First National Study on American Elementary Classrooms after NCLB

In today's keynote, Stephanie also introduced this article published in Science about the quantity and quality of instruction and the relationship between teachers and students in American elementary classrooms. It is the first national study of its kind after the implementation of NCLB.


Here are a few highlights important to look at:

• The study is based on direct observations of first, third, and fifth grades in 1000 elementary schools and 400 school districts.
• In fifth grade, children spent most of their time (91.2%) working in whole-group or individual-seatwork settings. Students spent little time (7%) in small-group instruction (two to five students).
• In fifth grade, 37% of instruction was in literacy and 25% was in math; in first and third grade, more than 50% of instruction was in literacy and less than 10% was in math.
• Very little instruction or classroom activity was given in technology.
• Few opportunities were provided to learn in small groups, to improve analytic cal skills, or to interact extensively with teachers.
• Typically, over the course of a 20-minute period, instruction involved only one method or mode (e.g., vocabulary worksheet or watching the teacher do math problems).
• Teachers most of the time gave generic feedback on correctness rather than encouraging extension of student performance or discussing alternative solutions.
• Classroom dynamics were not related to teachers’ degree status or experience.

The most surprising finding for me is the ineffective elementary-level teacher education in the U.S. Being at an educational institution as prestigious and progressive as TC let me ignore an important fact that not only that no child should be left behind but also no teacher should be left behind. On one hand, the national DOE and a number of professors in higher educational institutions keep proposing that all K-12 teachers should have master's degrees. However, on the other hand, the quality of teacher education programs is doubtful. The spread of higher educational degrees doesn't mean a spread of high-quality teaching. The findings of this article imply that the quality of teaching, the allocation of instructional periods across subjects, and the classroom climates created by the U.S. teachers are not satisfactory at all.

The unbalanced instructional periods across subjects imply that our elementary teachers either ignore or are lack of confidence in teaching subjects such as science, math, and technology. Even within the relatively larger trunk of literacy instructional, teachers spend too much time in drill and basic teaching such as asking students to fill in blanks and doing multiple choices instead of helping students look for meanings within texts.

Prof. Calkins mentioned in the first-day keynote: "the access to a good teacher is the most likelihood that can increase children’s success." It seems that our teacher education and professional development are not influential and in-depth enough. I wonder how many schools are actually applying TC's literacy teaching approaches? what are the percentages in NYC and the nation at large? How to make this project be more widely accessed and how to revolutionize the teacher education programs in a large number of universities?

Furthermore, under this new digital age, to cater to students' needs for 21st-century skills, our literacy teaching should not be limited to traditional static texts. As Prof. Calkins argued, today's children are growing up in an age of blogs, wikis, videos, games, etc. We as teachers should keep ourselves updated to the changing outside world. Literacy teaching can happen with comic books (e.g., The Comic Book Project), Twitter (e.g., community writing contributed by thousands of children around the world), videos (e.g., use video conversation tool VoiceThread to make textual/video/audio/visual comments to a video story), classroom blogs and wikis, etc. We should know how to appropriately use technologies to bridge children's literacy learning and their 21st-century skills.

The Importance of Active Thinking in Reading

In today’s keynote, Ms. Stephanie Harvey talked about the importance of active thinking in reading. It reminds me of the keynote given by Prof. Calkins on the first day. She mentioned as teachers we need to explore our self-consciousness and be aware of our own reading preferences as well as when and why our learning levels reached sky high. The process of “pushing” students to have higher-level thinking is stressed in the teaching of reading. “Comprehension is an on-going process of involving thinking. It is the thinking that happens…all readers are developing readers,” Stephanie further mentioned.

A teacher at the beginning of the reading institute told me that she would prefer to ask students just read without putting down their ideas in the middle. She argued that when students started to write while reading, the writing would take for ever. Is that true? I wonder what questions the teacher might ask students before and after their reading, and what she might expect students to learn from their reading. Like Stephanie said today, even we as professional readers are often running our eyes across pages and often times need to go back to the previous pages. So, it is important to keep our young reader conscious and active in the reading process. After they learn envision (visualizing the texts in mind), prediction (predicting the incoming plots), connection (looking for the relationships among characters and chapters as well the connections between the book being read and books read before), interpretation (explaining their findings in the book, e.g., relationships, hidden plots behind conversations, features of characters, etc.), and critical thinking (recognizing the pressures around characters, social stigma on characters, marginalized aspects of the main story, etc.), they will be constantly thinking. The process of thinking while reading will further help improve their comprehension skills.

