Cheyenne's Writing Journey

Digital natives. We’ve heard that term used to describe today’s youth because of their upbringing around technology. We see kids navigate technology and pick things up faster than we can. We assume that since children are growing up around this that they just know how to use it. In the On Being podcast “The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Danah Boyd explains how these children didn’t gain this knowledge by being born in their generation. She states, “Young people spend a tremendous amount of time learning how to navigate these tools, these technologies.” These kids know how to work technology because they have played around with it and spent time exploring it. They were not born with the knowledge. Boyd also gets into how when we hear “digital natives” it gives off the connotation that these younger generations have nothing to learn from us. The truth is, they still need our help learning all of the ins and outs of this digital world. They still need us to h...

Schools often put formula above voice when teaching writing, but Linda Christensen makes it a point in her book Teaching for Joy and Justice that voice should be what comes first. “Too often, schools ask students to drop their identities at the door” (152). If there’s anything that’s clear with Christensen and that I have learned this semester, its that students have to be able to make connections with the classroom and their lives. Students need to be able to not only make these connections but include who they are in their writing. Whether they are writing a profile essay or an argumentative essay, they should not have points taken off for their voice. In fact, I believe that voice is the most important development in writing. Reading about Christensen’s lesson around profile essays got me thinking about developing students’ voices in their writing. In that particular essay, students wove in scenes and created an essay that worked like a narrative. Here, even though the essay ...

Rick Wormeli ends his video “Defining Mastery” talking about what grades are supposed to report: what a student has specifically learned. He discusses how grades are far too transactional; if a student does X the teacher will give him Y. If we follow standards-based grading and get specific with the verbs that we want from our students (Ex. Students will be able to create a 3-dimensional paper airplane. Students will be able to define dictatorship and describe an example in their own words.) then we have more evidence-based and standards-based grading. This is asking us to get detailed with what we are looking for from the students and reminded me of the lessons I have had on student objectives. We have to be asking them something that is measurable. We can’t just say that the student will learn this or understand that, how will we know if that is even true? But if we have them define, describe, analyze, something along those lines, then we can measure whether or not they have learne...

The Rhode Island Writing Project Spring Conference 2019 was an amazing event. There were two workshop sessions before the keynote speaker, Tina Cane, spoke. I wish I could have attended all of the workshops; they ranged from involving more imagery in personal writing, to talking about race, to involving mindfulness, to guided meditation and reiki! Unfortunately, I could only choose two workshops, so for the first session I chose “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”: Revolutionize Your Relationships and Practice. This workshop was led by three English teachers: Ryan Burns, Janine Boiselle, and Ashlee Burns. This workshop began with a prompt asking us why we were here, if there was anything we needed to put away to be here more fully, and if there was anything we wanted to hold onto while we were here. Some people chose to read aloud what they wrote and then we split into three groups. In groups, when working with Boiselle, we had another writing prompt asking us what was somethin...