Post #7 - Madeleine Perko

My visit to the BTU was very fulfilling and eye opening, today. To begin the session, the writing mentors discussed the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Immediately, I felt that this lesson was one that I could take and apply to my teaching, but also apply to my own life. I think that I use a fixed mindset statement as a way of providing myself with a staring point. However, I didn’t realize until this lesson that by framing something very simply, “I am not good/good at _____”, reflects a fixed mindset and actually is not objective. In fact, it negatively frames my position and taints how I proceed.

Following this preliminary discussion, the other volunteers and I sat in on a fifth grade writing lesson. The lesson focused on how to develop sentence fluency and edit “fine” sentences into strong sentences. The teacher started with a run-on sentence that had a lot of good information but was disjointed. To give structure to what could be arranged, she marked off fragments within the sentence. Doing so then allowed the writer to rearrange core topics without getting lost in trying to solve the issue by further complicating the sentence with new words. This lesson was really impactful. I was never taught what sentence fluency was let alone how to go about achieving it. I actually think that this lesson will really help me going forward when I try to edit for my own sentence fluency, but even when I try to make sense of my own knowledge on a topic by organizing it into manageable units.

Beyond what I felt I gained as a writer and mentor in these two preliminary lessons, I felt that I was able to profoundly translate that to my student. My background in writing has involved crucial influence from my father. He really helped me to develop sentence fluency, however, sometimes that development reflected his voice more than my own. I wanted to make sure that my student was guided but not confined to or distracted by my writing voice. I think that by breaking down the sentence into fragments was crucial for me to be able to facilitate restructuring rather than dictating voice.

When I sat down with my student, she expressed the she felt relatively finished because multiple people had checked her writing and approved it (although, none of them were her teacher). I decided to review her work anyways. I felt insecure reading her paper and ended up reading over the first paragraph slowly multiple times before making any comments. I felt that her sentences were okay on their own but did not flow together and there were gaps in my understanding as a reader. After going over her work together and making small edits to the first two or three sentences, I felt that there was a gap in our understanding of each other and that more needed to be done beyond these bandaid patches.

After about 30 minutes of meeting, I began to become increasingly worried that I was pushing too far and that the changes I had tried to show her as examples were becoming her voice… I tried to remove her from what she had already written so to better understand what she knew and see if how she verbally explained the information, without referencing her paragraph, would be better than the sentence fluency in her paper. When she struggled to do this, she showed me her source. There, I found sentences on the website what matched those in her paper.

This time, I asked her to not look at any material and not try to write the paragraph, only explain what she wanted the reader to know. As she was speaking I saw her make a breakthrough. I finally targeted the disconnect she felt between my explanations and then going to rearrange the sentence by herself. Seeing that lightbulb go off in her mind was so rewarding. It validated that I did not push too hard, I unlocked something in her. She actually said something along the lines of being excited to be able to write from her own thoughts going forward. I felt so relieved that I did not impose my writing preferences onto her, and was so happy to see that what she got out of the lesson could be applied without my guidance. I am so so happy for my student and so grateful for the opportunity to be able to help her.

Ultimately, in her explaining to me what she knew, I could see her develop a more profound understanding of the material she researched, and understand how she could translate what she read into her own words, which could then become her own written words.

BTU has been so amazing in helping me learn about myself as a writer and as a person and I feel especially grateful to be able to work with 5th graders because at that age you develop intentional skills that I think reviewing or learning now is helpful. I have always believed that we should surround ourselves with many difference age groups because they inform us on where we have been, where we are going and how that relates to our now. My experience at the BTU is reinforcing that belief.