Each school year comes with its own set of challenges. And even
more, each individual class has in its own issues. A teacher, a professional seasoned
with many years of experience, will encounter different challenges every year whether
it concerns students or colleagues. This semester, my Mentor Teacher and I are
working on a new technique to get our students to learn to write in complete
sentences. When the students are answering and writing down questions from the
board, we give the students a sentence starter to get them started in the right
direction when answering. For example, if the question is ‘What is the name of
Johnny’s friend?’, the sentence starter we provide is ‘Johnny’s friend’s name is…’
We have been in school for almost three weeks so we are still in the
experimental stage, so the students are getting used to having to answer in
complete sentences. We still remind them about the sentence starts every day
and some are having a hard time remembering to look on the board for the
starters.
A question I
have been wondering is whether they will take this skill they are learning in
our classroom and use it in their other classes. How do we insure they do
beyond mentioning that this skill can be used in their other classes? We could
talk to the other teachers, like the history and science teachers, to see if
they are teaching that same skill. But I would personally feel wrong about
telling another teacher what to do in their classroom. It is one thing to get advice
when a colleague is asking for some or looking for new ideas, but it’s another
when a colleague tells you what to do.
When these
sentence starters are used, we are conducting a whole class discussion on a
story we just read. The students are asked the question and write their answers
using the starters and answer individually. Once everyone has something written
down, we ask the class what the answer is. In Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms, Bomer points
out that whole class discussion is very popular in the classroom. This
structure is not the best when it comes to developing good writers and readers.
“Whole class teaching is the location for demonstrations of and mentoring into
things writers and readers do that students have not yet had enough access” (Bomer,2011,
pp. 12). Whole class discussions should not be the structured used every day.
When we
first started using these sentence starters, the students asked why they had to
use them. It kind of concerned us because these are 7th graders so
does that mean they were not learning to write complete sentences last year? I
am not sure how far elementary teachers go in teaching writing, but I would
think it would make sense to emphasize complete sentence writing from the very
beginning when they are learning to write. I hope that is what happens.
Thanks for writing this! I think that you pin-pointed a common issue, and a very valid inspiration for some teacher research. Even in working with high school students, I struggle to get complete sentences. I've often wondered if this phenomenon is a symptom of the exponential growth of internet communication. Because students spend so much time writing in this informal register, perhaps they are resistant to the concept of switching to a more formal, classroom register.
ReplyDeleteProviding sentence starters sounds like a great scaffolding idea. Eventually (ideally) you will be able to remove the stems and students will do all the work of composing a complete sentence. I also think that assisting students in generalizing this skill in other content areas is important and worth looking into; middle schools, in my experience, are pretty collaborative across content areas, especially when it comes to promoting better literacy. I would ask my mentor teacher if she felt that the staff would be responsive to the idea of implementing the sentence starter method in their classrooms.
Thank you for the reply! I will talk to my mentor teacher.
DeleteI saw this same predicament when I was at my middle school last year. It was hard for me to decipher if the children did not know how to write in complete sentences or they were not willing to put in the effort to do so. It seemed to me that they know they need to write complete sentences, but are at an age where taking shortcuts leads to less work and more free time.
ReplyDelete- Joshua West
And it is not teaching the students anything when the teachers accept this low standard of work.
DeleteMs. Rodriguez, thanks for this interesting post! In addition to helping students articulate complete thoughts during discussions (or Q&A sessions), sentence stems/starters can also help them generate ideas for productive dialogue and learn how to build upon others' ideas and disagree respectfully. I found an interesting link that will give better insight than I am able to. Check it out when you have time: http://www.teachthought.com/learning/sentence-stems-higher-level-conversation-classroom/. Thanks for your post!
ReplyDeleteThank you for this resource!
DeleteWhile you certainly don't want to tell other teachers what to do, it would be interesting to ask them if more students are writing in complete sentences. I would be interested to see if this is carrying over to their other classes. Kudos to you and your mentor teacher for helping your students to write in complete sentences.
ReplyDelete