NCSWL Workshops
The Center offered workshops for teachers at all grade levels. We regret that these workshops are no longer available. However, we provide a description of them here for your information.
Purpose
The purpose of this workshop was to make accessible to educators important research on the teaching and learning of writing Our goal was to foster discussion that would stimulate participants to consider the applicability of this new information to the needs of their immediate classrooms.
The format of the workshop was interactive, as workshop facilitators and participants explored research findings and discussed their applicability to classroom practice. Participants had the opportunity to respond to issues raised by the research, analyze texts written by their own students, and contemplate ways to interweave applications of these findings with their own classroom contexts. By the end of the workshop, participants clarified for themselves the role that writing occupies within their school curriculum as well as expanded their conceptualization of the role that writing potentially can play to foster student learning. Specifically, participants did the following:
- develop an appreciation for the kinds of classroom activities that complement developmental aspects of emergent literacy in the early grades;
- explore strategies to help students access the potential of writing to solve cognitive problems and to promote learning in content areas such as History and Science;
- explore teaching strategies that can demonstrate to students how writing can be used to solve problems in the "real world" outside of and beyond school;
- gain a better understanding of the diversity of literacy practices that may be found within the cultural and home backgrounds of their students, as well as ways in which these practices can be recruited to assist with the academic agendas of schools;
- explore and come to terms with the purposes for which assessment of student writing can productively be used at different schooling levels;
- gain a deeper understanding of the issues involved in establishing standards for assessment;
- explore ways in which teachers can conduct their own classroom-based inquiry into the effects of their own teaching strategies and the learning behaviors of their students.
The workshop was organized into three parts, introducing the relevant research under the umbrella themes: (1) "How Writing Comes to Be"; (2) "Understanding Our Students"; and (3) "Understanding Our Expectations as Teachers." The first part, "How Writing Comes to Be," synthesized and translated recent research on students' writing processes and the role of writing in the learning process. The second part, "Understanding Our Students," cultivated in educators a greater understanding of and sensitivity to the influence of cultural and ethnic features on students' classroom interactions and performances, with special emphasis on the effects of home-school language and dialect differences. The third part, "Understanding Our Expectations as Teachers," facilitated practitioners in their attempts to articulate their expectations for student performance as well as to translate these expectations into assessment standards.Because educators at the elementary, secondary, and college levels do not necessarily share the same interests and concerns, and in order to stimulate immediately relevant and meaningful discussion, three companion strands were offered: elementary, secondary, and college.
writ@socrates.berkeley.edu
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