How's it going? is one of my favorite pieces of writing that I've read in a long time. Carl Anderson sounds like a writing workshop god. Because my classroom does not have a "writing workshop" time of the day--I was unsure what I could actually gain from this book. Although I whole-heartedly believe that my students are writers and authors, I've never been one to "confer" with them on their writing pieces.
As I read through the first few chapters, I realized right away that Anderson takes on an attitude of expecting his students to be writers. I love how he mentions conferences as conversations, "Although today I see conferences as a means to get to know students and as a powerful way of teaching them to be better writers, I have never stopped considering these one-on-one talks as conversations" (2000, p. 6). This is something I'm definitely already doing with students. As most of us know, kids can talk a lot. And often they want to talk about themselves, and what they are proud of. My students come to me a lot and talk about the writing or illustrations they are doing. Up until this point, I have used these conversations as a means to understand their thinking and usually annotate or write dictation for their writing. Anderson is helping me see how I can use these conversations to teach my students what they can do to be better writers. I'm extremely inspired by the work he is doing with students, however, I'm left wondering what this looks like in a Pre-K/K setting. Most of my students are not formally writing sentences, however, they are amazing visual and oral story tellers. I'm wondering and thinking about ways to adapt his conferencing model to meet the needs of my students.
Anderson talks a lot about teaching the writer not the writing. How can we help our students become better writers and not just help them improve one piece of writing? He points out a student's ability to teach themselves, "When conferences are times when students teach themselves, they not only learn about strategies and techniques they can use the rest of their writing lives, but they also learn about being writers who can teach themselves at any time while they're writing" (2000, p. 9). WHAT A GIFT!!! I love Anderson's approach of helping create lifelong writers who are always finding ways to be better writers.
Finally, within the first few pages of the book I read a sentence that I felt was challenging and heartbreaking, "we need to remember that we are writing teachers, not therapists" (2000, p. 8). I found this idea to conflict with my pedagogical model. I believe that not only are we writing teachers, but we are math teachers, science teachers, meditative teachers, listeners, friends, thought-partners, parent supporters--the list goes on and on. It's hard to imagine a classroom where a teacher can only be a writing teacher. And although Anderson goes on to say that writers are most impacted by a teacher that truly cares for them--this sentence is still playing in my mind. As I consider my conversations with my students over the next few weeks about their writing and their lives--I wonder how I can straddle the line of teacher, not therapist.
