Day Two of The Training of Trainers from Gretchen Bernabei-Kernel Essays and Revision Stations

We are taking our work from today and revising it. We made a quick list about things that are problematic and ways that we can come to our resolution.  I took interruptions in the classroom. The number one culprit in the classroom is the telephone. No, I am not speaking about my cell phone. Some of my students carry electronic devices. I am not speaking about them. I am speaking about the land line or dinosaur telephone that is my nemesis. It always disrupts the flow of my classroom.

We were to follow the structure from the Declaration of Independence.

Here it is:

Text Structure:

1. A belief that you have about a topic   
2. The problem   
3. Your personal proof  
4. Solution that has been tried unsuccessfully
5. Your solution

Here is my kernel from this morning:

1. Teacher need time for instruction.

2. Constant interruptions take away from the flow of instruction.

3. Every time that my students and I were fully engaged in instruction, the telephone would ring in my classroom, and it would inevitably destroy the moment. 

4. I would let the phone ring as it took me a country mile to come and answer.

5. Schools should protect instruction at all costs between the hours of 8 and 3 pm. 

Now I am going to use one of the revision stations to revise my work.  I am going to use snapshot and thoughtshots.

Teachers need time for instruction. Learning takes time, uninterrupted block of time. 

Interruptions take away from the constant flow of instruction. It takes time to get all of the students to be fully engaged in what we are learning. It always happens that when I have my entire class with me, all eyes are upon me, leaning in listening, talking with their groups about what they are learning, or we are in small group with a thousand points of light going off in their minds, when the telephone starts to ring out too loud. I say to myself, "WHY? WHY? WHY?"  Everyone shouts, "Awww! Not again!"  I have to stop what I am doing, walk a thousand steps, and ask patiently about what I can do to help the person on the other line. The learning has stopped and will be very hard to return to that learning zone.  

When the phone rings, I am teaching. Inevitably, I am never, ever sitting next to my phone waiting for it to ring. If I was ever too far from the phone, by the time I would make it over to answer, it would stop ringing. I decided that if I was too far, I would allow it ring. If it would be important, then I thought that they would call back.  I also had students answer the phone, but the person on the other line would ask for me. On a scale of 1 and 10, as far as importance goes, it would be a 1. It could have been taken care of with an email.  I hate interruptions with a passion.

My thought is this: school should protect instruction and interruptions should happen once in a blue moon. Anything that can be placed in an email should be placed in an email and read at the end of the day.   

  

Here is a digital version of revisions stations. Go to this link: Revision Stations

Why Revise?-Videos Change Your Words, Change Your World

Here are some great videos that shows the power of revision.  

Having Fun with Revision-RADAR

During the workshop, participants were given the opportunity to revise with RADAR. Jeff Anderson and Kelly Gallagher have done some work with revision.  Kelly Gallagher speaks about this in his book called Write Like This from Stenhouse Publishers (2011).  Here is an example of the process.  There will be more information with pictures coming up on the blog later this week. I just wanted to put something up for now.  This is my writing using RADAR. I took it all the way through but I will upload other examples from step 1 to coding.  Writers of all ages can benefit from this.  I know I have.  Teachers and students rave about it!

We chose a truism from our morning experience starting with  the sentence frame-I have learned that sometimes....we share each others truisms and couldn't help but share the memories that go with them.

Then we chose a memory from the quickist in which to write that goes with the truism or theme.  We then sketched out the memory.

We wrote for about 3 minutes in a quickwrite about that memory. Then I explained the RADAR process.  When we write we revise.  What do we do when we revise?  Sometimes we replace words or phrases that aren't what we want them to be. Other times we replace words that are repeated with better words.  Sometimes we add sentence or phrases to make our writing clearer to the reader.  Still other times we delete words we repeat or that aren't to our liking.  Finally, you will see that we reorganize our sentences or paragraphs or even the order of the sentence to make it flow better.  We want to make our writing better.  We move from okay to better to best. We read like a writer and write with the reader in mind.  I went through the whole process of, as Kelly Gallagher likes to say, "The I do, you do model." I model it with my writing and you try it with yours. Each time we go through and replace, add, delete or reorganize, I use a different color so you can track the movement of my mind.  Then we code it to what process we actually utilized. Wow! That is some thinking.  It's fun to revise.  Remember, anyone can write, but real writers revise!