Sunday, February 24, 2013
Teaching Grammar
Many great ways to teach grammar in the high school classroom from ReadWriteThink.
http://www.readwritethink.org/search/?grade=17&resource_type=6&learning_objective=11
Lynn Sams expresses the importance of teaching grammar and writing together rather than treating grammar as a separate entity. Grammar should be taught by teaching students the relationship between structure and meaning in their writing.
http://www.jstor.org.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/stable/10.2307/822261
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The Importance of Feedback
The biggest problem in writing
instruction that I have witnessed and read about is lack of timely, clear, and
useful feedback provided by teachers to their students when returning work. In
my own writing instruction, I have experienced teachers who wait several months
after a major paper to return it, and at that point the feedback is sometimes
missing entirely or incredibly vague. I
have also observed several teachers who know the importance of offering helpful
and timely feedback, but explain that it takes too long or that they never know
when it is a good time to return papers without having the time to discuss the
grades. As a future writing instructor, I know how valuable feedback is and
hope to provide my students with close to immediate feedback which addresses
major patterns in their writing so as to not be overwhelming.
Atwell believes that it is important
for students to be able to anticipate the patterns of response during conferencing
so that they can learn how to incorporate her responses into their writing
while they are in the act of writing. Atwell (1998) claims that “after-the-fact
response from a teacher comes too late; it assumes students will not only hold
a teacher’s advice in their heads until the next writing occasion and apply it
to a new context, but that they actually read the teacher’s written comments”
(p. 120). With the knowledge that feedback is most useful during the writing
process, I plan to incorporate many one-on-one conferences with my students and
also give them time to peer conference with each other.
However, with this added time for peer conferencing, I must be sure to teach my students how to offer each other effective feedback. Many teachers I have observed simply place their students into groups and tell them to read each others' papers and give comments. Students primarily focus on things like grammar and sentence structure without commenting on ideas and organizational structure which would be more helpful for the writer. VanDeWaghe (2004) explains that students need "direct instruction in ways of responding, as opposed to just expecting effective responses" (p. 97). Therefore, before implementing peer conferencing, I will demonstrate the ways in which students can respond to each other by modeling how to give helpful feedback and how to properly conduct a peer conference.
Winn and Johnson (2011) explain that
“feedback should be clear and concise” (p. 81). They explain that instead of simply
writing ‘good’ next to a sentence, a teacher should explain why; “This is a
good sentence because you chose some very colorful and concrete words to
describe your dream” (p. 81). In this way, the feedback is actually useful to
the student and because it is so specific, it will allow them to understand
more deeply what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in their writing and they will be less
likely to repeat mistakes. By making sure that feedback is clear and useful,
teachers can also ultimately save time by not needing to explain grades or
ambiguous feedback to their students. I will also not make the mistake of covering a paper with red pen and overwhelming my students with extensive amounts of unfocused feedback that will be more likely to end up in a trash can. I want my students to recognize the patterns of their errors and learn to incorporate feedback in their writing.
References
Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle. (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
VanDeWaghe, R. (2004). Research matters: "awesome, dude" responding helpfully to peer writing. English Journal, 94(1), 95-99.
VanDeWaghe, R. (2004). Research matters: "awesome, dude" responding helpfully to peer writing. English Journal, 94(1), 95-99.
Winn, M., & Johnson, L. (2011). Writing instruction in the culturally relevant classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Additional Resources
http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson261/peer.pdf
This is a great guide from Read/Write/Think for peer editing. This emphasizes the importance of useful feedback while also explaining how the writer and the responder should conduct themselves during the conference.
http://busyteacherscafe.com/literacy/writing_workshop.html
This website offers many helpful hints to guide a teacher through the entire Writer's Workshop process. It also offers many links to other resources like mentor texts, answers to questions about conferencing, strategies for planning mini-lessons, etc.
http://www.virtualsalt.com/comments.htm
This website is specifically about writing comments on students' papers. It offers suggestions on how to comment as well as things that a teacher should avoid writing. Helpful for first year teachers who do not have a lot of experience commenting on writing.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
How to Teach Students to Argue
One
of my favorite writing classes in undergrad was during my freshman year and focused
primarily on writing arguments. Our textbook, Writing Arguments by Ramage, Bean, & Johnson, was a great
reference for me throughout the rest of my college career. Perhaps the reason
that I loved the class so much was because of how much time we spent learning
how to craft incredibly effective arguments while developing our own. I loved
learning about the different strategies to present my argument because I feel
as if this was something I never learned in high school.
