RIWP Conference Reflection I added many tools to my teaching toolbox at the RIWP conference yesterday. I’m convinced my attendance gave me facts about teaching that will sustain me as I continue my studies in class, my work as a preservice teacher, and beyond into my own classroom. As I expected, Tom Newkirk raised my awareness on a number of levels. The thought that stuck to me from his mention of Common Core was to do some high level thinking about them, just like we ask our students to do with the text we expose them to. He challenged me to think about the words, the phrases and sentence structure. He asked us to consider words like aliignment and compliance as they relate to the Common Core. I suppose I will not hesitate to be ready and willing to adhere to them, after all I will have a boss! What I will do, though, is reflect on my teaching practice in an effort to use them to my students’ benefits. He convinced me that it is not important to make students read more complex text, but rather to have them relate the text to their own lives through narrative writing. The introduction to this keynote speaker was very telling. He took the works of a frazzled doctoral student and sent her on her way with renewed vigor with two simple statements: “Here’s what I learned” and “So here are my questions” -after he read her work. That tells me he believes he can learn from everyone, he is not the conveyor belt of information to his students. I appreciate his words of encouragement about seeing narrative as the basis for all writing. I was a “reluctant writer” (an expression I heard yesterday) and I will meet them in my students, so using narrative to build a love for writing is something that worked on me and will work with my students. The two workshops I attended were about the Summer Institute and the use of Shakespeare in middle school curriculum. The institute is clearly for teachers who are already practicing and who wish to step back and rejuvenate their work through summer study in new areas. I appreciated that middle school teachers were running it and it was not lost on me that that subculture can drain a teacher-one of the participants was just two years into his practice! But then I met up with him again in the Shakespeare workshop and I realized why he did the summer study-he is simply charged by his work and opens himself up to new avenues of study. He was nearly breathless, trying to share with us all that he does with the bard and his sixth graders. He has found infinite entry points for this complex, yet incredibly appealing text. Another tool that I added came from seeing the work that the RIC archives librarian did (and does) and how I can tap into this when I do units which include living history. Using this activity may be especially effective if i teach in a setting where students’ families are from other cultures where the role of narrative in the home is larger than written communication.