ESL ELA and Honors 9

The ESL ELA class has been working on an essay called, "This I Believe," they spent weeks finding their purpose, finding their voice and finding the courage to let their story explode from the place where it came from…their hearts.  Their stories were published, they shared them with each other, I noticed that when they shared their stories, walls came down, relationships were continuing to build and confidence was growing. The next day they walked into my class and I had on our daily schedule:  Everyone has a story to tell, today is your day to tell it. I told them to follow me, that today their voices would be heard, so we marched on down to Jessica Cleland's Honors 9 ELA class. Jessica and her class welcomed my 8th and 9th graders into their classroom. My class huddled in the corner of her class, literally they stood in a united huddle in the front corner of her classroom. I explained to Jessica's class that the ESL class has been working on their believe essays and that today they wanted to share their stories with them. The ESL students stepped up one by one (not all the students shared, to be honest only my 8th graders were comfortable sharing), they stepped up and they read their stories in the front of the class. A brief overview of the topics of these stories: hardships, devastation, hope, change…. After each story was read, the Honors 9 students offered a praise and a question to relate with each student's story. Let me say that again…they praised their writing. They questioned their writing. This day the ESL ELA and the Honors 9ers taught me the lesson, that there is value in sharing our stories and that sometimes students need to be heard and sometimes they just need to listen, to each other. I used to think…collect the essay, conference with the student, pass back the essay. Now I think differently. The whole experience of this assignment was a reflective piece, from thinking, to writing to sharing. After our moment in the Honors 9 class, we came back to our class and the students wrote a reflection on their experience. I didn't set any expectations, I just told them to write a reflection on the experience. The key here was for me to tell them to reflect on the experience, not the writing. They took it in any direction that they wanted and it was insightful. The students were then asked to write one strong word that captured their experience and display it on our wall.