Blog # 9: Raising Some Questions

Is there a type of genre writing a teacher should focus on? 

I have thought about this question for most of the semester now, and I cannot help but wonder if some genres should be seen as more important. Each presentation given about the genres has been very informative and has given me so many different ideas for how to teach the genres. That being said, the presentation have not been able to bring closure to my question. Thinking back to when I was in elementary school I cannot help but remember reading expository texts and narrative texts the most. Mainly because the expository texts were the ones we would be tested on and the narrative texts were fun to read and were most often found in our literature books. Maybe the answer to my question lays within the grade being taught. Perhaps a teacher should start with narrative texts and should talk about all the fiction types of texts and then work into the expository texts and the other non fiction types of texts there are. This might be able to create a balance between how to teach the genres and how to show each of their importance. I think it is all about working in stages with students, working from a starting point and waiting until that is understood before moving on. 

Is it necessary to master the genres? 

I believe that a student should not need to master all the genres of writing and reading, however they will need to have some familiarity with each of the genres discussed in school.  Having said that, how can a teacher ensure each student has some baseline knowledge on each of the genres. This idea could be fulfilled easily by exposure. If the teacher continues to expose students to all the different genres of writing and reading they will become more familiar with them. I feel it is important to have pieces from each genre represented in the classroom library. When the students are exposed to each of the genres they might be able to remember certain things about each of them and they might be more comfortable using each of the different genres. 

Should teachers be able to pick and choose what they teach?

Thinking about this question from the stance of teaching genres, I wonder if teacher pick and choose which genres they teach. I know that I am able to teach certain genres better than others and because of that I might be guilty of picking and choosing how I teach my students. I wonder if this is something I can change  in my future teaching experiences. How can I do this? Perhaps it all lays in education of each of the genres and familiarizing myself with fun and exciting ways to teach her of them. I am glad I have had the opportunity to learn how to teach each genre in this course!

Blog # 6: revisiting post # 4

After revisiting entry # 4 written about assessment. I found that I left many unanswered questions and many undeveloped thoughts about ideas that I posed. In this blog post I am going to be taking a deeper look at two of the ideas I discussed in my previous blog post.  

Disclaimer: all of my responses are given with early childhood students in mind (K-2)

Is there a time when a teacher should not correct a student?

When a student is working in their journal or creating a draft of some sort i feel that a student should not be corrected. i feel that if a student is not being graded on their correctness of the work, the teacher should not correct them. this might encourage students to try and push themselves to work harder or try something different without the fear of being wrong or getting a low grade. 

I recall many times when my students were working in their journals and they would just stare off into space because they did not know how to properly spell a word...the fear of being wrong is something that I feel students struggle with day in and day out. The idea of just trying their best or sounding out the word or even using their inventive spelling scared my students. They feared being wrong would lead to failure. 

This is another reason why students need to be pushed to try new things. Students trying new things would push them to reach outside their comfort zone. When a student knows they will not be graded or corrected on their journal or note taking maybe they will be encourage to finally reach outside their zone of comfort. 

The next problem that rises after that would be when do you start correcting students? 

I feel that if an assignment is given the student should knowingly be working their best on it. That being said, I feel that a student should have the opportunity to have many different drafts of their writing. Their reading should not be graded based on the correctness until the end. The students could be graded on their steps taken throughout the assignment or the students could be graded on their ability to stay on track. However, having the students being graded on correctness should not be done until the final product. 

Depending on the grade of the students, I feel that even during a test if a student spells a word wrong, they should not be punished unless of course it is a spelling test. I want my students to feel comfortable to reach for the stars and to reach for success. I want them to be comfortable to try anything and to reach out of their comfort zones without the fear of being wrong or worse failure. 

What about using assessment over technology? 

Using assessment over technology is a completely new idea to me as a hopeful teacher, However, I feel that this type of assessment could done correctly. I feel that the use of rubrics might be the best way to go about assessing over technology. Rubrics give the students guidelines to follow when completing an assignment. A rubric also gives the student an idea of what the teacher is looking for. This would help the students organize their work. That being said, I cannot think of any other assessment tools that would work for an assignment over technology. This is an idea I hope to learn more about during the semester. 

Blog # 4: Types of Assessment

When I think of assessment tools, formal assessments such as test are naturally the first to come to mind, however there are many more tools used for assessing young students. During my student teaching experience I was able to work with many of the different types and I was able to see which types of assessment worked best with certain types of students. Before learning about different assessment types I was filled with questions... what type of assessment should I use with my second graders? Should I focus more on informal or formal assessments? When do you start to correct your students? Is there ever a time when a teacher should not correct a student? What about using assessments over technology? So many questions filled my head about the topic. I was a tad overwhelmed to say the least.  Some of these questions seemed to have disappeared once I began teaching and they were not thought about again until reading Gail E. Tomkins’ Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product. In Chapter 4 of this book it discusses the many different ways to assess writing. 

I always conferenced with my students, it was one of the beginning, middle and ends points of our writing process. After reading Tomkins’ book I realized he describes many more types of conferences. According to Tomkins (2012) there was not just one type of conferencing to use with students. Tomkins talks about eight different types:  on the spot conferences, prewriting conferences, drafting conferences, revising conferences, editing conferences, instructional conferences, assessment conferences, and portfolio conferences. Each of these conferences have something special about them. Below are differences between each of them:

On the spot conferences are described as brief visits with the students to monitor different aspects of the writing process
Prewriting conferences are meeting between the teacher and student when planning a topic occurs.
Drafting conferences are for the students to address any trouble areas they find during the writing process
Revising conferences are for small groups to meet with an audience to get feedback on their writing 
Editing conferences are for students to work with teaching on any errors they might have such as spelling, punctuation or any other errors
Instructional conferences are for small group of students to work with they teacher on a topic they are struggling with
Assessment conferences this is for the students to meet about their growth as writers, this also is for students to set new goals for writing
Portfolio conferences is for students to meet with the teachers to look and pieces of writing found in their portfolio and discuss it with the teacher.  (p.84-85)

After reading about each of the types of conferences I was determined to incorporate more conferencing my future classroom. I feel that one on one time with a student is extremely helpful, the student feels more comfortable to share their writing and to try different types of writing when they do not feel threatened by a whole class sharing time. 

I feel it is important for a student to learn different self monitoring techniques, checklists being one of them. I have also used a checklist with my students, the checklist I provide for my student is much like the checklist found in Tomkins’ book in figure 4.3 (p. 88). I feel that it helps the students to slow down and to think about all the writing skills they sometimes over look, does the student have a period at the end of each sentence? What about a capital letter at the beginning of each? These are the skills the student knows how to do however often times are over looked because the student is rushing to get all of their thoughts down on the page. This checklist can also be used as a form of assessment for during writing. This will help the student to monitor themselves to ensure they are using their best quality of writing. 

The type of assessment that I used most in my classroom would be rubrics, I feel that a rubric can be used for really any grade, starting with first grade moving through college. In my case I used a rubric for my second graders. We used the common core standards for my school in Cleveland, because of that I followed a strict scope and sequence provided to me by the school district. This told me what needed to be taught and by what time of the year it needed to be done. This would help me organized my rubric. All of standards that were being assessed were put on the rubric, to get a score of five the student would need mastery of the skill being taught. By having the standards written down on the rubric it helped not only me to see if I reached my goal of teaching the skill to the students but also gave the parents some knowledge on what was being expected of their children on a certain assignment.  It really helped to see if all the objectives were met for a given subject.      


Tomkins, G. E. (2012). Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, INC.