Teachers get advice on teaching writing

Read the article

By Kelli Gauthier kgauthier@timesfreepress.com

First-year teacher Amanda Smith knows her future in education is somewhat uncertain for the next couple of years.

So until she is granted tenure, the Hillcrest Elementary fifth-grade language arts teacher said she’s going to participate in as much professional development as she can to improve her teaching and, she hopes, her students’ test scores.

“It really terrifies me. I want to go to all of the workshops so I can boost those test scores. I want tenure,” she said.

As debate swirls in the Tennessee General Assembly over K-12 education reforms, a group of fifth-grade teachers, including Ms. Smith, gathered Thursday to swap some last-minute advice on how to teach writing. Fifth graders in Hamilton County will take the writing assessment portion of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program test at the beginning of February.

“If we could just take everybody’s ideas and put them together, we could really improve writing scores,” Ms. Smith said.

The event was held at the Public Education Foundation by Clara Sale-Davis, PEF’s director of the Benwood Initiative, and Susan Swanson, director of urban education for Hamilton County Schools. Carolyn Mashburn, a certified national trainer of Six Traits Writing Skills who has been working with the 16 Benwood elementary schools since the summer, presented teaching tips.

“This is the last little hurdle, and we’re going to get them all through it,” she said. “It’s OK to prioritize (writing) for 11 days. We’d be foolish not to.”

Lauren Bosworth, also a first-year teacher from Rivermont Elementary, said she appreciates getting a chance to talk with a room full of veteran teachers.

Ms. Smith said one idea she got from another teacher was to pull reading interventionists from all classrooms and have them concentrate their efforts in one grade level for an entire hour.

Claire Wood, a teacher at Brown Academy, shared that in her classroom she had her students practice taking the TCAP writing prompt and inverting the sentence to create an opening statement.

Mrs. Sale-Davis, a former fifth-grade teacher, acknowledged the pressure that is put on the group of teachers gathered Thursday.

“You’ve got your school’s report card on your shoulders in two areas: reading and writing,” she said, referring to the fact that fifth-graders are the only elementary students who are tested in writing as well as reading. “How do we avoid burnout? We’ve got to be motivated that day. We’ve got to show up in camo and declare war on TCAP.”