Co-Authoring Classroom Texts

William Burns

ENG 333

Co-Authoring Classroom Texts: Shifting Participant Roles in Writing Activity

I liked this reading by Larson Maier because Maryrita’s approach to teaching is awesome in a way that she evolved these students involvement to create a new learning experience.  She made her class so that it was a community of kids wanting to learn. Instead of the teacher forcing her students to read certain books or write what they learned down, these students were excited about reading and wanted to do the best they could. “ She constructed a context in which she and her students were authors together, struggling over questions and problems authors struggle over.” I personally love reading and I would of enjoyed this classroom very much. Even if someone didn’t have a previous enjoyment of reading I think they would thrive in this setting and come out of it a better reader and writer.

I enjoyed this article because it was very interesting to learn about Maryrita’s teaching style and Larson was very in depth with the research and you could tell a lot of time went into this. As a future teacher I would love to implement these types of teaching strategies with my students. As far as I could tell Maryrita’s schedule was somewhat the same as most first grade teachers but she implemented reading into different aspects of her teaching. It’s always a great thing when you can see the spark light up in a child when they actually want to go out and learn something without the teacher telling them so.  It is very smart to make the child their own author because they can then have a personal connection with what they are writing and want to do the best they can. Dewey stated that kids learn more with hands on activities and this is exactly what Maryrita is doing with her classroom.