Evidence of success!

After two days of preparing for student led learning conversations and marking writing samples, I am seeing an exciting trend in writing levels.

Our Term 1 writing sample had 12 of 25 students achieving below the expected end-of-year levels. After marking the 26 samples, only three are below the expected end-of-year level.

It would be interesting to look for a connection between the number of student posts in relation to the increase in levels.

Ariki reflection Term 3

In scanning through all to posts on this blog to share my progress since our first presentation, it is clear how far we have come and how much we have achieved in regards to increasing both the qantity and quality of writing within the class!

Personal blogging has taken off and there is no better illustration of this than students posting 19 separate posts on their personal blogs in one day.  The perfect example is Josh D who would never have written at home for fun and struggled to write at school.  In the last 10 days, he has made five posts from home, often getting his elder brother to help him.  This elder brother is not keen on writing at school either but they are enjoying the challenge of his personal blog.  Josh D's Blog

This, and the discussion at the Ariki presentation, brings up a few next steps to focus on for the remainder of the term.

Student Blogging:
1.  Give students more time for personal blogging in class.
2.  Draw attention to and celebrate student blogging within the class.
3.  Identify needs and teach writing workshops through student blogs.
4.  Promote student writing through Twitter more aggressively to attract visitors and comments.
5.  Unpack student comments, revisit and edit using success criteria to make them more effective.

AKO: Student's teaching students:
1.  Get students to identify something they are good at.
2.  Unpack and structure a workshop for KidsAKO.
3.  Test and adapt student workshop planning.
4.  Unpack the success criteria of instructions and commment on Weedons writing.
5.  Interact with Weedons around writing challenges.

It is times like this morning that make me smile, when a reluctant writer comes in before school and asks if I have seen the post he put up on his blog from home last night - three days in a row!

Unpacking the Writing Process

One of my challenges was to unpack the Writing Process and provide resources on the blog for writers to follow.  Link

The resources have been linked and have been used in separation but the whole process needs to be embedded in daily writing.  This will require some 'free time' for students to work through the process and expectations of completed published pieces within a term.  

This will be my focus for the start of Term 3 and will support the work on Slow Writing.

The impact of blogging

The same blog from the UK that I referenced in the previous post regarding Slow Writing has made clear links between student blogging and progress in writing achievement.

http://inthetwelve.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/early-impacts-of-blogging/

Please click on the image for a closer view.

While these levels do not correspond to those we use in New Zealand, there is a significant suggestion that the greater the number of blog posts made by students, the greater the progress in writing achievement.

This perceived link between progress and post numbers might be worth tracking over time, although I still believe that quality of constructive input and personal responsibility for editing also play a role in writing progress.

Slow Writing

Amongst the blog focussed writing and editing, there still needs to be inspiring motivation and clear direct teaching.    Following a lead on using Angry Birds as a writing motivation, I have come across  something called Slow Writing.

http://inthetwelve.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/begging-borrowing-stealing/

Read about it on the blog above.  
Time is spent following this process, thinking carefully about every word used.

SLOW WRITING:
Sentence one must appeal to the senses.
Sentence two must use three adjectives.
Sentence three must start with an adverb.
Sentence four must contain a connective.
Sentence five must use exactly three words.
Sentence six must be a question.

This would require direct teaching about adjectives, adverbs, connectives and the use of the senses.  It would give regular use of these tools, short pieces of writing for easy editing and quick publication.  The motivating topic of focus could be writing within Angry Birds, eating sour worms, video clip responses and images.

Sharing my learning journey

I shared my action research learning journey at Educamp with a good response.

SMACKDOWN presentation slides

Other educators' thoughts on the value of responding to student writing

The environment needs to be supportive and non-threatening.
The teacher needs to develop a community of writers.
An audience gives purpose for writing and a wider range of next step comments.
Comments should be specific and immediate.
Students can be trained to give effective comments - taking the entire responsibility for constructive comments off the teacher.
Evidence of achieved success criteria across a range of pieces can be tracked and recorded.
Blog posts are shorter pieces to edit and comment on but still give evidence of targets achieved and editing completed.
Concrete examples of next steps helps student editing.

http://patue.teachercast.net/responding-to-student-writing-chat-archive/