Correcting students’ writing Name Fenia Halari, Vicky Katsika, Maria Stavrou, Maria Keppa, Naya Kokkinou Which of the four face-to-face institute or Elluminate session topics did you select to report on and why? We selected the face-to-face institute of Literature on 13th of December. We were interested in an alternative way of correcting students’ compositions because it was one of our biggest issues. (what we should correct, how we should correct students’ writing and how we can help students improve their work) With whom did you pilot this new practice and at what grade level did you undertake your pilot? All 2nd grade teachers piloted this practice with second grade students. Then we decided to talk about what we had done in our class, compare our work and exchange ideas on further practices. 1

Connections with Colleagues Describe in a few brief phrases what connections you made with colleagues in experimenting with this new practice. We talked about the difficulties that our students encountered and the challenges that we had to face. We found out that the most difficult thing for most of our students was that they couldn’t express themselves and write many things/relevant on the theme we had given them. A challenge that we all had to face was the correction of spelling mistakes. We express our ideas on how compositions should be corrected. Some of our suggestions were the following. Setting common goals on dictation: We chose certain words that we wanted our students to know (meaning/spelling) and we presented them in the beginning. Making a plan for the compositions: We talked with the students about the theme before writing and we created, with them a checklist of the most important things that each composition should include. 2

Successes Name two or three 'successes' you experienced with this pilot. What changes did you notice? Some of the successes we experienced with this pilot were: Students for the first time re-read their writing without being bored and didn’t complain about it. Students completed their checklist with honesty and responsibility. Surprisingly, they were sometimes more strict with themselves than we would be with them. Students used their checklist while re-writing their composition. They added things that were missing and/or corrected their mistakes on their own. Students gave some warm and cool feedback on their writing and we gave them ours. It was really amazing how strict they were! Some of the changes we noticed with this pilot were: Students became more confident when asked to write about a theme. Students have stopped complaining about writing. Moreover they ask for more! Students don’t feel disappointed even though they have some mistakes. The checklist helped students with learning difficulties to organize their thoughts. 3

Challenges Name two or three challenges you experienced with the pilot. What got in the way of your success? Some of the challenges we experienced with this pilot were: Lack of time Number of students in the classroom Although we had rescheduled our program, the time wasn’t enough. Sometimes we needed more than two hours to talk with each student (24 students per classroom with one language-teacher) about what he/she had written and how he/she could make it better. 4

Next Steps Name two or three next steps with this material. What will you try next? How will you build on your experiences with the institute? Our next step with this material will be to give more initiative to the students. We will give the opportunity to students to choose their own themes and expand on them. We are thinking about building our experiences with the institute by trying some other things, next year. Some of the themes we are thinking about are: -The use of realia in Mathematics and focus more on the “WHY” question when we teach. This will be the most challenging experience for us because we will have to change a lot our teaching methods. -The literature circles is also something we are really insterested in, but we will have to plan it very well before we use it in our classrooms. It will be very helpful for us to give different roles to each student and discover their skills. -The involvement of parents. Although we have already invited parents to see students’ work it was really difficult for us to engage them in our activities. So next time, when they come to our classrooms, we will try to assign different roles and give them more specific tasks to complete. 5