AR Implementation Phase 1

Alright. It has begun. I was very excited to finally be standing in front of my 5th grade class explaining to them that we would be embarking on this exercise that was 2+ years in the making! Without giving any indication of what types of things I would be looking at, I implored the class to take the process seriously. I asked that they simply write whatever they were compelled to write. I explained that there was no grade involved and that I had designed the course to be as beneficial to them as it will be to me. Then, with a grin, I gave them their first prompt: "What I would do if I were principal at Johnson Elementary".


Now, I had actually intended for this first prompt to be rather vanilla. I assumed that this is a prompt that they had received before. I remember being given prompts similar to this one (substitute "teacher" or "president") annually when I was coming through elementary school. So, I was very surprised when my reading of the prompt was greeted with an excited ruckus! I got the feeling that many of them had never considered what they might do differently if they were principal. They got to writing.

My students were (and will be from here out) given their prompt Monday afternoon after lunch. They will have somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes that day to get started. They will then be allowed to pull their writing out and work on anytime they finish an assignment early (which should be frequently for most). Each afternoon, from 2:00 to 2:30, we conduct a quick spelling exercise. Unless students are really dragging their feet, this should give each student another 15-20 minutes to work on their prompt daily. Then, of course, they are allowed (encouraged) to take their writing home to work on. I encourage students to write on a word processor for this assignment since I am most concerned with how much they write.

For the first week, I did not allow students to turn their papers in early. "Friday is the due date", I told them. I really wanted them to have their papers so that if they thought of something they might actually take the paper out and add to it. However, a few students had some issues turning their papers in on Friday. I believe that in a couple of these cases the students had simply written all that they were going to write on Monday or Tuesday, and I have now expected them to carry the paper around all week without losing it. Well, as I recall from that age, once a paper is finished, it becomes a dead document that is asking to become misplaced. So, beginning this week, I will set a basket on my desk and allow them to turn their work in starting Wednesday. I no longer believe that they will be inclined to work on them simply by virtue of having them.

On Friday, they turned their papers in (most of them). I began picking through these papers for the things that I have decided might be good indicators of their relative level of engagement and (gulp) counting the number of words that each student produced. What I found is that my research is much more labor intensive than I realized. First, some of their work is quite long. One girl wrote over 300 words. Also, I found that I had some decisions to make about what I will accept as a descriptive word. For instance, if a student wrote "there would be a large, noisy room for..." then there are obviously 2 descriptive words that are a product of the student’s decision to add description to their work. Alternately, if a student wrote "I would call for cleaner restrooms.", 'cleaner restrooms' is really just a noun, in the sense that the school already has restrooms, so the sentence does not make sense without the word "cleaner". "Cleaner restrooms" is not, in this case, extraneous at all.

Then there are issues of clause, which I considered- when designing my research- to be some measure of sentence complexity, which I considered to be some measure of quality, which I considered to be some measure of engagement... Ignoring the fact that in 5th grade writing there is rarely anything approaching a subjective clause; I'm not even sure, as I sit here today, that this is any indicator at all. Should I consider keeping track of something more elementary (pun intended), such as prepositions?

Data aside, I will say this about my first week of AR: I thoroughly enjoyed getting the students writing. This is really the reason that I designed my AR to be a writing exercise. I love to read student creative writing. A handful of them are fantastic creative brains! Identifying the ones who produce inspired work even when the prompts are meant to be only average in their ability to inspire is thrilling!

I'll end this blog with a passage from one of the works:

"We would have a classroom filled with water. The class pets would be squids, octopuses, fish, and dolphins.... There would be a building with a giant chocolate fountain with strawberries and you could dip the strawberries in the chocolate fountain. We would have a big water park called Eagle's Splash World."