Today, I’m working with a fourth grade teacher on how students can give effective feedback to each other about a passage of descriptive writing. 

We’re trying a “sandwich” approach: a positive response, one suggestion for refinement, and another positive comment. 

We’re going to model and also provide some sentence scaffolds.  I’ve written before about how powerful I’ve found the word “because” to be in unpacking student thinking, so we’re trying to fold that into the scaffolds. (Click on the image above for a full-sized slide.

Sometimes, I can prep for my part of a lesson with real ease, and sometimes, I struggle with the words a bit.  This was a time when I struggled a bit.  What ideas do you have for how we could improve this for next time?

Follow-up at 12:00: Raya read this post and created a handout that could be given to students. Click to enlarge!

Is it a full moon? Because today has been One Of Those Days. Let’s just say that I got on the expressway going Westbound … and school is Eastbound.  40 minutes of delay afterwards, I had turned myself around and swum upstream back to where I needed to be.

And then I forgot to pack my laptop cord, and the laptop ran out of juice during the day. Which I discovered now, 30 minutes before my first lecture of my first night class.

And you know what your first lecture presentation of the year looks like, right? Shiny and pretty, with lots of visual interest.  (It’s not until later in the term when you start doing white backgrounds and black text for “readability,” right?)

Then I remembered that I have my files back up automatically each night by Mozy.com.  5 minutes later, I had logged on via a different computer and a download of the backup was speeding its way to my desktop.  Whew. Crisis averted. Prettiness preserved.

I signed up for Mozy.com after my old laptop died when I was en route to ALA in Anaheim.  Luckily, I had backed up the files on an external hard drive the night before, so I didn’t lose anything, but it reminded me of all the times I forgot to do the backup.  Mozy.com does it automatically, perfect for scatterbrained folks like me. And files I can access from anywhere just in case? Ideal.

Psst …. when’s the last time you backed up your files?

It’s the night before my first class teaching School Library Media Management. There is so much to talk about in this course.  But as I was prepping my slides and my thoughts, this is the one that kept pounding in my head:

Nothing profound, nothing that hasn’t been said before, but it reminds me of why we do what we do.  Every policy and procedure, every cataloguing decision, every lost book cost we charge is about being driven by that goal.  It changes how we look at libraries. And that’s why I’m a school librarian.