All tagged writing
As I sent in my sub plans, I held my breath a little after writing:
This class is student-directed by design; they should know what they need to do.
What they needed to do was conduct a writing workshop on narrative drafts scheduled to be finalized by Friday. They’d conducted a workshop exactly once before, and then when at least half of them were still planning or early drafting stages. This was the first major writing project, and I wanted to be there to facilitate the workshop.
As the second week progressed, we began to build to a critical mass of work to do, so that now everyone had a book to read, a major piece of writing in progress, and usage/mechanics exercises to pace themselves through.
Here, though, is my fear: This is where it starts to get hard.
One week in and--if I’m honest--colearning feels a lot like regular school to start the year. It has some of the hallmarks of a regular class, with regular students, in a regular school; so we have to do things like hand out syllabi, talk about norms and expectations, and send home forms to be signed. They sat. I talked. They listened. I asked questions. They didn’t say much. I talked some more. They listened some more. They sat some more.
