American Creed Screening- Writing into the day


 

At the invitation of Molly Robbins, a Denver Writing Project (DWP) teacher at Aurora’s Cherokee Trail High School, Remi and I will help facilitate today DWP’s screening of American Creed, a documentary which will be released nationally by PBS on February 27. We’ll share about the Marginal Syllabus after the film, but our first order of business will be to lead the “writing into the day,” a routine practice at National Writing Project professional learning.

Using hypothes.is, I highlighted three short excerpts from Danielle Allen’s “Night Teaching,” a chapter from her book, Our Declaration.

Above is a screenshot of three notes I made.

By remixing lines from Allen’s chapter into sentence frames for teachers to use as starting points for their own writing, I will ask them to write about their classroom experiences, or to reflect on the purpose of democracy…or both. (Or neither, if they want to write about what they had for breakfast instead.)

After the film, when we convene a breakout discussion group about the movie, we’ll invite attendees to add their informal writing into the margins. This small experiment with a “nerdy book group” convening is another example of the way this project tinkers with replicable professional learning practices in the context of equity conversations.

Here’s the first note in context.

Here’s the second note in context.

Here’s the third note in context. 

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