Hi Karen,

I also loved that you conference with students about their writing. I'm always looking for ways to give more one-on-one feedback in my classroom.  As much written feedback as I give, I still find the time I go over an assessment orally with a student to be much more valuable (instead of me trying to guess what a student meant to do). I've tried doing conferencing during class (while students work on an assignment), but it is still always difficult to try to fit in every student.  Let me know if you have any procedures that help you do this effectively.  Do you have students sign-up online to meet you at lunch? 

Tompkins vs. Schleppegrell

After reading Tompkins and Schleppegrell this week I'm a little intimidated about completing our assignment this week. I found Tompkins theory of spelling development fascinating. Reading about each stage, I felt like I could remember my siblings or little cousins in those stages. For example, Tompkins says in the semiphonetic spelling stage children often use only one, two, or three letters to represent an entire word. My brother used to call me "Ca Ca" because he could only pronounce the "ca" sound in Jessica. (Pretty unfortunate nickname, I know)!    

Although each of the stages made perfect sense to me, I had a hard time understanding how the student samples were categorized into each stage.  Reading the student sample from the phonetic stage was particularly challenging. I had to read the discussion to translate some of the words (e.g. spaekler=sprinkler, caecnan=chicken).

Finally, I thought it was interesting that the hypothesis that native Spanish speakers would have more trouble with vowel distinction was found to be false, and that little difference in spelling was seen L1 and ELL students in School One. Despite the unclear findings, I found the theory of spelling development more useful to me than Schleppegrell's grammar for writing. I think because I teach math, I do see spelling errors in students' justifications of computations; however, I never examine reports with long narratives, explanations, or persuasions.

 Error vs. Mistake

After reading this discussion, I'm fairly certain I have been using these words incorrectly. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I use those word interchangeably and never really thought about the distinction. Again, I'm going to relate this to mathematics because that is the work that I'm grading on a daily basis. There are two types of errors/mistakes I see students make:

1. Inaccurate basic arithmetic – Students add, subtract, multiply, or divide incorrectly. I teach AP Calculus so these are clearly skills students know how to do, but they just messed it up while solving a long, complex problem.
2. Invalid mathematics operations – Students perform an operation that is mathematically inaccurate. A step in the problem is not equivalent to the previous one. Student demonstrates they do not have an understanding of that mathematical operation.

Making a #1 error/mistake does not dramatically impact a students' grade. Making #2 type error/mistakes are worth a significant amount of points on a test. So if we are saying (in language) that an error is when a student does not know they do something wrong and need guidance from the instructor, then type #2 is an error. Therefore, type #1 should be classified as a mistake. Do I have that correct?

Thanks!

Are we supposed to also upload Assignment #9 to this discussion post?  If so, see attached for my submission.