Impressions of the Capital Region BOCES 12th Annual Writing Institute at Guilderland HS 8/4-8/6 2009

While driving back to Guilderland HS on the bluest, sunniest, most glorious summer day you could imagine, I was seriously questioning my good judgment.  We don’t get many of these days here in the Albany NY area.  I enjoyed my time at the Reading Institute but the Writing Institute had to be even better to pass the test for me.  I get squirmy thinking about sunshine and blue skies if I am not completely enraptured with what I am experiencing.  Three days of squirming would have been unfortunate at best. Luckily it all worked out for me.  I got a big kick out of Carl Anderson.  He was funny and had a ton of useable information. Also amazing to me was, no matter how many times I hear Leah Mermelstein, Isoke Nia and Kelly Gallagher speak their messages never fail to seem motivating and help me to focus and refine my teaching ideas.  I always have this cool “brush with greatness” (you know that Letterman “bit”) feeling around them at the Writer’s Institute. I walked away feeling that the time spent at the Writing Institute was worthy of my precious summer days.

The day one keynote was Leah.  Thankfully I found Shauna, Melissa, Jen and Angela -Shauna’s friend from Catskill ES to sit with in the room of 200 teachers. Mike, Ashley and Judy were there too but I hadn’t scoped them out yet. Leah delighted as usual. For me some new points I heard covered were

·         Be careful not to have the students research and write simultaneously – “research and writing at the same time is tricky”  She was talking about the need to have the students focus on research at one point and writing using the format of genre studies separately. 

·         Have kids write out loud with you during conferences.  She said something like if you can’t say it well you are not going to be able to write it well.

·         Writing territories- people have subjects they write about over and over again- identify them for each student- use them to encourage writing

 I also loved getting reminders that

·         Writing to get a snippet of your child’s thinking

·         Teaching the structure of a genre first (Three’s Company Analogy)using mentor texts

·         Using record keeping and writing samples to demonstrate student learning

·          Conferring=differentiated instruction

·         Teachers need to write in order to teach writing

Any way- Leah’s presentation was enjoyable and valuable to me.

On the way to Carl Anderson I ran into Judy.  She told me about her trip to South Dakota and seeing wild burrows. I got another cup of coffee.

Mike and Ashley also signed up to hear Carl Anderson speak for three days.  His topic was Conferencing with kids about their writing. We staked out a table that was closer than I was comfortable with but it turned out to be fine. We happened to be out of Carl’s routine target teaching gaze areas.   I don’t like to be close enough to be noticed all the time.  I am fidgety and I like to move.  I don’t want to bug anyone. Later on in the week we sat in the wrong place right in his target teaching spot.  We sweated it out and switched back the next day.

Carl started out by noticing the oddly large number of pregnant women in the room.  He told us about himself-that he was the co writer of two children.  He told stories about diapers exploding, temper tantruming in public to the point of humiliation and all those teasing stories that would make the pregnant women and the childless of the room wonder why anyone would choose to be a parent willingly. I could relate-this guy was a pretty funny father.

Big plus-Carl used his love for the Beatles to teach us about teaching writing.  He used the Beatles song writing process to illustrate concepts of writing purpose, writing process and writing craft.  I thought using the Beatles was very cool and fun and I loved all the music thrown in to the presentations.

In the three days he covered tons.  On day one he set us straight about making certain you do not edit when you are conferencing.  He told us why not to do this. It made perfect sense. I won’t get into it here.

He taught us to look for patterns- that conferring is looking for patterns.  He figured that there are 30 or 40 basic issues that we address in kids’ writing. If we can get mentor texts to address each and can identify these in a piece- individualized to the writer’s need during the differentiated instruction of the conference we are good to go. He gave us many examples of these patterns and showed us his DVD of writing conferences http://www.conferringguy.com/.  And yes, he does remind me a little bit of Steve Carrell , but you judge. http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1166971392/nm0136797FirefoxHTML%5CShell%5COpen%5CCommand

Also important to mention-I was very impressed, Ashley read all Carl’s books in graduate school.  I loved all that I learned even though it was sunny outside..  Maybe we could buy the DVD for next year -2010-11 and use it as the springboard for our VES Professional Reading Group.

Oh yes, Mike has great new wheels.  Check them out. We all had a fun lunch at Tim’s favorite deli BFS whose motto really is”Come Eat, Drink and be Mediterranean”.