Wow Wednesday: Talk, Read, Talk, Write in Action

 Wow Wednesday: Talk, Read, Talk, Write in Action

*Caption for image- This sheet was made to help teachers at Brenham High School use Talk, Read, Talk, Write with the strategies and tools that have been introduced in professional development previously. 

WICOR Strategies were from AVID training, Fundamental Five Strategies were from the book Fundamtntal Five, and Talk, Read, Talk, Write (TRTW) framework was from the book by Nancy Motley.

The first week, Talk, Read, Talk, Write was introduced. The second week, WICOR strategies, Fundamental Five strategies, and tech tools were shown in the Talk, Read, Talk, Write strategy. Our goal was to show how it all can come together. The third week, an informal conversation was held to talk about what was tried, what went well, and what maybe did not go well.

The conversations were good, and the strategies and ideas given were amazing. There were several ideas shown, and I am going to try to highlight as many as I can remember. If I forgot something, please let me know. 

In Spanish, Mrs. Featherston used a Pepe and Paula Spanish conversation for her read. While they were reading, they highlighted masculine and femine words.

In Mrs. Morales's Spanish class, Mrs. Morales had her students go throught the TRTW process, and in the end, students had to reply back to the message (in writing). See image below for an example-

In history, Mrs. Ruiz used Costa's Higher Level of Thinking when her students were talking about the prompt- evaluate how conflicting historic and modern border claims causes political unrest.

In science, Mrs. Ross used the Tween Tribune to differentiate the reading text for different reading levels. As well as she used Answer Garden to discuss the vocabulary in the article (see image below). Mrs. Eschete, Mrs. Halfmann, and Mrs. Kidd all contributed about how they are being more intentional in adding reading and writing to their lessons.

Our special education teacher, Mrs. Coston used actively learn to annotate on the article she gave her students to read (see image below). While another sped teacher, Mrs. Gest used her science class to TRTW. She showed the students how to use the question to formulate the sentence stem for the writing part.

Our CTE teachers, used a variety of strategies, too. Mr. Kenjura uses Kami to have students mark the text they are reading. While Mr. Gonzales uses journaling to get his students to write in his CTE classes. Mrs. Antkowiak discussed how she had her students read and write in her co-op class; they even told her we write and read so much in your class. Mrs. Gurka added that it is important for her students to know how to read, so even reading the directions on her Google Classroom is an important part of TRTW. Our CTE teachers talked about the importance of writing and reading with their students because the students' future jobs will depend on it (workers' comp, how to quit a job politely, how to fill out applications, and more). Also, Mr. Dupont added how he used a word problem that the students had to read in order to figure out how to solve the crime scene.

Our math teachers, talked about the different strategies they tried. Mrs. Markos discussed how her statistics class had to solve a problem, and then they had to critque other groups' problems (if they solved correctly or not). Mr. Rollins explained how he had the students discuss in groups and as a class about credit. Mrs. Gallway explained how the students would talk about the vocabulary or notes, and then she would use Classroom Screen to randomly call on a student to share what they discussed.

In Choir, our teachers, Mrs. Seymour and Ms. Bernhard used writing stems to get their students writing, too. Check out their board-

Last but not least, English had all sorts of ways to incorporate these strategies. Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Aubhil discussed how their students are talking about their essay writing with them individually. Also, Mrs. Prihoda was saying how easily this strategy (TRTW) comes to English teachers (they are naturally in the habit of doing it). For Mrs. Cloud, she used a article from Achieve 3000 for her students to read and pick out particular feeling words. In Mrs. Schulze and Mrs. Williams's classes, they used Jamboard for their talking part (see image below). Their whole TRTW led up to their big essay (all the parts of TRTW helped the students have ideas to write about in their essay).