Narrative Writing

I never got the chance to write about Christensen’s work with Narrative writing and honestly, kind of missed out on that. Since this was the first chapter of Christensen that we actually read together, I felt like it was a really powerful chapter to start us off on. Whenever I have heard anything about meeting standards or anything like that, I have never thought of teachers using narrative writing as a means to reach those standards, and I don’t think Christensen had that in mind as she was teaching her students, I think it was more about making sure her students learned empathy and that their writing was meaningful. They had an audience in their classroom and learned that their writing could make others relate to them and feel like their world was not so isolated. The idea of actually getting students to share such personal moments in their writing is definitely something I want to explore in my classroom. Although, some of Christensen’s idea did give me a bit of anxiety, especially the read-around.

When I had originally read this chapter, I was very scared about the concept of the read-around. To me, I felt like that would be like cruel and unusual punishment for some students. In fact, I have one friend in particular who I knew would have left the classroom right as her turn came up just to avoid the idea of reading her personal writing aloud to her classmates when it could just have gone to her teacher and she could call it a day. But Christensen writes, “I discovered that students care more about their writing when it becomes public. The read-around offers and immediate audience and a way to expose students to different writing styles” (65). Now, I don’t know if I particularly agree with her claim that students care more about their writing when there’s a specific audience. I think a student who loves writing and is passionate about it is going to write to the best of their ability. I do think that there’s probably students who don’t try as hard until they know that they will be put under scrutiny by their peers as they share out. I know that I would be shaking in my boots as I knew that we would be slowly going around to the room to me if I were a student in that classroom. So, I think if I were to have my own classroom, I’d encourage read-arounds in a much smaller setting like we do in class with our writing histories and things like that. I feel like with a much more intimate environment, students would be more likely to share especially if they could pick the people in their groups. I think a read-around encourages students to write better, but again, I’d be very nervous about doing it in a group setting. I wouldn’t want students who are more isolated to feel like if they share their true writing then they might get bullied or something like that.