Raise or Raze?

(disclaimer: some of this is full sentences, and some of it is just thoughts/notes)

1. What makes good student writing?

Believing that students are capable and able to produce good writing

Fostering habits of mind

Writing is dialogic (Salvatori, Bartholomae, etc). Facilitating the writing process for the students and encouraging them to see that they will be doing a lot of reading, writing, and discussing of the readings and writings that they do in class. It also involves a dialogue between the different components of the rhetorical context, not to mention between their ideas, the texts, the methods that they engage to write, and even the author of the work they read. For ideas, they can think about how different texts (readings, assignments they’ve responded to) have to say about a given topic. It will give me a chance to develop thoughtful critical inquiry regarding the topic at hand.

We will be doing a lot of reading and discussing how writing scholarship engages the writers’ ideas and write to join in the ongoing conversation. By working with themes, it is easier for the students to engage in the dialogic writing – they can engage with different perspectives on the same topic and then see how they fit into this conversation. When a theme is built into a course, it gives a great way to compare different methods of writing and gives students a way to dialogue about them: purpose of genre, audience, strategies they can identify in a text about style and other things.

Working with the WPA framework as a guide

It is also important to understand that good writing is a response to either a reading, or perhaps a discussion. It is not an isolated “event” but integrative. Our knowledge is socially constructed and this understanding needs to be communicated and taught to our students. Understanding the components of rhetorical context goes along with this: good writing involves an audience, a purpose, a context, and constraints.

Giving students clear prompts. Giving students many scaffolds to work with their drafts.

Thoughtful and engaging pre-writing activities.

Engaging topics.

Being organized and keeping the students on task can also help them to be better writers.

A lot of low-stakes preparation: notes, readings, discussions. Also making sure that the students were engaging in all of these

Ideas are so important when writing. I think it is really important that students get to spend a good deal of time on the invention stage of the writing process

Good writing contains both subject and object. Students will be putting their own ideas and thoughts into their writing and be trying to transform their readers’ views in their writing. Here their tone, voice, style, and ideas will shine through. Yet writing also takes on the object form and here the student will need to be aware of the standard conventions and genres that we participate in when writing replete with guidelines, ways of arrangement, and accepted practices. They will be evaluated objectively Students, to be good writers, will need to engage both: as an individual and unique writer with unique ideas yet also a writer who fits into an organized and established discourse community.

Writing drafts, and building in milestones into the writing process so that students are accountable and keep on task. Bring to class. Workshop them. Get feedback from peers in various ways. Then involve teacher input later in the drafting process. Good writing cannot be accomplished in just one “final” draft. It takes time, re-thinking, re-reading, re-writing because writing is discursive and not linear.

Modeling. And other metacognitive awareness and techniques. Brainstorm as a class strategies and techniques that work for writing. Things that don’t work.

To write effectively, our words need to make sense; we need to make sure that we have a strong command of grammar. It involves making decisions and choices about words, sentences, paragraphs, whole essays or other writings. What is the purpose of the writing assignment? This plays into what type of language the student will use to respond: academic? Informal? Yet at the same time, grammar needs to be taught in context and not via a textbook. This requires more work on the part of the teacher, but being able to help students later in the writing process to identify grammatical issues that they need to address will help the students to be good writers. The same is true of the writing’s organizational structure, too. Of course, modeling will be provided, and it is important for students to see what good writing looks like and to keep it in mind when they are writing their own essays.

Creating a way to assess (and provide feedback) the essay(s) to show the students that you have confidence in their abilities to write. Rather than damning comments, provide supportive comments and constructive criticisms that students can then use in future drafts.

Understanding, knowing who the students are and what their backgrounds are. To be an effective teacher, it is important to understand that my students come from so many different backgrounds, styles, experiences – and it is impossible to have them all turn in a formulaic essay that I then impart to them and have them regurgitate.

 

How does my course design and writing prompt foster this kind of writing?

I tried to accomplish many of these points in my unit. I selected a topic that was engaging, and made sure to work through the writing process. I am aware that writing is a response to reading and so I am making sure that the students are reading interesting and engaging things. I also believe that the students are smart and fully capable of rising to any academic challenge and so I am challenging them to work through some really meaty texts.

 

2. What is a good definition of the writing process?

A good writing process definition has to include metacognitive strategies and awareness. Helping the students become more aware and helping them take on the task of responsibility for what they read and write is important. This can be done by using some of the habits of mind and then bringing them back to how they can help them when writing.

How I teach the students to begin and to work through their writing will revolve around the understanding that writing is recursive, and not linear. It is also flexible.

Writing process includes many different steps including pre-writing (and sometimes reading), thinking, re-thinking, invention, getting feedback, and revising in response to the feedback, editing, and even publishing. Students generate ideas and writings (subject) and place those ideas and writings in context paying attention to different rules and guidelines (object).

Good writing is not accomplished in isolation, and students will be working with each other, the text(s), their notes, and myself as they write. For a good writing process to be “good” students will be asked to incorporate feedback into their draft(s).

Self assessment is also a good metacognitive skill to finish off the writing process. Students should think about which writing tasks helped them develop as a writer and which didn’t.

