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Anne Elrod Whitney

Professor of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction

 

I’m a professor in Penn State’s College of Education. My research is about writing and professional development, and most of my courses center on writing in educational settings. You can learn more about me here.

 

Blended Course Overview

Many of my courses, including the one described here, are directed toward preparing teachers for the classroom or helping experienced teachers to improve. This means that I’m responsible not only for teaching the content itself but for providing course experiences that model what the teaching and learning of that content can and should look like. My typical in-residence course features lots of in-class writing and reflection, small-group conversation, working through activities that might happen in a K-12 classroom and then unpacking those, or problematizing classroom artifacts such as children’s writing and analyzing those with conversation protocols. I try to develop the class as a model of a professional learning community.

Because of this, I designed a blended course that would preserve many of the activities and experiences in my in-residence course, while providing online opportunities to dig into content in greater depth than had been possible in our once-a-week, three-hour sessions.

LLED 501:  The Teaching of Writing in Elementary and Secondary Schools

BLENDED FORMAT:  Class meets SOME Tuesdays 11:15-2:15. Other weeks meet online only. When meeting in person we will meet as a whole class, plus an individual conference and small group meetings to be scheduled.

Course Description:  In this graduate course, we will examine the ways writing has been taught about and taught in schools in the United States.  We will read and discuss theory and research in the field of composition, and we will consider the implications of those works for instructional practice. We’ll also examine current examples of published practical work by teachers in this area.  Our own experiences as writers and as classroom practitioners will serve as important entry points for those discussions.  

Evidence of Success

Below you will find the course objectives, assignment and assessment descriptions, and student artifacts

Course Objectives

Objective 1:

Understand one’s own history as a writer and as a student in relation to your current and future practice in the teaching of writing

Objective 2:

Articulate principles of a process approach to writing instruction and a workshop learning environment for writing, grounded in research and theory

Objective 3:

Know and use strategies for supporting student writers as they work through writing processes

Objective 4:

Differentiate writing instruction for students with varying backgrounds and needs

Objective 5:

Access, evaluate, and use professional resources for writing instruction in ways that are consistent with principles grounded in research and theory

Course Activities

 

Major activities of the course include:

  • Writer’s Notebook (to begin Day 1 and continue through the duration of the course; ends in a reflection activity)
  • Unit activities (Units 1-5) including quickwrites, reading/viewing, and discussion
  • Unit End-points (“Quizzes” that you may retake until 100%)
  • Professional Book Club (Unit 6)
  • “Dear Parents” or “Dear Colleagues” Letter
  • Student Stories and Strategies paper
  • Checkout conference with instructor

 

Writer’s Notebook

When blending, one concern I had was how to retain a physical artifact such as a paper notebook when many interactions would now be online.

Keeping a writer’s notebook is an important part of this course. In doing so, they use strategies that children in their K-12 classrooms will also employ. We use the notebook for reflection, in-class quickwrites, responding to readings, videos, and other course texts. We also use notebook writing to model how both teachers and students use writers’ notebooks in a classroom Writer’s Workshop setting.

When working in the online space, students had the option of writing in a physical writer’s notebook and uploading a photo OR simply typing into a text box, as shown in the next two images below.

 

Professional Book Clubs

One key course activity was the Professional Book Club. Students form small groups to engage in up-close shared discussion of a book they choose for themselves. Self-sponsored book clubs like these are a research-supported means of continuing professional development for teachers, one I want the future teachers in my class to have experience with and tools for.

After choosing books, students held three book club meetings, each in a different format. One was a live meeting, but with assigned roles for each group member. Afterward, each student debriefed the experience in an informal written reflection. The second was a Voicethread meeting in which group members responded to the text using an image and commentary (text, voice, or video). The third was a Zoom meeting, which students recorded and then reflected on.  Below, you can see a screen shot of the Book Club assignment overview as well as photos of students engaged in a live book club meeting and an sample of an informal written reflection.

 

 

Students’ first book club meet was a live meeting, followed by this written reflection.

Future Applications

I originally stepped into blending this LLED 501 course with primary goal of making it easier for students to schedule field experiences required in their programs, which occur in the schools surrounding Penn State. A secondary goal was to deepen student engagement with readings and other “outside of class” material, which in this very practice-focused course was sometimes falling to the background of our in-class discussions.

Having now had the benefit of the BlendLT experience and the expertise of my instructional designer, Stephanie Edel-Malizia, I am now thinking about blended format in a much more expansive way. In addition to LLED 501, I also blended a course for experienced teachers focused on improving teaching practice through systematic classroom research. The blended format enabled us to move between shared in-class experiences, daily data gathering in their own K-12 classrooms, collaboration on- and offline, and implementation right back into their teaching settings. These students have choices about where to seek professional development experiences. Blending that course helped me create a course just for them, offering personalized and flexible arrangements that other universities offering courses couldn’t.

 

I loved the mix of online work and the on-campus meetings. I thought that the organization of the class, materials and assignments were all thoughtful and purposeful- and helped us all engage in meaningful conversation.

--Blended course student