Alive

“It felt alive in here today!”

“I agree. It did.”

These were the whispered comments I exchanged with a Karen, fifth grade teacher, today at the tail end of writing workshop. I have been pushing in to work with this class during an argument writing unit. At the end of yesterday’s session, Karen and I had exchanged masked whispers, making a plan to wrap up the first bend of the unit. This is how coaching conversations happen these days, stolen whispers at the beginning or end of class. We had decided that kids would use a development checklist to make revisions related to the craft in their essays.

When I got to class the next day, I quickly touched base with Karen and decided to pull a group of writers that could use a push. “Let’s meet with them in partnerships, get them working together,” I suggested.

I called Leo and Frank down to the one corner of the room free of desks and plexiglass. We began by looking at the checklist and started talking about the power of precise words. “I was just working on that,” Leo said. “I added a Gordan Korman quote.” He went on to read a quote that went something like, remember who you serve. “And schools serve kids. So, they have to keep kids safe. So that’s why chocolate milk shouldn’t be allowed in schools.”

“That is one way to make a point, ” I replied, impressed with Leo’s use of a quote from his fiction reading in his argument essay.

I then offered another example, of looking for words that could be more precise, like good or bad. I gave the students a quick tip about using the thesaurus and just like that, they were sharing their documents and working together to find words to make their arguments stronger. We left them to work and then Karen and I split and each pulled separate groups.

Before, moving on, I looked up and noticed the student who was sitting at the desk closest to our group, gazing down at us. “Sorry. Did we distract you from your writing?” I asked.

“No. I was just mesmerized by that tool (the thesaurus) that you were showing them,” he replied. I left him with a post-it with thesaurus.com written for him to explore as well. I love when kids eavesdrop on a small group.

After my second group, I noticed a group of four students kind of hanging out by the back of the room. They were “done.”

“Quick, grab your essays,” I said. “I want to teach you something.”

Before I knew it, those students were paired up and chatting excitedly about ways to beef up their essays.

Between Karen and I, we had met with almost all the kids in the class.

There was an excited hum. I stood up and watched tiny, socially distanced, clusters of fifth graders chatting about words, offering suggestions, and writing sentences in the air, trying to get them just right.

Karen and I met in the center of the classroom.

“It felt alive in here today!”

“I agree. It did.”