Keeping different strategies in mind and putting down ideas in the middle of reading, like the teacher said, may hinder students’ reading speed. However, as teachers, we need to think about the ultimate goals of teaching reading. Are we teaching students to merely understand the story plots? Are we teaching students to be speedy readers? Are we teaching students to be thinkers?

Students in China are used to filling blanks and doing multiple choices for reading comprehension after reading articles/books. The nationalized test-oriented instruction has caused many children losing the joys of reading. Furthermore, if a teacher wanted to punish a student, he/she would ask the students to read/write more. What a bad method that extra reading and writing has become painful punishment, instead of something fun and motivating! For teaching upper graders, one feasible way to adapt TC approaches to classrooms in China is, based on the nationally scripted curriculum, to develop topics related to the textbook. Maybe I can connect students’ book-club reading to the national curriculum. For example, when teaching a unit on traveling in foreign countries, we can gather books on foods, sceneries, festivals, people, etc. in other countries, and ask groups to read these books and come back to act as a tour guide to introduce the features they learned from the books… Meanwhile, reading strategies of envision, prediction, connection, critical thinking, etc. can be introduced regardless of the content we will be teaching.

Philosophically speaking, what is the essence of teaching? Teaching for interest? Teaching for motivation? Teaching for “proximal development”? Teaching for lifelong learning? All the strategies will serve for eventual realization of the essence(s) of teaching and learning that we believe in.

Book Club, Book Leveling System, and the Application in China

One of the methods to help children grow interests in reading is to set up book clubs. As introduced by the TC Reading and Writing Project, we can match students at about the same reading levels and with similar interested genres together. Members within the same book club can “monitor” and motivate each other’s reading. Book club members meet several times a week, discuss moments in the book that make them excited, touched, and passionate, and decide how many pages they will be reading in the next a couple of days. They also talk about their findings and understandings after applying certain strategies towards the book they are reading. Book club members are selected and matched first according to their reading levels. Reading levels, according to both Fountas & Pinnell and TC standards, ranges from A to Z which is mainly aiming at students from kindergarten to the 8^th grade. 8^th grader is expected to reach adult-level reading proficiency. To my knowledge based on a previous TC course in children’s literature and experiences in a number of public school classrooms in NYC, most teachers are familiar with the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system and their classroom books are leveled by this system. While many books are published with a labeled F&P level, TC’s book leveling standards are not in conflict with the F&P. TC’s standards further complement the F&P system with specific guidance about features of each level in vocabularies, sentence patterns, punctuations, grammar, story flow, picture flow, etc.

While I love the structure and strategies given by the Reading and Writing Project, I have been thinking that how I can apply these good methods to classrooms in China, a place without a recognized leveling system in teaching English. Textbook so far is the main formal resource in K-12 schools in China. Students learn English through reciting vocabularies and practicing pronunciations and textual conversations. Students in bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai are fortunate to have more after-school resources, including after-school English drama club, CDs and software in English stories and plays, English movies, and TV and audio broadcasting devices. Given the facts that there is no leveling system so far, English/bilingual picture books in China are insufficient, and there is no custom of having a classroom library, what can I do there? Can I develop a leveling system for learners who are learning English as a second language in China? Can I promote the idea of having a national English leveling system in China and connecting it to all the English picture book in the market and to be developed in the future? Students in China now start to learn English from 1^st grade (while fifteen years ago students in my generation started to learn English from middle school), with at least one-hour instructional time per day. One possible and feasible way to apply the book-club idea in upper-grade classroom is that: first, establish a classroom library by utilizing English books at school and local university libraries; second, ask several students to manage the classroom library, collecting students’ requests for books and returning books to the libraries; third, match students with similar English reading levels (based on evaluation) and interested genres to book clubs; fourth, ask students take turns to lead their book clubs and produce weekly report to the teacher reporting their reading progresses, questions, and problems encountered; fifth, ask each book club to present what they have learned from their books to the class on a monthly basis; the last but not the least, ask parents to attend students’ monthly book-club presentations, or videotape students’ presentations and post the clips onto classroom web log on a monthly basis.

