Professional Development Reflection

The professional development I attended this semester was the RI Writing Project here at RIC.  It was a fun, interesting, and constructive day that reflected the many themes that I am studying this semester.  The keynote speaker and the seminars I attended directly related literacy to content, which is now required by Common Core Standards, and provided unique ideas that I will be able to use in my classroom.

The keynote speaker, Thomas Newkirk, spoke about purposeful and meaningful writing and reading and how they need to be personal, fun, and engaging in order for anyone to commit to them.  He used an example of how stories before literature were initially in spoken form, and engaging to listen to because they told an interesting tale with meaning or reason.  Newkirk claimed that in the vast world of literature and academia, this fundamental characteristic of discourse has been lost and that many types of literature have become dull or uninteresting to read.  He added that textbooks are too large, hard to read, and there is no story involved, which makes them difficult to get excited about.  Therefore, he argued that the literature that students read needs to figuratively “form an itch that needs to be scratched” with further investigative reading.  This concept provides engaging interest that fuels self-guided learning, which is what we need to present to our students.

I also attended a seminar that involved improving literacy through different strategies that allowed the attendees to be personally reflective through a manifesto creation workshop.  The technique used forced everyone to recall the reasons we decided to become teachers and brainstorm through other questions, and then combine the thoughts into a manifesto.  It was a worthwhile exercise that I will most likely use in one form or another in my future classroom.

The RI Writing Project was a successful and beneficial event.  It was fun and interesting, which was exactly the main point of the entire conference.  It took the concept of recreating the instruction of reading and writing into a fun and exciting process, and did so by example.