You've reached the end of the school year which means it's the perfect time to reflect on your writing instruction in order to improve next year. In this post, we'll go through the 4 key areas for your writing instruction reflections.
Why writing instruction reflections are important
Just like all reflections, when we reflect on our teaching from the year we are looking at what we want to change and what we are happy to keep for the next year. Our reflection will help us clearly see what worked and didn't work for us.
Reflections will help provide us with purpose for the following year. This will also give us a strong sense of where we are headed with our teaching. Reflections provide us with clarity and confidence to prevent teacher burnout.
What To Reflect On
When it comes to approaching reflections on our writing instruction there are 4 key areas to be considered. First, we should reflect on our mini lessons. Next, our students independent writing time. Third, student growth. Last, our lesson planning and classroom management during writing time.
Mini Lessons Reflections
- Were your mini lessons clear and focused?
- Were the students engaged?
If you answered no to either or both questions, let's reflect!
Why were your mini lessons not clear and focused? What made them unfocused? Did you talk about more than one thing or skill within the mini lesson? Get my free download if you struggled with keeping your mini lessons mini. It goes great with my podcast episodes about writing mini lessons, too.
If your students were not very engaged during the mini lessons, did you have a piece in the lesson to keep them engaged?
Some examples could be:
- Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down engagement
- Writing on whiteboards
- Turn and Talk to a neighbor
- Following along with their own paper copy
Independent writing reflections
- Were your students productive?
- Were your students on task?
- Were they following your expectations during this time?
- Were your students working towards an independent goal?
- Was your class building their writing stamina?
- Did you have enough time to do writing conferences during this time?
If the answer is no to any of these questions, let's reflect!
Some reasons for a no answer could be:
- Students are unsure of the task when released for independent writing time (build in some mini lessons that show them how to know what to do during writing time)
- Students don't have enough stamina to write the entire independent writing time (slowly build up stamina starting with 5 minutes and increasing 1 minute each time they are successful)
- Writing conferences are not short and focused (meet with multiple students of the same goal or skill needed, have a 2-minute conference focused on the student goal)
Student Growth and Writing Samples Reflections
Make sure to take pre- and post assessments of writing before each new unit.
- Is there any progress between the two assessments?
- What skills are students still struggling with?
- Are they understanding what the genre is?
Lesson Planning and Management Reflections
- Were you consistent with your writing time?
- Lesson planning format?
- Writing time expectations?
- Did you have any systems in place for your writing block? Did these systems save you time?