The process of teaching should be creative and differentiated. Even with limited resources, we can still make a difference. I am enthusiastic about applying and adapting the literacy teaching approaches I learned here to students in China in the near future.

The TC Structure of Teaching of Reading

The following map may give you an overview of the TC method of teaching of reading in upper grades (3rd-8th grade). More details are provided towards the language used with students. For example, students are addressed as "reader" in reading workshops, while they are addressed as "writer" in writing workshops. Teachers are required to use specific language to start a conference with students, for example, "what are you doing as a reader?", "what have you learned from this book so far as a reader?", etc.

You can move any part around on the map to view details.

Self-Consciousness in the Teaching of Reading

In today’s keynote, Prof. Lucy Calkins asked the audience (who are about 760 teachers/graduate students from 38 states and 11 countries) a question -- “When was your learning curve sky high?” In addition to this question, we were also asked to think about our own journeys as readers. The process of recalling our own journeys as learners and readers is important to make our teaching better. Being self-conscious about my own learning curve can help re-affirm myself what good teaching might look like. Being self-conscious about my own favorite English books can help recognize my preferred genres, which further ensure me to make a better decision in selecting literature across genres to teach.

Looking back on my learning journey during my formative years in China, I started to learn English as a second language from middle school. At that time, mathematics, rather than English literacy, was my favorite subject. My passion in mathematics never reached such a high level that math was my first choice in doing homework and I often couldn’t help discussing math problems with boys in my class, although at a sensitive teen age that boys and girls didn’t talk much to each other in class in the early 1990s in China. I set up a high expectation in math for myself and I was the top one female student in the subject who won district math prizes together with all other boys for our school. Why? There was a secret behind. I adored my math teacher Ms. Tang. She was a smart, artistic, humorous, but also rigorous middle-aged lady. I never saw a female math teacher as smart as her. The instruction she gave was succinct. She had the “magic” ability which could change complex problems into simple and clear interpretations…As Prof. Calkins mentioned in the keynote that U.S. DOE’s recent report showed that the access to a good teacher is the most likelihood that can increase children’s success, I was fortunate enough to enjoy the “sunshine” from Ms. Tang through my middle-school years, however, I was unfortunate to experience an ignorant math teacher in my high-school years who most of the time tried hard to “feed” students with textbook knowledge, like most teachers in China did/are still doing today. The big contrast directly caused my decreased interest in math which eventually influenced my choice of future career. Coming back to the discussion at the beginning of this reflection, what is good teaching about? Good teaching should come from the facilitator of the classroom, the teacher. Good teaching should be succinct, guiding, motivating, and involving. Good teaching should be interesting and creative in a predictable way (Calkins, 2001, The Art of Teaching Reading) so students can be self prepared. Good teaching should be constructive and social. Good teaching should be collaborative, differentiated, and open to new possibilities…

I read limited English literature before coming to the U.S. My favorite ones in mind include Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, and Little Women. Jane Austin is always my favorite author whose writing style influenced me a lot. The conversations she wrote were models of succinct but powerful writings. I noticed that my favorite books were all fictions and all feminine. As an individual, I admired some glittering points of the female characters within the books: Scarlett’s undefeated spirit and persistence, Elizabeth’s intelligence, confidence, and courage, and Jo’s independence and pursuit of personal life goals. All of them conversed with me and created a beautiful world, full of imagination, colors, and lights, during the later stage of my formative years. I realized that I tended to use the limited flexibility (under a national curriculum) to do storytelling about fictions and fantasies with elementary students I taught in China. Being aware of my own preferences, as a teacher/educator, I need to pay more attention to other book genres and make sure that students will be able to read across genres in their English class. I need to develop more passions in other genres to facilitate students’ learning.

Ten Transformative Ideas to Create a Richly Literate Classroom Culture

By Mary Ehrenworth

1. Talking passionately about books (example book described: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins)

Instead of saying the book is good, make specific recommendation/introduction of the book (e.g., personal connection, etc.) Try to reach genres and authors when talking about the book. Further suggestions for teachers: A need to develop passions across genres.

