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Amy Reed West Marion Middle Schoold |
I began participating in the National Writing Project’s C3WP i3 Professional Development grant in August of 2018. It was my first year teaching English and middle school, and I remember sitting with the interview team as they told me that we would be a part of this new professional development partnership. I was nervous about the idea of teaching middle school writing. It was something I really needed to take seriously and think about before signing a contract. I knew by taking the job, though, I would get the professional learning experience I needed to be successful in at least one type of writing, and in that moment, that was good enough for me. Over the next few months, the South Mississippi Writing Project provided us professional development through which I learned new approaches to writing instruction and was given resources and experiences that I knew would really mold me as a young teacher. We were taught the C3WP materials as the students would experience them, which led me to understand where students would struggle (even before meeting them). We were presented with thought-provoking topics which helped me better prepare to teach my students; through having more background knowledge, I was able to guide them and help them prepare their own opinions.
Having never taught English before, I felt like the beginning of the year was an important time for me to learn what I was up against for the following year. On the first day of class, I gave my students a small informational text to see how they would read and respond. They read it, wrote what they had rehearsed from years prior, and turned it in. There was little thought that went into what they were writing. There was no evidence they were even remotely interested in the issue. They had no voice.
On day two, we began to interact with the text. We did a few exercises that consisted of reading, talking, and writing a short bit. Of course, the students struggled, even through the first few months, because whenever we read, I required them, as I had been shown, to think through the text and respond by forming their own opinions.
By the end of the year, I began to hear the kids make comments like, “When are we going to write another argument?” and “Oh! I saw this in the news last night. I did research. This makes me think…” It was amazing to see how these children who had no voice a few months prior to C3WP learned to speak and engage with the world around them. They learned how to have civil conversations with other people who had opinions opposing theirs. Students interacted with other points of view to challenge or confirm their own thoughts. They became more successful with getting their ideas on paper and thoroughly explaining them.
Fast forward to the next year. It was my second year of implementing C3WP in my classroom. My new class had already been taught using the C3WP resources the year before. On the first day, I gave a similar assignment as I did the year before just to see where they were in their writing skills. Wow! The transformation was incredible! They began at a similar place compared to where my students the year before had ended.
Throughout the year, I was able to teach many of the same C3WP lessons using different texts that paired with what we were reading or in connection with school activities. Of course, we used the informational texts that were given to us, but I quickly realized I could engage them even more by exposing them to texts and topics beyond those in the resource guide. Time spent with the C3WP resources in the year prior helped give my students and me the confidence to apply these skills to other areas of writing and subject matter, such as science and history. My kids began taking the skills they were learning in the argumentative setting and transferring them over to the fiction we would read in class. All of a sudden, they had opinions about characters in the stories. They would make claims and state reasonings as to why the characters should or should not have done something. It was not uncommon for my kids to read a passage, get frustrated at a character, and bring or email me articles the next day proving why something should be different. I had a conversation with the science teacher one day as students were working on a project using a controversial topic. The students had used the skill of analyzing different viewpoints and applied it to the science lesson. The science teacher was amazed, and I smiled knowing my kids were growing. The environment in my room (and others) was much different than the year before. I had to learn new management techniques because all the students had found their voices. Some students were better at writing their views, while some of the students were better at having conversations until they could pinpoint the exact words to use. Some of them had to learn how to express their ideas in appropriate ways, which led to interesting and necessary conversations.
C3WP is rich with instructional resources that guide students to becoming more mature, thoughtful writers. As with any instruction, sometimes students need different accommodations that are maybe not included in C3WP, which is where teacher judgement and autonomy are important. One also has to be willing to pause and fill in the gaps before jumping too far ahead, and C3WP provides supplementary resources for these moments in the writing and revision processes. With the current and engaging texts and teacher support, C3WP gives students their voice- a skill that lasts far beyond high school.
Amy Reed just completed her second year of teaching eighth grade English Language Arts in the rural town of Foxworth, Mississippi.
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