Poetry and Teaching

Poetry in the classroom helps students learn to distinguish detail, appreciate juxtaposition and read closely. It develops critical thinking experiences that are essential to writing details and supporting ideas on tests like the WASL. This workshop aims to increase teachers' pleasure in the reading and writing of poetry, support teachers as writers, provide participants with practical approaches to and strategies for including poetry in the curriculum, and support writing instruction that helps students achieve the Washington State EALRs.

Teachers as Writers

In this workshop, we address the findings of research that shows that teachers who write themselves experience more success in encouraging their students to learn to write successfully. We write, examine strategies for teaching writing successfully, and practice implementing what we learn in our classrooms.

Reading Strategies for Challenged Readers

In this workshop we read and write, examine strategies for teaching reading successfully, develop reading assignments, and practice implementing what we learn in our classrooms, focusing on one at-risk student in each teacher's classroom. We want all students to enjoy reading, and to understand that authors' writing comes from a perspective and has a purpose.

Teaching with Writing Process

In this workshop, participants gain experience in and awareness of writing process through personal writing and participation in writing groups and classroom-appropriate writing excercises, explore the incorporation of writing process both to teach writing and in writing across the curriculum in their own classrooms, and gain assurance that "it's OK to let students write."

You've Seen the Scores: Now What? : Using the Results of the WASL

Depending on the building need, teachers will increase their understanding of the differences between classroom assessment and large-scale assessment of writing and of how WASL anchors and scoring guides are used in the state assessment, and will consider how this understanding affects classroom practice. And/or teachers will try out strategies for elaboration of sentence fluency in writing and sketch our plans to try these research-based strategies on their own. Based on need perceived from WASL results 2003.

Writing to Learn

In this workshop, teachers will experiment with strategies that use the writing process to help students learn and display their learning using different modes of writing to communicate with a variety of audiences. Participants have opportunities to work on their own lessons, try these strategies in their classrooms and discuss results and further uses of writing to learn. (This workshop can focus on any subject area-History, Math, Art, reading or it can be general.) You decide.