2. Being visible as a reader

Physically carry the books when they are running around.

[Ting's comment: How does this happen? Can we allow students to bring classroom books with them to the dinning room and recess?]

3. Create communities around books (another way to keep readers visible)

Fox can be read with every grade.

4. Create an online experience: goodreads.com, which can help to make a book club and keep track of books they read.

[Ting's comment: An online book club is a great way to involve parents and students. Students can see what books other peers are reading/ have read. The options of leaving comments and keeping track of the books they are reading will be very motivating. It would be interesting to have a comprehensive investigation of the users on the website and specifically see how students interact with their peers through these digital literacy activities.]

5. Seek books (in classroom; another classroom; school libraries; public libaries) – the capability to search for books

[Ting's comment: This will cultivate students' research skills: How to search for information they need and how to utilize potential resources.]

6. Reading across the day – out of school

"We are going to try reading at different places: on the train, sitting in an art museum, in a park, etc."

This will help students to get a sense about carrying books and reading across the day.

[Ting's comment: This approach will definitely benefit students' life-long learning experience -- Reading can happen anywhere and reading is a joyful experience.]

7. Form book clubs

E.g., every adult at the school leads a book club.

[Ting's comment: How much time and energy does each teacher need to devote for the book clubs?]

8. Parent workshops/book clubs

Most parents don’t know that most of the children in the country drop two levels in the summer because they don’t read.

[Ting's comment: This is a good approach to get parents involved in classroom literacy activities and let them be aware of the literacy approaches applied by teachers.]

9. Book clubs that test “hot literature”

A mixture of parents and students who will test that “who will be appropriate to read the books”.

[Ting's comment: It will be very motivating to be part of the "test" group.]

10. Read, read, read and read

If you read, your students will be reading too.

Three essential elements in teaching of reading: Visibility, Passion, Integrity

Thoughts on Digital Literacy

Today's August Reading Institute mentioned a popular website called Goodreads which is used by a great number of young students and adults today. I had a trial on the website and found many students use it to keep track of their own readings and let their friends on the site to monitor their readings. They also comment on and rate books and post book-related videos. I was told that some schools use the Goodreads as a collaborative online book club for students, parents, and teachers to leave comments to books they read or have been reading.

Students can limit their group discussion to their friends. One interesting thing happened recently was about a book named The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. A group of students were discussing the book on the site and opened the access to their classmates, teachers, and the author. One day, they surprisingly found the author left a passionate comment to a student who wrote a poem for the book...

Digital Literacy Project Design

This online book club drove me to think further about my potential digital story telling project with a class of 5^th graders in P.S. 199 in the fall. The classroom teacher has given me great flexibility in co-creating and co-working on this digital story telling project. Our original idea was about teaching children basic movie editing skills and guiding them to convert photos and pictures into a video story/book with different texts inserted. So students will, based on the books they will be reading in the fall, make reflective video works or create books in their interested topics. They will in the process additionally learn design skills and 21^st-century media skills. However, this original idea has potential uncontrolled challenges: (1) potential difficulties of managing Windows Movie Maker as 5^th graders; (2) limited space and time to show texts within a video story/book; and (3) a potential website to house these digital stories.

Goodreads is a great “online book club” to share, monitor, and keep track of books. But how can I connect it to the digital storytelling project? How many students in the class have internet access at home? Is the website allowed within the school? Since videos can be uploaded to personal profiles, how many videos can be uploaded for each individual and what is the upper limit?

Idea Two is, instead of trying a fancy video project, to let students publish their works/reflections and make comments to others’ entries through a classroom blog. Small-scale videos, images, and mind maps can be posted on the blog.

Idea Three is about Twitter. Twitter is a place we can use for collaborative writing and also individual publishing.

…

Before making a final decision, I need to think more about the classroom facilities, students’ internet access, and the main publishing activities students will be involved in the fall.

August Writing Animoto Clip

Final Piece of Adult Writing

Thanks to Josh for proofreading my piece. And thanks to Sandi for listening to my rehearsal.

