Newspaper article features Transition to Teaching students assisting Bedford students
Friday, December 18, 2009
The Bedford Times-Mail featured a unique collaboration between "Transition to Teaching" students at the IU School of Education and Bedford elementary students in an article on December 16. The article is below, courtesy of the Bedford Times-Mail.The Skill of Writing
By Carol Johnson
carol@tmnews.com
December 16, 2009
BEDFORD — A learning project to improve the writing skills of sixth-graders at Shawswick Middle School culminated last week when the students, about 95 of them, got to meet for the first time the Indiana University graduate students who had been critiquing their work for the past few months.
The project began shortly after school began. English teacher Aaron Ritter thought his students could benefit from getting feedback from a broader audience. Students in IU’s Transition to Teaching class were eager to help.
About every week, Ritter would give his students a writing activity and would send those assignments to IU, where the graduate students would offer suggestions to improve their work.
About a dozen IU students participated.
“The students love having college kids read their work,” said Ritter. “The IU students comment on the papers, offering encouragement, comments and suggestion. We have written back and forth several times and the essays have gotten progressively more involved.”
Sixth-grader Treyton Phillips said the experience helped him.
“I got some good comments,” he said. “I liked having them read what I wrote.”
Phillips was matched with IU student Noel Koontz, who formerly worked as a book editor before enrolling in IU’s Transition to Teaching program.
“What I looked for was how they engaged the reader and their thought process,” said Koontz.
Koontz sat down with the students and discussed what he looked for in their writing.
“I didn’t worry about your spelling because that will come the more you write,” he said. “It’s more important that you take the assignment and get it all there.”
Zach Banks’ IU partner was Lauren Ellis, who was a musical theater major at IU when she entered the program to become a teacher.
“I like writing. I have fun writing and I like to be creative with it,” said Banks.
Ellis encouraged him to be more descriptive in his writing, which Banks said has helped him write better stories.
Banks and other students said it was fun to finally meet the students who had been grading their work.
Ritter said that wasn’t part of his original plan, but as the writing exchanges went on, the sixth-graders were more curious to have a face-to-face meeting with the IU students.
“My field experience has been at a high school in Plainfield, but I love middle school,” said Ellis. “I really enjoyed this. They went from writing choppy sentences to complex sentences with good descriptions. Some of them were as good as the sophomores I’ve been grading.”
Ritter said the project has been good for the sixth-graders and IU students.
“A lot of what the IU students said about their writing was what I have been telling them, so it reinforced what I do in the classroom, but because it was someone different, they really looked forward to the feedback,” he said.
Besides improving their writing, the sixth-graders benefited in other ways from the Shawswick-IU partnership. The idea was to:
- Improve sixth-graders’ writing skills by allowing them to get more feedback from more sources
- Give sixth-graders a variety of audiences for their essays
- Allow IU students to put some of the ideas that they discuss in class into practice
- Establish a relationship between Shawswick and Indiana University that gives the kids a taste of college and the college students a taste of middle school
- Meet new people from a different setting.
