RIWP Conference

            The RIWP Spring 2014 conference was amazing and I wish I could have gone to every single last workshop and absorbed everything! To start, hearing Mr. Newkirk speak on narrative was absolutely inspiring and I had flashbacks to my seminar class and the importance of reflecting on our own experiences and other’s to understand the world. Narrative is really central to everything. Newkirk’s introduction was also inspiring. The fact that he addressed student work by first saying “this is what I learned”, then asking questions is an amazing way to highlight student strengths then get them to dig deeper into their own work. Sometimes personal conversation is the best way for people to develop ideas and I plan on using this idea on my own students.

The first workshop I attended was really awesome. It was poetry speed dating and we got to participate in an activity that we can use in a classroom where students get 10 minutes to write a certain kind of poem before going to another kind for the next 10 minutes, and so on. This is a cool activity that I can see students really getting into. It is low stakes and gets the creative juices flowing. Poems can be silly or serious, there are no real rules other than the type of poems that need to be written. It was great hearing other people share their poems. I can totally see myself using this activity in my future classroom to get students producing and having fun.

The second workshop involved focusing on how important characters are to a story. For this workshop, we did an activity that the person leading the workshop had used in her own junior high classroom. We started out by putting ourselves in the shoes of an uninterested student then saying something that the student would say about doing uninteresting classwork. We then each created our own characters, split into small groups of 3-4 people, and were given a single prop and a setting. We then had to create a situation using our characters, prop, and setting. Next,  we acted out our mini scene. This activity was a lot of fun and I could see it really working in any classroom, especially in an English classroom, using different characters from different books to make them interact in a way they never would. This would show students just how important character traits are to the way a story develops.

Overall, this conference was a great one. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. All the presenters I saw were awesome, I just wish I could have seen more workshops. But, that is one of my character traits, I want to do everything and learn everything.