I was asked to read my adult writing piece to the audience at the closing ceremony of the Teaching of Writing Institute this afternoon. The following is the final version for this afternoon:

This is a story about my grandma, happend in the 1940s in a small village in southern China.

“What happened, Mom?” Lin asked as she walked to her Mother.

“Oh, my little sweetheart,” her mother couldn't help crying before her daughter. “Your father will have you marry into the Wu family next month.”

“M...Mom,” she stammered with her black eyes opened wide, "which…which Wu family?"

“My poor girl, my baby, you will marry the oldest son of the Wu family in the Kim Village...He is ten years older than you. How could I live without you?” Lin's Mother looked at Lin as her heart was breaking.

“Mom, I don't want to get married. I don't want to leave you! Let me go to talk to father,” as Lin was about to walk out of her room.

“My silly girl, are you crazy? You will be beaten to death. Oh, my poor little girl.” Her mother held Lin in her arms and kept sobbing.

Lin rushed back to her room and cried hard in her bed. “I hate him. I hate this suffocating family!” The hatred and pain soared in her heart, “I hate the fact that I have to follow and accept everything arranged by others. Why do I have to follow father and why do women have to always follow men's decisions? Why could a woman as kind and noble as Mom never be well treated by father? Why? Why?!!!”

“No, this is not what I wanted.” Lin wiped the tears on her face.

Suddenly, there was something glittering in her eyes. “Why not run away from this family and never be controlled by father or any other man in the world?” She recalled, “Lu mentioned that there were jobs for women in the nearby city Yichun...Yes! I should go to Yichun.”

“But I can't leave Mom...” Lin hesitated.

Lin walked to the window and stared at the light from her mother’s room. Everything around seemed frozen and there was no other sound heard except for her own heartbeat.

Finally, Lin walked back to her bed with the decision made.

The next morning, before dawn, a girl sneaked out of a big house and walked towards the mountains faced by the village. On the other side of the mountains, there was a city called Yichun. The girl started to climb the first mountain. The sun was rising. Bright sunshine started to cover the peaks. The girl’s face became as rosy as the dawn. She continued climbing, without stopping or even glancing at the house which was becoming farther and farther away.

...

Teaching via Picture Books

I have been immersed in a big number of children’s picture books these days, which I feel supper happy about. To become a children’s book editor and writer is one of my career goals when I get back to China in the future, in addition to academic life. All the recommended picture books by different speakers are interesting in a special way. They offer various teaching points for classroom writing workshops.

This is a book I like very much which is fun to read and of multiple teaching points.

Teaching points:

1. Punctuation is the craft (e.g., …)
2. A sentence can be written across pages
3. Use speech bubble to add conversation
4. Use text in boldface and exclamation mark to express strong feelings
5. Write words into different shapes (to match pictures) (e.g., a curvy shape)
6. Use repetitive format
7. Dialogue can be added by people not shown in the picture
8. Use pictures to show emotions
9. …

Minilesson and Conferring

The teaching of writing institute is intense especially when it conflicts with my final week of another going-on research methodology course. I have really got a CRAZY week... But fortunately it is a high-quality week-long class that is far beyond my expectation. I never thought about that writing can be taught in such a well-structured way which is full of fun. I feel excited about the processes of teaching: (1) the 10-minute mini lesson for building up connections to fit into students’ works, demonstrating strategies for writing, engaging students by asking students to practice the strategy just taught, and linking the going-on lesson to content/strategies taught previously; and (2) the ways of conferring with students individually and in a small group.

In a writing workshop, the min lesson which takes the first 10 minutes of the workshop is very important to support students’ independent writing. It will provide students with strategies for writing and students will be the ones who take the choices of strategies with them through their entire life in writing. The strategies may not help students to shape their main work that they need to complete on that day but will get students familiar with different meanings realized via different strategies. The processes of practices will enable students to build up a rich writing repertoire for their increasing growth. Since there are only ten minutes for the mini lesson, the instruction needs to be very succinct, and the demonstration of writing needs to be very detailed.

Conferring with students is another important component in teaching of writing. Conferring gives good moments for differentiated teaching. A conference consists of research (finding out what students are working on, where they are, and what problems they might encounter), compliment (encouraging students’ going-on work and support the strategies students already used in their works), teach (what further help they might need and what strategies they can apply to make their writing better), and link (link the aforementioned teaching to the mini lesson or the previous strategies/content).

