Reflection:
Teacher as Learner
I learned that as a writer I need to focus on creating stronger more described endings as at first my ending was only about me finding our my dog was found and safe where instead I could have gone into more detail about how we found out that the dog was safe and the reunion with him. Also I learned as a writer that I need to focus more on building my characters personality and morals as I go deeper into the story as it would make the character more three dimensional whereas it was in the first draft more on the second dimensional. As a teacher I learned that creating a clear example helps students see that by using abstract words it helps to create an image for the reader. Also it helped me as a teacher by showing that I need to have clear directions about beginnings, middles, and ending to help keep my students organized.
Yes my concept as writer did change during this experience as I tried to think about how the reader was going to be able to picture each scene as I was telling the story.
This personal narrative connects to my teaching ethical values by allowing my students to choose to write freely about whatever memory they have. It also allows for my students to share very diverse topics and experiences.
I brought in my strengths of story organization of a beginning, middle, and an end. Another item I used was transitions words and my vocabulary of descriptive words for this writing project. I learned to use those descriptive words in my paper from growing up in the theater world. I also used the formatting from the Teaching Reading and Writing by Templeton in chapter 9 where it talks about when writing a story you should take these steps to go about that process which is prewriting, creating a draft, revising, editing, and then publishing the work. By bring these strengths into my classroom I can help students in the future with how they can organize a paper so that it flows in order for it to make sense to a reader. If I asked my students to act out their story for me that they wrote word for word on how they wrote it I can help them hopefully vision why we write every detail about the character down as to help the reader be able to visualize what is going on.
I have identified that we are moving away from the paper and pencil writing to the age of computer typing and using audio and video in our writing as well. As in Templeton chapter 9 on page 360 talks about how the reader and writer is using technology to help them research, collaborate, and construct new knowledge for their education of becoming a better writer. As this age continues to grow within the classroom I would encourage my students to take advantage of the age appropriate scholarly articles to hep them research and create papers for science and history projects. I would also encourage them to share their writing with each other through google docs or something similar to help encourage group work.
Reference:
Templeton, S., & Gehsman, K. M. (2013)*. Teaching reading and writing: The developmental approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.