At this very moment I am watching Howl’s Moving Castle in my living room and trying to figure out how to start this response to our readings for this week. The main character in the movie—and book—is Sophie, a young girl who is cast aside by others and doesn’t recognize her own worth. In the course of the film she learns to find her strength and cast off the curse that has plagued her. This is one of my favorite movies and I love that the moral of the story corresponds, perhaps in a roundabout way, to what so much of our reading this week focused on—the need for teachers to foster in students the ability to value their own insights and skills as writers.
As teachers, it is our duty to ensure that students can find importance in their own writing. I noticed that there were many similarities in the readings this week and, thus, I decided to make a list of the most valuable insights that arose from the texts. These steps can help teachers create a writing pedagogy that meets the needs of students everywhere and will foster within them an appreciation for writing.
Teachers should be sure to…
1. Create a safe environment that encourages experimentation, risk, personality, and reflection in conjunction with the writing process.
2. Help students to discover for themselves that writing is an individual process and that there are many different types and forms of writing. This will help them learn to take risks and take pride in their writing. This may often include the need for them to understand that writing is not something that a teacher tells you to do, but “something real” (Dornan et. al. 172). Risk is something that writers need to get through and teachers can help them accomplish this by providing a safe and comfortable environment for experimentation and sharing.
3. Help students to appreciate and value their thoughts and insights in order to help them find their personal voice. This can be done by providing students with opportunities to explore their personal voices in a variety of writing genres and prompts. “When we nurture and praise voice in our students’ writing we imply that writing is much more than the basic ability to communicate in various social forms effectively; it is a way of expressing who we are” (Lane 164). This was something that my teachers never emphasized in their classrooms. I think this is important in helping students develop their writing style by helping them transmit their personality into their writing.
4. Help students identify the correct tone and level of formality that is expected with different genres of writing by exploring audience and purpose. This can be done by providing them with plenty of exposure to other authors and genres.
5. Provide time in class for revision. This can be in the form of conferences with teachers and/or peers and should be focused around providing questions that help students extrapolate/clarify the content of their writing. (Don’t worry, grammar, mechanics, and punctuation will come later!) Conferences should be about building the student-teacher relationship and not telling students how they should write; “the teacher should not look at the text for the student, not even with the student. The teacher looks at—and listens to—the student watching the text evolve” (Murray 28). Teachers should “encourage students to pursue ideas, feelings, or merely a sense of things which they may not yet have thought out or been able to express, but which may emerge into language between” student and teacher (32).
6. Encourage students to make decisions for themselves; providing helpful questions or insight into their own interests can be a way in engaging students with writing. In doing this, students can find value in putting their ideas down on paper—to organize their thoughts and help them expand upon questions that might arise; making sense out of seemingly arbitrary assignments.
7. Identify the difference between revision—editing content—and proofreading/copyediting—editing for grammar, mechanics, and punctuation.
8. Remember that “errors” in student writing should be assessed based on the student’s dialect and the tone/genre of the piece of writing in question.
9. Present grammar, mechanics, and punctuation in the classroom in a way that puts responsibility more in the hands of the students themselves in conjunction with the teacher and other students. Mini-lessons and self/peer revision can be the best way to help students learn to take responsibility for their own revising needs and writing in general.
10. Model, model, and model! An important rule writing teachers need to remember is that “students need to be immersed in a writing and reading environment in which language study has a direct application to their own composing, where the usage skills they are taught are immediately applied to the papers they are writing, and where the grammatical structures they study help them become responsive readers and flexible writers” (Dornan et. al. 82).
If these steps are met, teachers can turn the tide of poor writing that plagues American schools. I myself will keep this list handy and be sure to utilize it the best that I can in the classroom. Some of these things I have observed or experienced myself, but there are aspects of them that are new and exciting to me as a future educator. I can only wish that my former teachers had taught me to value my own writing style and voice, put grammar instruction into my own hands (for the record, sentence diagramming doesn’t count), and found ways to successfully utilize both teacher and peer conferences in the classroom. Nevertheless, here’s to the future of writing instruction!
Link:
http://www.songsforteaching.com/grammarspelling.htm
Okay, this is kind of a silly link, but I know that I remember the words to songs, or vocalized little ditties a lot more than I remember grammar rules. If your class is getting stuck on a grammar, spelling, or punctuation rule, this might be a good way to bring it all together in a rhythmic manner!
On a more serious note...
http://www.eslgold.com/
This link would be a great tool for both ESL teachers and students. The site provides materials that can be used by the teacher in helping ESL students master their speaking, listening, reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary as well as providing ideas for teaching appropriate speech in the business realm. Some of the provided material looks more helpful than others, but it might still be a good starting point or back-up plan in our future endeavors.
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