The processes of both the mini lesson and the conferring well match the Constructivism learning theory. Students are continuously learning from new strategies and their own practices while being linked to knowledge already or previously acquired. These approaches assist students to write, rather then restrict the content students want to write about. Teachers are more like facilitators rather than instructors. I wonder can this structured set of approaches (for teaching of English writing) be applied to students learning English as a second language? And can it be also applied to other languages, for example, for teachers teaching the writing of Chinese literacy in China? Actually, I have a strong and positive feeling about applying the structure of teaching to the teaching in China. I would love to experiment this teaching method in the English teaching in China when I get back home in the future.

Power of Poetry and the Aesthetic Literacy

“Sometimes I think that what we want to make possible is the living of lyrical moments, moments at which human beings (freed to feel, to know, and to imagine) suddenly understand their own lives in relation to all that surrounds.” -- Maxine Greene

The second keynote in this Teaching of Writing institute was about poetry. Poetry gives children a new way to look at the world and transform pictures in their minds into words. Some teachers think that teaching of poetry should happen in secondary schools. However, poetry writing actually can be conducted by elementary students, too. The “poetic” lecture given in the morning further reminds me of the way of teaching poetry writing in Prof. Ann Sabatini’s class last spring. Teaching of poetry is an indispensable part of aesthetic education. Maxine Greene (2001, Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education) defines aesthetic education as “an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is there to be noticed, and to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful.” Teaching of poetry can happen anywhere, not limited to space, time, and traditional formats of poetry writing. As Maxine Greene put in her book, which echoed with aesthetic ideas given by a Chinese educator and artist named Zikai Feng in the 1930s, we as teachers should render students the capability of seeking for beautiful moments in the daily life. The beautiful moments are moments that they can appreciate, share, reflect on, and write about. The beautiful moments can be found from regular scenes, such as patterns on an old wall, scenes through a classroom window, breeze felt after a thunderstorm in a scorching summer, a blossoming rose in the backyard, etc. Students will have “trained” eyes of looking for beauty in every corner of their lives. Yes! The beauty of life lies in the seemingly unchanged daily life, as said by the old idiom “Beauty is but in the eyes of the beholder”.

I once did a trial with Prof. Ann Sabatini and some other classmates. I observed the Bancroft building across the street through the window of a classroom in Grace Dodge Hall. The observation took about five minutes. After that, we came back to write about what we saw and felt from the observation via free-style poetry writing. I wrote the follow lines:

Clouds move gently
Under the blue sky
An old building
Stands there
For decades
It has a red and blue roof
With delicate carvings
At the base of each window
Moving shadows are reflected
On the glass
In the color of sunset

This might be a bad example of poetry writing, but it is a good way of letting students “fly” with their minds to write about the beautiful moments they have seen. For lower graders, they can practice this approach of writing and let’s forget about the grammar as well as the rigid formats and rhymes of poems.

Finally, I want to share a well-known example of beautiful moments found in daily life which worth writing and appreciating. It is my favorite piece which I first time fell in love with when I was a high school student learning English in China:

The Sound of Music
My favorite things
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad

Techniques of Revision

Most writings can be polished multiple times. One of the important strategies to make revisions is to add actions to conversation. The actions can make storytelling more specific and vivid.

In the process of drafting, one option to convenient the future revisions is to write only within one half of the paper and at the same time skip some lines (esp. for those who like writing on hard copies).

The following is my revised draft (see revisions from the second page).

Revised Draft of Grandma's Story -

The First Draft from the Adult Writing Session

In the 40-min adult writing workshop, we were asked, based on yesterday's "timeline", to generate a seed idea.

The short moment I chose to write about was a moment taken from my grandma's brave story happened in the 1940s in China. I drafted the "moment" with a background narration and an ending scene, with the thought that they would help to explain the complicated historical and cultural background of the short moment I wrote about:

Background

Lin was born in the late 1930s in an extended rich family in southern China. At that time, China was still a country under the transformation from a feudal society under wars and invasions to a new China. Lin's father was one of the most powerful landlords at the local village. Everyone in the family followed the decisions made by her father, so did Lin and her mother.

