Crafting Writers Ch. 7-9, App.F

Chapter 7 of Crafting Writers, as the title Teaching Craft Lessons would suggests, gives concrete ideas and examples of teaching writing craft.  I was delighted to see that the “why” of each lesson was clearly depicted because this point was emphasized in chapters 1 through 6.  I was also happy to see that there is a place for lecturing when teaching lessons and that, according to Hale, “expertise in a subject matter is not always the key to giving good lessons. You do have to know something about the subject you’re teaching. You just don’t have to know everything.”  This really hit home for me because I tend to feel overwhelmed and that I need to know everything about something before I can try and teach it.  This statement gave me permission to understand that I don’t have to be an expert to facilitate learning. I found another important point of this chapter to be found on page 99, when the author explains that, while a well delivered lesson is a terrific goal,  the true test of  a craft lesson’s worth is how well students can hold on to what they are taught and bring it into their own independent writing.  I plan to remember this and to do my best to make lessons connect to my students’ prior knowledge so they might better assimilate the new information and use it on their own as one of their many “tools” of the trade. 

            Chapter 8, Researching Strengths in Conference, reminds us how imperative it is to teach all students their strengths during a conference. The story of little Jonathan was a prime example of this. The steps and goals of a writing conference were depicted well and again, the “whys” were quite visible.  I especially appreciated the section on deciding what to teach, as I think it could prove to be a difficult part of the process for me.  Keeping in mind the skills taught in the last conference, mini-lessons that were recently taught, and having an awareness of where each student is coming from, should help narrow down the possibilities.  This book is proving to be an invaluable resource for the teaching of writing craft.  It is bursting with concrete examples of what to do. Yeah!

            The most pivotal point in Chapter 9, Researching Next Steps in a Conference, for me was on page 151, when Hale states, “researching possible next steps in student writing begins by noticing as many possible teaching points as you can before moving on to deciding what to teach”.  Again, this eases a sense of “having to do it all” in me.  We can find different “next steps” and choose which ones we need to teach at a certain time. I like that this idea of choice keeps teachers from feeling like they don’t know what to do but rather are choosing what is important to focus on at the time. I can see how this all was described as a balancing act in the final comments.  The best we can all aspire to is to be aware of the need for balance and to “support students in different ways as we decide what to teach”.

            The guided practice pieces presented in Appendix F were more difficult to work through than I had imagined when reading the strategies for approaching them.  I welcomed the comparisons on the back to refer to while working through the process.