Raise or Raze?

I like that this document is national.

Habits of mind – both practical, and intellectual. Putting learning in the students’ hands, teaching students to reach beyond. Open-ended thinking. Meta-skills. I might call these something else.

When the document goes through each one of these separately, I learned a lot of good ways to word things for my own philosophy and curriculum plan. My favorite four are: curiosity, engagement, responsibility, and metacognition. I think some of these could be combined…

These “how tos” of what I feel about learning are extremely useful. They are all designed to support success.

Fostering the habits of mind through the three focus areas: reading, writing, and critical analysis also imply that these things are interconnected – something I really support. Adding rhetorical knowledge and analyzing texts, awareness of audience, purpose, and context are also key for me. How to teach good writing is something that I don’t think I could ever have too much of. It is central to a student being successful in school and also in their future workplaces. I want to provide opportunities to write in different genres to help them on their way. I want to also make sure that I get some of their writing assignments focused on real authentic situations. This will help with the rhetorical section as well.

I’ve been learning so much about rhetorical situations, and knowledge. I’m particularly drawn to this section probably because it is central to writing and teaching students the components of rhetoric is key. I like the breakdown of “how to” as well: the concepts, the analysis, and the audience/purpose/context. I think it is really important to teach students to focus on purposes for writin. Being able to respond to the needs of different audiences and responding to different kinds of rhetorical situations is also important. Students should be aware of tone, voice, style, and also how formal or informal their writing should be.

Critical thinking – explaining the how/why to students is important. It can be connected to assigned readings, and essay assignments. It can also control the way classroom time is spent: group work, pair work, whole class discussions….so many ways to incorporate critical writing and reading. Again, I love the “how to” section here. Students really need to be taught to read and write for inquiry. I’m getting a greater understanding of this from reading the Bartholomae book. This can also be transferred to their actual writing assignments as well – they are also a way to teach inquiry and critical thinking. Students can turn their assignments into exigence – and they can identify the higher-order thinking skills that they are asked to use for the writing: analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing…the sources that they use. Also, how to quote, cite, use direct and indirect speech…it all flows form this. Language is power J

The section that explains writing process. I like the aspects of the process breakdown (invention, research, drafting, sharing….revising…editing). and it goes even further to explain each piece. I also want to make sure that I am keeping in mind that there is new theory and research out there that describe a post-process way of writing. I may also want to incorporate these somehow. After reading an article on first-drafters/multi-drafters, I am curious about how many students actually do write drafts as assigned. I want to make sure that I keep on top of this. Even if a students is a one-drafter, they can learn so much by writing drafts and engaging in the entire process of writing. I want to make sure that we focus on invention and expressivism early on and I want to make sure that I act more like a “feedbacker” and not a “grader” for the early drafts. Students will learn all of the strategies for the process.

The section on conventions surprised me. I don’t know why I just assumed (wrongly obviously) that this wouldn’t need to be a big focus for any college writing course, remedial or not. But I see here that it is just as necessary to keep the students on their way to college success. This section seems to go beyond simply thinking about an individual students’ conventions but more globally. I rather like this – teaching students what features are: content, tone, style, organization, and evidence. These are all things that I have always had in a grading rubric, but I like this focus. Learning the accepted and most used text formats is important. They can see them, I wlll model them and they can develop an awareness of different writing genres.

Stressing that students should be able to compose in multiple environments reminds me very much of a chapter I saw in another book on writing media….so important for the 21^st

Intro. I like how this section leans on teaching students that they deserve a quality education. Researched-based. I like that. Leads one to trust it as sound, accepted, worthy of being used.

The fact that this document is a collaborative effort is appealing. I’d be more willing to implement it myself.