Write to Learn Reflection

Write to learn activities seek to enhance students' understanding, interest, and comprehension of the current material.  The "write to learn" activity that I presented was unsent letters.  Below is the handout used in my write to learn demonstration.  It gives information about the benefits of using unsent letters in general, as well as instructions as it applied to my specific content area activity.

The most difficult part of preparing this activity was finding a poem that worked well.  As a teacher implementing this strategy, it would be obvious which texts would work well and which would not; i.e., texts with no characters may not be the ideal, while ones with lots of characters and conflict would be much easier for students to write a response to.  Luckily, I was able to find a Shakespearean poem that had two distinct characters: the author (the lover), and the recipient (the loved); and that was also short enough for them to more or less read in five minutes.

I believe the activity went well because they all seemed to enjoy the fact that they could write a letter as one of the characters.  The somewhat scandalous content also helped gather interest from the class.  I feel that there would be a similar response in my actual classroom of high school English students, and I think that they would be excited to get to express their point of view in a more casual way.

I also believe that the class grasped the benefits of the unsent letter, since they experienced the interest and more deep comprehension of the text that the my content area students would.  I hope that my explanation of the activity, the facilitation of it, and the instructions I provided on the handout allowed them to understand how to do this activity, and how to use and modify it for their own classroom.

If I had to do this again, hopefully I would have more time.  In a lesson, this activity would be done after plenty of group discussion and classroom time exploring and analyzing the text, but that was not done here.  The purpose of this activity is to allow the student a fuller understanding of the emotions of characters in the text, and to explore the nuances of conflict through a personal lens - but this cannot be done without having a decent amount of time to let it marinade.  Also, I would have liked to provide the students with an example that I wrote to help them connect with me and to inspire them.  With more time, I would have either had them share with a partner, with the class, or turn them in for me to read.  These letters provide a great opportunity for students to express their opinions, thus allowing teachers to get to know them better.