Check-in (30-45 minutes)

Let’s take the next 5 minutes (or less), do the following:

1. Write down as many words or phrases as possible on this Google Doc that you feel comfortable sharing that relates to questions, concerns, successes, etc. about your teaching over the last two weeks.
2. Put an asterisk (this symbol: *) next to anything that someone else wrote down that is also a question/concern/success/etc. for you.

We can than spend a little time skimming what we put down and open up conversation from there.

Commenting and Grading (45-60 minutes)

Let’s start with your questions and comments about comments. For homework, we asked you write briefly about one thing that stood out to you and one question you had. Let’s take about 5 minutes to look over what you all wrote and let discussion start from there. You can find each of your posts here: [ADD CATEGORY LINK TO POSTS; ADD LINK HERE]

Let’s also take some time to go through a few key points about commenting and writing groups.

Labor of Commenting

The Labor of Commenting – Pedagogy in Praxis (cuny.edu)

Commenting Practice

Let’s look at a sample paper together and try out some comments. Worry less about assigning a grade or meeting a standard. Instead, focus on ways to offer a comment that can:

• recognize something you thought was good/impactful
• recognize something you thought was good/impactful and comment in way that pushes the writing forward
• notices a pattern for student to address at sentence level (would worry much less about this for a first draft like this)

Frame things positively, mix in questions as well as statements.

Before getting started, tell me what are the things you are prioritizing in looking for in the literacy narratives. Let’s list some out and then we will decide together which sorts of things we will look at in the sample paper.

Grading

Be fair. Re-read the comments you made. Read those comments against the rubric you have. If you don’t have a rubric, “tier” your papers and let that guide you.

Literacy Narrative Prompt + Unit Planning (if time; 20 minutes)

How is the assignment related to what you teach during your unit? Let’s take out prompts and read it against what we are doing each day in the unit.

If we have time, we can do some independent work on some backwards planning. That is, start with the due date of the second draft of the literacy narrative and work backward with “deadlines” for thinking through what students need to complete the assignment.

For example, I focus on three things with the literacy narrative unit:

1. introduction to writing process and practice
2. using concrete examples to think through ideas
3. thinking about the connection among their languages, their identities, the joy both bring them, the stigmas they have encountered with them–and how all of this might affect the way they

So, if my literacy narrative draft 2 was due September 28, I might have an informal plan like this:

• By September 28, everyone submits second draft
• By September 24, everyone was able to peer review drafts and get feedback to one another
• By September 21, we have completed our final reading related to identity and language
• By September 18, we have completed our second “writing session” assessment
• By September 18, we have workshopped first drafts, with special attention toward using examples
• By September 15, we have completed our “time management” activity
• By September 14, we have turned in our first draft of the literacy narrative
• By September 13, we have completed “distraction management” activity
• By September 12, we have completed most of readings about identity and language
• By September 10, we have done several assignments/activities related to reading annotation
• By September 8, we have done our workshop on writing concrete examples and read model literacy narratives
• By September 6, we have introduced writing process and writing practice stuff
• By September 1, we have introduced connection between language and identity

What are your goals for this first unit? What do you want students to do and learn about? How does that connect to what you are asking of them in the literacy narrative assignment?

FINALLY: how do we balance our learning goals and making sure our classroom focuses on “seeing” our students? How do we balance the structure and the humanity of all of this?

OK. So the above was for first unit. What about next unit? We will talk about the next unit more during next week’s class, but for now, let’s talk about transitions as a way to get started.

Goals Check-in (if time; 20 minutes)

What do you want your students to do at the close of the first unit? What do you want them to do for the next unit?

What do you want to work on as a teacher?

Close Out

-So, we talked commenting. Especially as a way to get students to own their papers and to move them forward. Writing groups and peer review can also be helpful here, so they get more than an audience of one for more perspectives. That was the main focus, but we also may have talked about grading, unit planning, and goal setting.

-Next time, we will focus on talking about analysis. You will post your in-progress analysis assignment draft to our Google Drive folder and you will read “Tools for Analyzing Texts” in JTC.