Collaboration
The KMWP Summer Institute has taught me the true value of collaboration in the teaching profession. My colleagues have amazing ideas that I can adapt to benefit the needs of my students through enriched learning experiences and relationship-building and myself through simplification and streamlining of my teaching practices. Particularly effective with proving collaboration’s value were our welcoming, start-the-day-off-right morning dramas, the truly helpful and inspiring writing groups, and the brilliant teacher demonstrations. Each of these has given me tools to take back to my classroom.
Highlight Moment
One moment from the Institute that I will never forget is my first moments with my writing group. I was beyond nervous about sharing my writing, and I had had little success with writing groups in my class and did not fully buy in to them anyway. I sat down with the two lovely ladies with whom I was blessedly partnered and it was like we had been sharing and helping each other for years. I left that day giddy and pumped about writing, about using writing groups, and about collaborative writing in general. In fact, it inspired my teacher demonstration, which I came to do on collaborative narrative and academic writing.
Good Writing Skills
I am now a better writer, and I have also rediscovered my desire to write, which left me when I left college. I had always understood on the surface the nature and purpose of writing for catharsis and of writing to reflect on my life and my teaching, but the Institute helped me internalize writing as a tool to build a better me, both professionally and personally.
One skill that I’ve learned during my time here is a guided way to vary my sentence structure. The ABC story technique forces the writer to be creative in how to phrase sentences; each new sentence has to start with the next letter in the alphabet, the first sentence beginning with ‘A’. As someone who has trouble not beginning every sentence as subject-verb-etc, this proved a tool that I could transfer to other types of writing. The best part was that it worked on my writing subconscious, and I was varying my sentence structure without realizing exactly how difficult that was, until I came to ‘X’, that is! This is a technique I will practice with my students from now on instead of just writing the cryptic “Vary your sentence structure” on their essays; this way, they’ll know what in the world I’m talking about.
Inquiry and Research
I have learned that the best place to start with research is to build from something for which one already has a passion, has seen some success or failure, or genuinely cares to learn about. One must then develop a strong question that is understandable to himself and to others. Defining terms and parameters for research and presentation ease the process, and creating an annotated bibliography helps to cement the purpose of giving due credit to authors for their work. I will take these concepts along with the story of my struggle with them back to my classroom to share with my students.
Suggestions for Improvement
The variety of writing prompts we were given at the beginning of the Institute got my creative juices flowing; I would have loved more time for those and more of those to keep us writing about us and exploring who we are, then sharing that publicly.