Lin was an active girl, good at climbing trees, and also mazed people by her embroidery work, one of the essential skills girls were required to grasp in that age in order to get a good marriage. Lin was close to her mother. From her childhood, her father seldom talked to her graciously. Lin knew that in his mind, like many old-style Chinese males, girls were just “wastes” that would sooner and later belong to another family.

Lin's peaceful life was suddenly stirred one day when she became 14. Her mother ran into her room with tears. Lin never saw mother act in such an anxious way. She was brought up in an aristocratic family and she always behaved peacefully and calmly.

The Beginning of the Conversation (Optional Focused Moment 1)

"What happened, Mom? " Lin asked.

"Oh, my little sweetheart," Her mother couldn't help crying, "your father will let you marry the Wu family next month."

"Mom", she stammered, "which…which Wu family?"

"My poor girl, my baby, you will marry the oldest son of the Wu family in the Kim Village...He is ten years older than you... How could I live without you?"

"My godness!" There was a moment of blankness in Lin's mind, "why father would arrange this marriage for me? Just because the Wu family is rich and powerful? What should I do? I don't want to move to the Kim village. I don’t want to leave Mom. I don't want to marry a guy whom I never met. "

"Mom, I don't want to get married. I don't want to leave you! Let me go to talk to father."

"My silly girl, are you crazy? You will be beaten to death. Oh, my poor little girl." Mom held Lin in her arms and continued to sob.

************************************

Focused Moment

Lin rushed back to her room and cried hardly in her bed. "I hate him. I hate this suffocating family!" The hatred and pain soared in her heart, " I hate the fact that I have to follow and accept everything arranged by others. Why I have to follow father and why women have to always follow men's decisions? Why women as kind and noble as Mom could never be well treated by father? Why? Why?!!!"

"No, this is not what I wanted." Lin wiped the tears on her face.

Suddenly, there was something glittering in her black eyes: "Why not run away from this family and never be controlled by father and any man in the world?" She recalled: "Lu mentioned that there were jobs for women in the nearby city Yichun".

Lin's face turned red because of excitement and she could hear her heartbeat: "Yes, I should go to Yichun. I will find a job in Yichun and lead my own life there! " "But how about Mom?"Her face turned back to pale and another voice was heard in her mind, "Who will take care of Mom? I will miss Mom very much. If I escaped from home, father would blame on her and beat her again..."

"Oh, Mom," Lin felt hopeless, hesitated, and painful again, "I don't want to hurt Mom...I don't want to get married...I have a lot of dreams I wanted to try and I even haven't really seen the outside world...God, please help me."

The Ending of the "Moment"

Lin walked to the window and stared at the light from her Mom's room. Everything around seemed frozen and there was no other sound heard except for her own heartbeat.

Finally, Lin walked back to her bed with the decision made. "I love you, Mom. But I have to pursue my freedom. I will save you out of the prison once I get settled," Lin muttered to herself.

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The Ending Scene

The next morning, before the dawn came out, a girl sneaked out of a big house and walked towards the mountains faced by the village. On the other side of the mountains, there was a city called Yichun. The girl started to climb the first mountain. The sun was rising. Bright sunshine started to cover the peaks. The girl’s face became as rosy as the dawn. She continued climbing, without even one glimpse of the house in the back which was becoming farther and farther.

Mapping Strategies for Teaching of Writing

Interesting Children's Picture Books

Wave: A wordless book
I have fallen in love with this book upon a first glance, as it was shown via a projector this afternoon. It is the first "silent" book I have ever known. It "tells" a story about a little girl walking, thinking, and feeling the waves at a beach. The book shows great closeness to nature, and presents a limpid and bright world, combined with reality and imagination, in the eyes of the little girl.

Walk on! A Guide to Taking the First Step: A humorous book
This is book of vivid pictures showing how babies learn to walk. It is a funny book to read and to be shown to younger students.

