- Hi, it's Penny Kittle,
and I'd like to take you on a tour
of the online resources that are connected
to the book, 180 Days, that I wrote with Kelly Gallagher.
Online, you'll find excerpts from four days of teaching
that Kelly and I had filmed during the making of this book.
Two days were filmed in my classroom
at Kennett High School in New Hampshire
and two days were filmed in Kelly's classroom
at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, California.
The videos are divided in three ways.
First by chapters, so you can open chapter one, read it,
and then go back to the three videos
that align with the thinking that's in that chapter.
The importance of modeling authentic topics in our writing.
I remember Dawn Graves saying to me,
if you don't write with your students,
how do the know what writing is for?
- [Woman Voiceover] The importance of aligning students
with authors and genres they love.
- So kid at the beginning of the year,
when you say, who do you like to read
and he says, I don't know,
can actually answer that question in May.
- [Woman] And then if you go into chapter two,
you find lots of work around the big ideas
that happen in chapter three.
Each chapter has between three to ten videos
that accompany the big ideas in the book
and you'll see us in collaboration as teachers
as well as what our students are doing in the classroom.
In the section entitled, Conversation Videos,
we have video clips of Kelly and I discussing our planning,
discussing how to be responsive teachers.
Where we talk about the engagement of our readers
with independent reading with Cortex and with book clubs.
The engagement of our writers
and reflecting on different aspects of the book over time.
- I just felt it was more important
to try and get some words going on the page,
sit with kids and help them
and then tomorrow I'm gonna circle back and start with that.
- That's such a tricky thing, isn't it?
What I find fascinating about the work that's here
is the organization of it around just what we think
will help you move forward as you think about this work.
There is a clip under Writing Engagement
where Kelly and I talk about how we help our students
take ownership of their writer's notebooks.
- One of the things I'm really, really struggling with
is the idea of trying to get some of my kids
to see the notebook as theirs,
not as another school thing to do.
- [Woman] In another section, we talk about the model
of struggle in our own writing.
- I think there's a real value there
in revealing that wrestling match
and having those discussions.
- And probably the most important for us
were the times that we reflected on what was working,
why it was working, how it was working,
and then all of the places that we were still struggling.
So you forced them to think harder,
and when you force kids to think harder it isn't as smooth.
What we wanna capture in these videos
is the real life work that teachers do.