That semester I needed to write a twenty
page research paper which would argue anything of my choosing. At first I was
overwhelmed by the prospect of writing twenty pages about anything, let alone
imagining and researching any topic. After a lot of prodding by my teacher to
write about something I cared about, I finally settled on a topic: basketball. It
didn’t take long for me to come up with the idea that I would write about the
positive benefits that participating in basketball had on youth. Because I was so
interested in the topic, the research I had to do for this project was actually
fun for me. It didn’t hurt that I was also able to quote His Airness, Michael
Jordan, as a role model in my research paper; “I can accept failure, everyone
fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.” I also focused on the
positive health and physical benefits as well as the social aspects of the
sport. I found evidence stating that basketball was responsible for most of the
injuries in high school athletics as a counter argument, but still argued that
the benefits outweighed the negative aspects. With such an intense interest in the
topic, the twenty pages became a limitation rather than a goal to meet.
Researching and writing this
argument paper about basketball made me realize that when I was truly
interested in what I was writing, I enjoyed it a lot more and put more effort
into it. Hillocks (2011) states that, when coming up with problems for students
to write arguments about, “the best problems for younger students are those in
which they have some stake and therefore are more likely to take an interest in
collecting and studying the data” (p. 69). Although my argument about the
positive benefits of participating in basketball programs was not addressing
the needs to change policy, it clearly demonstrated how much more invested I
was in my writing because it was about a topic which interested me. When I
think about teaching argument writing in my own classroom, I hope that I can
provide my students with engaging examples and activities that will help them
to hone their skills in order to clearly support their claims with relevant
evidence, as Hillocks suggests.
One way to approach teaching
argument writing in classrooms is through the use of mystery stories, or “whodunits.”
Hillocks claims that by using these mystery stories he “can encourage students
to begin with the evidence and use it to determine what claims they can
legitimately make in an argument” (p. 15). This way of teaching is not only fun
and engaging for the students, but also teaches them the importance of using
evidence to support their claims. By finding the evidence first, it ensures
that students will not make unsupportable claims. Using “whodunit” mysteries by
showing students an image filled with possible evidence and giving them a backstory
also makes finding evidence into more of a game instead of another assignment. I
see this as an extremely valuable way for me to teach my students how to think
through the different steps of making an argument. One of the final steps is to
consider the audience after having gathered the evidence and making the claims.
This consideration of audience is another important key that students must
understand when they are writing arguments because they must know to whom they
are appealing.
Writing
arguments in a digital format, then, even further encourages students to
recognize their audience as well as take advantage of multimodal opportunities
to strengthen their arguments. When discussing the affordances of online
role-play as a way to encourage students to argue from different perspectives,
Beach claims that “online role-play hones the practices of argumentation that extend
beyond the classroom or static debate forums to discussing issues at the dinner
table or in coffee shops, the blogosphere, or social networks (p. 466). Writing
arguments online forces students to consider their direct audience as well as
others who may be able to see their comments. This will help students to
develop their ability to effectively argue their points while considering how
to best appeal to their audience. Arguing online also allows students to use
images and videos to strengthen their claims. Because I see the value of
teaching my students these skills, I will gladly implement this type of online
role-play argument in my classroom. I want my students to be able to
intelligently discuss and argue about current affairs and policies that affect
them. With communication moving to a more digital platform, it will be
important for my students to be able to express their ideas clearly in digital
space.
References
Beach,
R., & Doerr-Stevens, C. (2009). Learning argument practices through online
role-play: Toward a rhetoric of significance and transformation. Journal of
adolescent and adult literacy, 52(6), 460-468.
Hillocks,
G. (2011). Teaching argument writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Bean,
J., Ramage, J., & Johnson, J. (2004). Writing arguments: A rhetoric with
readings. (6th ed.). New York: Pearson Education.
Other Resources
Purdue Owl demonstrates how to use logic effectively when writing an argument. This could be useful for more advanced argument writing and could be a helpful resource for students when developing their arguments.
