Critical Reflection I am currently student teaching in a fourth grade classroom in a rural community of Central Illinois.

During the allotted time for writing instruction each day, I work with a total of seven students while my other four students receive writing interventions with a different teacher in the building. All of my students are native English speakers, and of the seven students, five are Caucasian and two are considered multiracial. For this writing unit I introduced and began teaching my students how to write a persuasive essay. This particular school does not strictly follow any single curriculum for any subjects. The teachers typically pull information from several different sources. Ever since I began teaching writing in January, I have been using the order of units described by Lucy Calkins in her textbook Boxes and Bullets: Personal and Persuasive Essays. According to this book, persuasive essays should be taught after working on narrative essays. Since my students just finished their first narrative essay a week ago, we recently moved on to the persuasive genre. In my opinion, the most effective lesson that I taught during this unit so far was the introductory lesson. Students seemed to have already built their background knowledge on opinion writing and persuading while they were in third grade, so this sparked a rich discussion at the very beginning of the lesson. The students all seemed to really enjoy the mentor text I chose, and they were able to identify specific arguments from this text when we began discussing valid and invalid arguments. Our principals video directed at my fourth grade class really helped to build up an emotional reaction in my students with regards to the topic of whether or not we should have school uniforms. Most of them expressed their anger immediately after watching this video, and I was able to transition effectively into the pre-writing stage of writing persuasive

essays. I felt that because this topic evoked an emotional response, the students had realized a purpose for the writing that they would be starting. During past writing classes, I had never held formal writing conferences with studentsI usually would just ask how the student was doing, if they needed any help, and I would offer some suggestions to help improve their writing. I really liked the idea of structuring a conference for each writing class time with students to discuss their ongoing essay writing process. I ended up learning a lot about each childs thinking process and which parts of the essay they felt stuck on. This helped me identify early on where I could individually help push the students to improve their writing, which in turn helped me shape my future lessons in this unit. Since I am still new to holding writing conferences with students during the lesson, I am still trying to figure out how long they should last, how to work around the needs of the other students in the classroom, and how to find time to meet and discuss with each of the students. I feel rather fortunate to only work with seven students this semester, and I constantly wonder how I would conduct similar lessons with twenty or more students. Based on the four lessons from this unit that I have already taught, I plan on re-teaching another mini-lesson dealing with adding details. Although we spent an entire week on this between our narrative essays and these persuasive essays, most of the students are expressing that they feel stuck when trying to think of what else they can add to their essays. Since I have been teaching writing for over four months now, I can usually gauge my students grasp of the subject fairly quickly. I have built a strong trusting relationship with each of these students and use daily journals to write back and forth with them, and I think this has helped make my students feel safe to take risks with their writing. This especially seemed apparent to me during

the persuasive unit, because when I held conferences with each student, they promptly and openly expressed their concerns and their honest thoughts about their writing up to that point. An aspect of this unit that really challenged me was anticipating how much time would be required for each lesson. By the time students return from their specials period each day and prepare to begin writing class, we end up having about 20-25 minutes total for writing. There also is no flexibility at the end of writing class to extend the time spent in writing, because another student comes to join us for reading class. Trying to fit in all of the components of a writers workshop lesson each day was very difficult. We usually do not share as a class at the end of the lesson, since students end up only having about 8-10 minutes of actual writing during this time. Because of this issue of time constraints, my class did not get as far as I would have liked over the course of four lessons; however, I do not want to simply rush through the unit and material just to get through it all. I want my students to really grasp the material and produce their best work. I was unable to perform summative assessments on my students work, since they are all still on the drafting stage of the writing process. Overall, though, I felt that this unit went very well, and I am eager to continue it over the next couple of weeks.