Emily McGann

EDPR 432- Unit Analysis Part 5

April 28, 2011

Impact on Student Learning

I have positively impacted student learning by motivating students to

increase the detail they put in their writing, the descriptive words they use,

and the emotions they reveal in their writing. As ten-year olds, these Fourth

Grade students were not familiar with adding depth to their writing. With

their pre-puberty age and limited life experience, tapping into their emotions

and feelings about life events was a struggle. One of the strong points of

their age, in regards to writing a Memoir, is how self-centered they are. They

are very focused on themselves at this point and are just working on looking

at issues from alternate perspectives. When the students had to write stories

about themselves and the events that affected the way they act or view the

world, being ego-centric was an advantage for them. I used their strengths

and tailored my lessons to building up their areas of need to make a positive

impact on student learning.

The work samples I have selected demonstrate my impact on student

learning. My work samples from Student A, sample a-1 and a-2, demonstrate

the growth that student made on the details they included in their writing.

The work samples for Student B, sample b-1 and b-2, show how that student
used more specific descriptors in their writing of their memoir. Student C,

evidence of their work is in sample c-1 and c-2, made a lot of growth on the

emotions that they shared and the way they described their feelings from

the first draft that they wrote to the final copy of their paper. While every

student did not develop in the same areas, I saw growth in each student’s

writing during this writing unit.

Student A, sample a-1 and a-2, demonstrated their growth in detailed

writing by the increase in length and coverage of the setting and sequences

of actions in the story. The student included basic events, who, what, when,

how, and what they learned in their five sentence paper. They knew that

memoirs needed to focus on one key event or things that influenced them.

They struggled to develop details in their writing. After working with the

student, through multiple conferences, I was able to help her add greater

depth to her writing. Readers can now understand the feelings she felt,

noises she heard, specific movements she made, and much more from her

improved story about her adventure at the beach. From these work samples,

sample a-1 and a-2, I learned that students sometimes overlook the little

details. They see the big picture and try to just give the main ideas of what

they think teachers want to hear or what readers want to know. Students at

this age are self-centered and have a hard time imagining what details they

need to include to help their story make sense. They tend to think everyone

has the same experiences as them and would know exactly what they are

talking about. This will improve my future teaching because I will realize that
I cannot be self-centered and must take into consideration the limited life

experiences that my students have. I will try to do more direct and specific

prompting when asking questions to them, so they know exactly what I want.

Student B, sample b-1, b-2, and b-3, demonstrated their growth in

descriptive words by increasing the depth of their explanation and the words

they used to explain the situations. Student B gave details, but they were

very ordinary, plain, and abrupt. He described his character climbing up a

hole, down a hole, up to find his yard, back down a hole to find a snake, and

then found a banana. The descriptive words are very limited on that writing

piece, a piece written before the memoir unit started. Sample b-2 is an

writing piece from their brainstorming period when they were learning what

a memoir was and discovering what they wanted to write about. His first

draft of his memoir includes a higher level of descriptions about the event

(what he likes, what the sand dollars look like, the size of the wave, length of

time surfing, etc.). His writing is improved even more with the next draft,

after a few conferences with me, as he gave specific measurements and

characteristics (“..like 2 centimeters,” “blue jellyfish,” “hairy man,” “pointy

fins”), told why he was at the beach and how he went belly boarding (“it was

summer vacation,” “got in ready position,” “took a deep breath,”), and used

better describing words for “fall” (“about to slip,” “crashed into the water”).

From these work samples, sample b-1, b-2, and b-3, I learned that students

will use more creative describing words in their verbal language, but take the

easy way out and use plain descriptions when they write. I will try to get
students to use more creative descriptive words in their writing in the future.

This will improve my future teaching because I learned that students

sometimes do overlook their writing. They can explain to you every detail of

an event and use higher level descriptors in conversation, but struggle to

convey those same images through the words of their writing. I will work to

get students to use more creative descriptive words.

Student C, sample c-1 and c-2, demonstrated their growth in writing

and describing their emotions through this writing unit. Before starting the

memoir unit, this student struggled with using the proper conventions of

writing. As seen in sample c-1, the student struggled with punctuation and

capitalization. He frequently created run-on sentences. The significant

growth in his writing is evident in his final draft of his memoir. The student

capitalized words, used correct punctuation, used quotation marks

appropriately, and convey his emotions explicitly and implicitly. He was one

of the students that demonstrated the most growth in this unit. From these

work samples, sample c-1 and c-2, I learned that sometimes students write

to just get their ideas on paper (ignoring proper conventions) and other

times students believe they are writing everything correctly to convey their

story. Students do not frequently reread what they wrote, so as teachers, we

need to encourage and model this frequently so they can get in the habit of

doing this. This student was able to correct many of their own mistakes just

by rereading what they wrote. Teachers must be mindful of the fact that

students will sometimes overlook their own writing too, and add in words in
their heads that they did not actually write on the paper. This will improve

my future teaching because I will model the “self-correction” process and

admit my own mistakes when I make them. Students like to model their

teachers. I want to show them that everyone makes mistakes.

The work sample set that I collected has demonstrated my positive

impact on student learning. I impacted the details students use in writing

and the way they convey emotion. From teaching the writing unit on

memoirs and from reflecting on the progress my students made, I have

learned how to improve my future teaching. This experience has impacted

my learning as a teacher along with the learning of my students.