 

Does my course foster this process

I did indeed try to incorporate writing process into my unit and kept in mind how each successive unit will review the writing process again and again…which will give the students several opportunities to practice the process and become more and more skilled at it. I hope that they will learn that writing this way can help them to become better writers.

Critical thinking is key! Looping is so important. I want to make sure that I am progressively adding more complex readings and writings in my course to develop mastery. I think that some way I need to make sure that I am building in constant self reflection and metacognition. It will help them to become critical thinkers and more autonomous, responsible citizens. It can also help them to develop authoritative voices.

 

 

3. How do my themes build intellectually across each course? How does the intellectual work done in each unit build on prior intellectual work and prepare students for subsequent intellectual work? Because I have three different secondary teaching credentials and have worked in the public school system, I see how much of a difference it makes to structure units by having organized throughlines or generative topics. It really helps the students to see how their knowledge can build and build and how everything comes to gether and makes sense for them. I’ve taught whole years where I didn’t have a theme going and it really made a difference in terms of planning, implementing, and also in terms of feeling completely lost and unorganized as a teacher myself. I can only imagine how disorganized the students must have felt if I myself was as lost in the planning.

By having a theme, it allows me to work quickly back up to the higher-level thinking skills (synthesizing, analyzing, critical thinking, problem solving, evaluating) and not stuck down in the lower order skills (remembering, understanding, summarizing, comparing). I think that when a class is not organized around a theme, a teacher might be more likely to get stuck on the lower order skills – because you have to begin fresh, new, each day.

 

4. How do the writing skills build across each course? How do these skills in each unit build on prior units and prepare students for subsequent units?

When the readings are connected, it also gives the students ways to continue with building knowledge which in turn lets them continue building metacognitive awareness on that topic. Continuity really makes a difference. But if there isn’t a theme, or overarching connection between topics, then every single day the teacher will have to begin class by explaining what the topic is, giving all of that new background information, and it takes time! I’d rather then students continue to develop a deeper understanding and knowledge on a topic that threads throughout the course.

I began with writing assignments that were more narrative, more personal for the students. And I tried to work to more complex writing assignments later in the semester.

By working through a sequence of assignments, students will become familiar with the cycles of assignments which will help them in the long run.

 

 

5. How do the reading skills build across each course? How do these skills in each unit build on prior units and prepare students for subsequent units?

The recursive nature of the assignments makes all the difference. Students will be encouraged to review previously-focused on materials (readings and writings) to build fluency.

I want to make sure that I am focusing on dialogic and active reading (Salvatori, Morris, etc). By reading a text, the students are in essence writing a new text (Barthes). They will be reading texts, their own essays, their classmates’ essays, journal articles, notes.

Students will be spending a lot of time doing interpretation and analysis (higher order thinking skills) and I am going to encourage them to read for sustained longer periods. By interpreting, students will learn not to focus on their own conscious ideas about texts but will learn to reach out and learn to value others’ opinions (author, classmates, etc). This is meaning-making and it is going to be central in my class. As Salvatori says, “it’s not ‘remediation’ but ‘mediation’ because they will be learning to turn what they know into knowledge. They will begin to ask and answer questions and understand (metacognitive awareness) that the texts speak to them. In these moments, the students will be turning the silences into something voiced. Rather than sitting silently in class, they will engage in dialogue and participate in the conversations.

Critical reading begins when they learn how to talk about the readings that they have done and can then discuss their reactions, feelings to the readings (transactional approaches to reading). They will also learn how to read rhetorically by learning to focus on the writer’s point of view.

All readings are misreadings.

 

6. How are reading and writing integrated?

Due to the recursive nature of the assignments, students will be constantly focusing on previously read or written about assignments. They will read a lot, and come to class to discuss it; they will write about their readings because the readings will inform the writings, and vice-versa. All of this connects to discussions and sharing as the students learn to empower themselves and to become authorities on the topics we cover. Re-vision is more challenging yet also more rewarding. We have an obligation to help our students to create knowledge.

There is an intertextual nature to the course (writing proceeds from text to text). Students will see that re-vision is a continuous conversation that will tie in previous readings, discussions, short in-class writings and homework assignments into their writing. They will be developing a critical stance to an overall theme as they negotiate meaning together.

Good writers read a lot (and write a lot). By decentering writing, we will engage in a more realistic view of writing as writing will be more exploratory (discover ideas and thoughts on various readings)

 

 

What tensions, trade-offs, compromises have I had to work through in making decisions about the courses?

I really want to make sure that I am always focusing on the higher-order thinking skills, but I admit that I don’t think I know how to do that very well – YET. I also want to make sure that I am focusing on critical inquiry and pedagogy, but I may not always be (new to this).

I also wanted to make sure that I understand where the students are coming from and that they all have something valuable to contribute to the class. They are social beings, and knowledge is socially constructed. Am I making sure to engage in social constructivist theories? What personal themes in society might they all engage in in common?

Empowering them means helping them to work through their own understandings – even of the grammar that they use to write. It is their writing and they need to make sure that they can examine their own writing and identify issues that need addressing. It may be hard – but I want to make sure that I am doing this – stepping back and allowing them to try this on their own, while guiding after that fact vs. identifying them up front for them….learning grammar out of context does not work.