Narrative Essays With Dialogue Text

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length: 1864 words 5.3 double spaced pages rating: blue price: $26.95 airport appearances a shrieking whistle breaks the dark silence of the room. Why do the nights go so much quicker than the days? , i ask myself as i roll back over in a futile attempt to relish the extra seven minutes i've been granted by the neon globe on my night stand. There are a few things i can see without my glasses in the dim light of the morning, and this is one of them: seven extra minutes are not going to compensate for last night's fun. After stumbling down the stairs and into the shower, i regain consciousness and hurry to get ready. In a mad dash i race from the house to my car in a desperate attempt to miss the sub zero temperatures outside. Impatiently i wait for my car to grind to a start and shiver against the ice cube on which i am sitting.

That sounds like a great idea! i'll just tuck it back in the case here and it will be right here waiting for you when you get back. Thank you very much you have been so helpful, she says almost condescendingly and as she walks out the door promises that, i'll be back!  i turn around to resume my lean against the counter and find a customer waiting to make his purchase.

narrative dialogue

a conversation between teacher and researchers by deborah muscella and katherine paget with evelyn gibbel walking into a primary classroom you enter a hub of activity.

Small groups of children gather around tubs of water, testing nails, paper cups, rubber bands, pennies, and popsicle sticks. Groans emanate from one group as the children watch a paper cup sink rather than float as they had predicted. For two weeks the children have been working with this collection of objects, sorting and classifying them in various ways.

They are now collecting data to find out more about the sink or float 1 properties of their thing collections. Where is the teacher amidst this friendly chaos? she is walking around the room observing children working. She observes children in another group counting to 10 each time they place an object in the water. They tell her their rule: anything that is still floating when we count to 10 is a floater even if it sinks when we get to 11. As the teacher walks to the next group, she makes a note on the clipboard she carries.

This group uses a more haphazard approach, tossing objects in the water taking some out after a few seconds while leaving others in several minutes. Periodically, she scans the room, checking to see if any group needs help or redirection. Suddenly she notices that children in one group have spilled water onto the floor. As researchers, we have observed similar classroom scenes countless times and have become intrigued by how teachers carry out the complex task of gathering information about children's thinking in the midst of all this activity.

    how do teachers keep track of their students' developing thinking? when and how do they reflect on what they have observed? how do they incorporate their reflections into their teaching practice?
reflecting on this classroom scene, we recalled john dewey's 1933 notions of reflective thinking, which he saw as an iterative process from which partial conclusions emerge during the course of reflection. These are temporary stopping places, landings of past thought that are also stations of departure for subsequent thought. Dewey also believed that all reflective thinking is a process of detecting relations.

Good thinking is not contented with finding 'any old kind' of relation but searches until a relation is found that accurately defines a condition p. The notion that we make many stops along the way as our thinking develops seems particularly apt when we consider teaching as a reflective practice: reflecting on our practice allows us to search for relationships for meaning about teaching and learning. To learn more about reflective practice, we began a two year research collaboration with nine teachers in the infusing statistics into elementary mathematics teaching project.

Through narrative dialogues clandinin amp connelly, 1988 russell amp munby, 1989 , we explored how written conversations between researchers and teacher could inform the knowledge of both research and practice. Each teacher wrote his or her reflections about an investigation to which the researchers responded with comments and questions. This article highlights the collaboration with evelyn gibbel, a primary school teacher of grades 1 to 3 in santa rosa, california. Through the written dialogue that ensued between evelyn and us, we developed new understandings about how reflective practice can provide deeper insights into the complexities and nuances of the teaching and learning process. Evelyn became much more aware of the multiple connections that exist among her pedagogy, the children's responses, the classroom context, and the social, emotional, and conceptual development of her students.

themes emerging in the narrative dialogue

during the two year narrative dialogue, evelyn reflected on her students' understanding of collecting data through the tasks of sorting and classifying, using investigations in the _used numbers_ curriculum unit, sorting: groups and graphs.

developing a working hypothesis

evelyn and her students had been investigating ideas about sorting and classifying. During one of their first investigations she noticed the students making precise distinctions in their classifications, leading her to conjecture that they had a highly developed sense of sorting and classifying concepts. Yet, through narrative dialogue evelyn realized that she had misread her students in these initial conversations they understood less than she had assumed. Here is a selection from one of the early class conversations in which she conjectures that the students have a stable understanding of classification concepts. One particular category was 'stripes.' some children had cables or ribs knit into their solid color clothing.

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Teacher: if we were going to pick stripes again for a rule, how could we state the rule so that we know whether a different weave in the fabric counts as a stripe or not? rachel: you could say, people who are wearing different color stripes. Mike: or, people who have got stripes on whether they are colors or different patterns that look like stripes. Evelyn wrote in her narrative that this conversation led her to hypothesize that the students saw many of the complexities and nuances surrounding the tasks of sorting and classifying.

Her work with the students in the next investigations supported this working hypothesis. Not until the students carried out their own data projects did evelyn notice the students' concepts of sorting and classifying were not as stable as she had first imagined. To them the counting error possibility was so strong, they didn't give much credence to interpretation. Through her narrative, evelyn revised her working hypothesis: using counting as a strategy for collecting their data superseded the students' concepts of sorting and classifying data.

From reading her narrative, we proposed possible reasons that might account for the students' inconsistency in classification. For example, we wondered if the contrast from the early investigations, in which all students worked together, to small group work, in which they worked on their own classification projects, may have led to the students' inability to recognize the validity of another group's perspective. Once students in a group defined a category and collected their data, they may have seen no other classification scheme as possible. Hence, alternative classification schemes were implausible to them and a counting error may have been the only sensible explanation. Realizing these differences led evelyn to consider carefully the structure of the next sorting and classifying investigation, which she described in the next narrative she wrote.

creating cognitive dissonance

as evelyn reflected on her choices and plans for designing classroom materials and activities, she looked for ways to challenge her students' thinking about sorting and classifying. She devoted much time and thought to the objects she included in the thing collection, which the students would sort and classify and then use to conduct a sink or float investigation.

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