A Flavor of Teaching Strategies

Instructor: Celena Larkey, 10 am -12:00

After the keynote, we came back to TC to join a smaller group to focus on a specific grade. I chose to participate in “first-grade” group. Recalling my own writing experiences during all my formative years in China, I felt that the first grade was one of the two crucial moments in my life for learning writing: (1) the time when I began to learn to write as a first grader, and (2) the “bottleneck” period when I was full of emotions but lack of systematic techniques to write. The R&W approaches for first grade here will further illuminate the ways of English teaching for students in big cities in China who take English as a second language from kindergarten, and may also shed light on the approaches of teaching Chinese literacy. Though English and Chinese are two languages having extreme differences, I believe, the concept of being a writer, a fair number of teaching strategies and learning principles, can be shared and co-discussed.

*What is good writing?

The Best Story

Celena asked us what should be the good writing for our students. I wrote down the key words given by peers: confidence, connection, choice, relaxed environment, organized, etc. Before perceiving the answer at the end of this week (the end of the writing institute), I’d like to add more thoughts:

The joys of writing first come from choices. For younger children, especially those who just begin to write, it is not appropriate to give them many restrictions. Let’s forget about connection, paragraph, and grammar. Let’s just write for fun, for something they feel interested, meaningful, and/or something which can help them create a wonderland in their mind. Free writing gives more options for imagination and creativity.

Every child has a palette in his/her mind. They use a mind brush to paint on the palette. How can we as teachers add colors to the teaching of writing? It is our responsibility to elicit their imaginations and guide them to "paint" their beautiful images via texts, pictures, music, and/or other possible media formats.

* Teacher as adult writer

Celena also told us that we would spend about 40 minutes per day this week to practice adult’s writing, to experience ourselves as adult writers. I jotted down ideas for possible topics: my first successful writing experience, my grandma’s brave stories, a story for my beloved, a poem for an only child, etc. I finally decided to write about my grandma's brave expedition in the 1940s, which I will blog about in the later entries.

* The use of "timeline"

The “timeline” here as consulted with Celena is about mapping the ideas you want to use for writing. It can be about breaking up a big idea into small ideas, or selecting special moments within a small idea.

The First Morning of the 16th Annual August Institute on the Teaching of Writing 8.10-8.14

I’m currently taking two summer intensive courses offered by the TC R&W Project. The history of this “project”, a research and teacher development institute housed by TC, can be traced back to approximately 25 years ago. Every summer, thousands of teachers from all over the U.S. come to TC to attend the well-known week-long sessions in teaching of reading/writing for different grade levels of students. I have just started this huge “feast” today.

Reflection on Keynote by Prof. Lucy Calkins, 9 am – 10 am

*Teacher as writer
Teacher was often addressed as “master” by ancient Chinese people. It was not just about showing respect but also about that teacher stands for the one who masters a great degree of expertise in the area they wanted to learn. So, when it comes to our teaching field today, what expectations do we have for a writing teacher? First, the teacher needs to be a writer. The teacher knows strategies for writing. The teacher knows how to develop good writing skills. The teacher knows how to dig out interesting writing topics. The teacher also knows how to make writing meaningful, interesting, and regular, like daily life.

*Processes of writing
Rehearsal >> Draft /Revision >> Further Revision >> Editing >> Publishing

The processes of writing sometimes are not linear as told, especially when we work with younger children. Influenced by ways of design thinking, I also think the processes of writing sometimes involve one more stage -- the process of presenting draft to others/peers and collecting feedback.

*The teaching of writing: how & why?
The teaching of writing is not only to let students know the procedures of writing but also to address the meanings behind. Writing should be a way that student can make meaning for themselves, for their life, and for a bigger society eventually. Teachers should help students understand “why” in the processes of writing. “Why it matters to you” is important, for the meaning children perceive and the meaning they make.

*The ultimate goal of teaching
The ultimate goal matches the TC perspectives for teacher education: Be reflective, be critical, and the pursuit of social justice. Prof. Calkins talked about that we, as teachers and educators, should think about bringing social changes eventually, to help those who are in need of help and to think ourselves as “bottom-up” social reformers.

*The changing media of literacy
One more aspect that I want to mention in this entry is that Prof. Calkins at the beginning of her speech talked about the importance of teaching literacy, including the Obama government’s educational initiatives and the changing media of literacy brought by the changing 21st century. The latter part is actually related to a heated new research area – digital literacies, which I am interested in.