Week 4: responding to fieldnotes

Hello everyone,

Just a quick note about partners and fieldnotes. You are doing such a great job with tracing your workshop sessions, which I know is not easy when you’re also trying to be a productive participant. Seriously great work with these notes. As you give feedback to each other, I’m hoping you can start noticing more what is similar or different between the two sessions: how the workshop gets started or how it ends (are their differences or similarities between the mentor approaches?); how Zoom is used; what the mentor decides to spend the most time with; how many students talk. Are there structures that seem more useful than others for supporting writers? How might you keep track of that for your future teaching designs?

I might also look this week at the writing the students in your workshop are producing by going into their Currents community. Link here or on the front of Dr. Sparks course page if that doesn’t work. You can see your workshop number and mentor name in the categories on the left. This will help you to see the student writing from the workshop you are interning in. You’ll gain more insights into how the students are taking up the writing tasks, which you could also include in your fieldnotes.

Here is the link to Dr. Sparks week 4 plan too in case it’s useful for getting situated for your workshop this week.

Thank you for all the work you continue to do in these *gestures wildly* “unprecedented times.”

Appreciate you all.

Kim