Making Connections

Hello Everyone!

I want to echo Bob’s welcome to the Transitioning Symposium. We have been talking about this conference for such a long time, and it is so exciting to see it all come together.

For me, as an educator, the hardest part about teaching is trying to find time to have conversations with other teachers. My focus is on my classroom, on trying to find a better way to reach that student who is having trouble with a text. Yet conversations are so important to a teacher’s development that we cannot forget to share ideas, to find out what strategies were taught in the earlier grades, and to build toward those expectations for the assignments in future classes.

This Symposium is about making connections and having conversations. It’s about exploring our own classrooms as well as asking questions across the secondary, community college, and university levels. This discussion is even more important with the incoming Common Core Standards as we explore their application to the secondary classroom and subsequent impact on the post-secondary writing classroom.

Actually, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Common Core Standards for a while, probably since the early drafts that were lacking a substantive writing discussion. The final draft, fortunately, looks very different from the earlier drafts. As a writing teacher, I appreciate those educators who made comments during the revision process and fought for more focus on the teaching of writing.

Now that the CCS is here, I am wondering how classrooms are changing. What are you doing to implement the Common Core into your practice? How will the CCS shift how you teach writing in your classroom? How much attention is your district putting on the CCS?

If you are a post-secondary writing instructor, how do you think your teaching will shift once the CCS-prepped students enter your classroom?

In essence, I’m curious to find out where we all are in this discussion. I invite you to enter into this conversation, and I look forward to seeing you on October 7th and 8th!

Sincerely,

Ellen Shelton