Refining Your Teaching
By Maryann Manning

Tracy Cole is always looking to expand her professional development.

I'm sure many of your teaching practices are so much a part of you that you don't remember where you first heard about them. When you hear ideas from other teachers or read about them in professional books or journals, you make a conscious decision to try them in your classroom. Sometimes the ideas are as successful as the person said they would be, while other times you aren't sure if the idea didn't work because your students are different or because you misread the idea.

The ideas of others
I'm fascinated about why we do what others recommend, and what authors and experiences influence our practices. I thought about teachers I respected who had a lot of professional development and had read a lot. Tracy Cole, a sixth-grade teacher from Brookwood Forest Elementary School in Mountain Brook, AL, came to mind. We met when she was a fellow in the Red Mountain Writing Project that I co-direct. Parents of students in her room had told me she was an incredible writing teacher.

I knew she was well-versed in professional development on writing and had studied with Nancie Atwell at the Center of Teaching and Learning and at the Walloon Institute. She had worked with a National Writing Project research study on the use of the six traits rubric and had attended a two-day Great Source Write Traits seminar. She had also spent several days visiting the Manhattan New School and seemed to have read many of the current books on teaching writing. She was my perfect candidate to question about using the ideas of others.

A literate environment
I started my quest to learn what had influenced Tracy's teaching by observing her sixth grade writing workshop. The walls were filled with student writing and charts about writing process. Books were all over the room on bookshelves and in baskets with labels like New Books, Favorite Authors and Favorite Series. Saying that the room shouted "literate environment" is an understatement.

Tracy began the workshop by reading aloud the poem of the day, "My Room" by Joe Powning from Nancie Atwell's Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons (Heinemann, 2005, ISBN: 0-325-00746-2). After a short discussion of the poem, there was a five-minute quickwrite during which Tracy moved around the room conducting quiet individual conferences. After the five minutes, she then read a poem she had written earlier, "My Classroom," a parallel poem that used the poet's patterns. After this reading, the students volunteered to read their poems.

Next, there was a mini-lesson about verbs. Tracy had asked the students the day before to notice the verb tenses in the books they were reading independently. There was a lot of sharing of verbs before we all went to the carpet in the corner.

The 21 sixth graders listened in awe as Tracy read Feathers and Fools by Mem Fox (Harcourt, 1996, ISBN: 0-152-00473-4). Each student had his or her writer's notebook and jotted down ideas as they listened. The discussion began by noting the difference between a fable and other genres and then moved from North Korea to Iran to Iraq and then to the West Bank. Tracy gave each student a copy of an analytical essay she had written about Fox's book. After reading aloud her essay, she asked her students to write one about the book as homework. Wow, what a writing workshop!

Masterful teaching
I waited in her classroom for Tracy to take her students to lunch so I could pick her brain about where her ideas come from for the masterful teaching I had just witnessed. I couldn't wait for her to tell me the source of her ideas and how her professional development had influenced her teaching of writing. She began by saying she had taught for 13 years and each year she had tried new ideas that sometimes worked in her classroom. I asked her to tell me the books that had influenced her most. She felt that Katie Wood Ray's books helped her value the power of demonstration and had led her to Frank Smith. Ralph Fletcher was credited with the writer's notebooks that her students used and Debbie Miller and Stephanie Harvey with the refinement of her discussion techniques. Nancie Atwell was her conferencing guru and Linda Rief had been instrumental in her quickwrite practice. Shelley Harwayne had influenced her to always use real literature for real reasons and the work of Heather Lattimer had inspired her fable study.

Seeing the power
Heinemann's Walloon Institute (www.walloon.com) changed the way Tracy conducted her book clubs in her reading class and encouraged her to reread Frank Smith's books. The Center of Teaching and Learning (http://c-t-l.org) helped her see the power of poetry and the power of using her own writing. It also reminded her to fill her classroom with laughter and enjoy her students' writing.

Each of us has a story about how we've made the ideas of others our own. We learn new things as we read books, interact with colleagues, listen to speakers, engage in professional development and most powerful of all, kidwatch. Each time, we make things our own.

Maryann Manning is on the faculty of the School of Education, the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

April, 2006, Vol.36, No.7