Implementation Plan

Implementation Plan

Looking towards August...
Above all else, I will have my students write more. I anticipate drawing heavily upon Kelly Gallagher’s book Teaching Adolescent Writers: developing a nuanced, multidimensional writer’s notebook; writing more with my students, which draws my thoughts to the idea of more emphasis placed upon instruction rather than grading; emphasizing purpose and audience more with student writing; introducing conferencing more into my classroom.

Gallagher’s writer’s notebook is outstanding. He has students divide it into multiple sections that I want to use: writing mini-lessons, grammar, spelling demons, and writing. I want to use all of these and introduce vocabulary as well as sentence structure.

Although I have wrote in front of my students and also provided models, oftentimes I make the error of writing on my own and presenting a finished version, which is not effective, whereas writing with my students and showing the process I work through is more effective.

In the past I have had students create writer’s logs with every finished piece of writing: purpose, audience, reflection. Unfortunately I moved away from that, and I will return. Furthermore, I will emphasize the notion of purpose an audience, drawing upon examples Gallagher provides. I also will try to have their writing reach greater audiences.

This past year I had writing conferences with my AP students outside of class; they were effective. I need to find a way to have conferences in my classroom. I also want to use some of Gallagher’s assessment strategies to promote efficiency.

Aside from Gallagher, I want to use blogs further in my classroom as a place of publication. I want to make portfolios a more significant part of the process, and I anticipate blogs will help with this. I also want parents to see their child’s work on blogs.

An area that I want to devote more attention to is sentence structure/fluency via sentence combining. This is something I want to use across grade levels. Additionally, I want to capitalize on what I learned from my peers about improving writing via the Carnegie studies. Presently, I envision using more structured note taking strategies as well as student models.

I have made a slew of notes about ideas that were sparked directly through conversation, reading or writing. Above all else, I want to have my students write more, grow more as writers, value their writing more, believe in their writing more, and recognize the beauty and power in their words.

Plus, I want to read and discuss much more