This is the companion website for the above mentioned Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings. This website offers many helpful tools for developing an argument.
http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/key-points-in-english-language-arts
This website briefly outlines the key points of the common core state standards which include the ability to write logical arguments.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Should I Teach the Five Paragraph Essay?
Many
people have argued for and against the five paragraph essay and always support their
claims with seemingly valid reasons. Tracy Novick, a high school English
teacher, argued that if the five paragraph essay were “taught with creativity
and variety, it gives students a useful tool with which to face business
meetings, testimonies before public officials, and letters to the editor” (p.
12). On the contrary, Kimberly Wesley argued that “Teachers of the five
paragraph theme, like the representatives of patriarchal society, have become complacent
in their acceptance of a tool that purports to nurture but, in fact, stunts the
growth of human minds” (p. 57). While some believe that the five paragraph essay
offers a solid form for students to use when they are learning to support
arguments with evidence, others believe that it creates strict boundaries which
can stunt the students’ creativity.
With
the realization that I, in all of my schooling, have never learned the five
paragraph essay in such a strict way, I must think about how I will teach my
own students how to write an essay. I agree with Tracy Novick that it is a
useful tool for students to learn because of what it teaches them. The five
paragraph essay teaches students to organize their thoughts and to support
their claims with evidence. These are valuable things that all students will
need to know in order to succeed both in high school and beyond. Can these
things only be taught by teaching the five paragraph essay? No.
Because
the positive aspects of the five paragraph essay can be taught in different
ways and even in different modalities outside of letters and words on paper, I
don’t see the five paragraph essay as an essential part of my classroom when I
am a teacher. I never learned it while I was growing up and I aced many writing
intensive classes throughout my high school and college career. Furthermore,
with the many new digital and multimodal avenues that students will be expected
to know, it is important to think of writing instruction beyond the transmittal
of ideas from pen to paper.
No
longer can we teach our students to replicate the form of a five paragraph
essay to best demonstrate their knowledge of writing, instead we must teach
them to consider how to best represent their message based on several considerations.
Andrews and Smith recommend a new model for writing development which considers
“the rhetorical context, framing, multimodal choice, composition and
development” (p. 131). In this way, a writer must contemplate who the audience
will be and which multimodal form will best represent his or her idea or
message. With the advent of new ways to transmit information in a digital age,
it is important for students to be prepared to tackle these new forms of
communication. They will still need to know how to support their arguments with
evidence, but they will also need to know which of the many different multimodal
options available will be the most effective way to communicate to their
intended audience.
References
Andrews,
R., & Smith, A. (2011). Developing writers: Teaching and learning in the
digital age.
New York, NY: Open University Press.
Novick, T. A. (2001). Praise for the five paragraph essay. The English Journal, 90(3), 12.
Additional Resources
A brief overview of the five paragraph essay. This site also includes many different examples of types of essays.
An explanation of multimodal composition along with some reasons for why teachers are incorporating it into their writing instruction.
A few ideas with descriptions for multimodal assignments that have been used in a high school in Massachusetts.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Writing Instruction and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Andrews and Smith (2011) discuss
many problems with current writing instruction in the beginning of their book, Developing Writers: Teaching and Learning in
the Digital Age. Perhaps one of the most important problems that they
pointed out is the issue that writing instruction is completely preoccupied
with form instead of content, especially when considering the popularity of the
five paragraph essay. Andrews and Smith state that “an over-emphasis on form
and structure tends to drain energy from the writing process which involves
motivation to write, engagement with the audience, the formation of ideas or
elements to be included, and then a
concentration on form” (p. 17). If students are so concerned with the form of
the piece of writing that they are undertaking because that appears to be the
focus of the instruction, then they sacrifice the focus on the audience or the
formation of their ideas. Additionally, when writing is seen as a skill to be
mastered rather than a means to communicate, students lose motivation and have
difficulty finding a purpose for their writing. This is a problem because
without motivation to write or the ability to focus on anything other than the
form of their writing, students do not learn how to develop or succeed as
writers.
As a teacher, I hope that I can help
my students to become flourishing writers by taking the emphasis off of the
perfect form and instead placing it on the development and communication of
ideas. I hope that, instead of constantly asking my students to perfect their
five paragraph essay skills, I can actually elicit some intrinsic motivation to
write by creating meaningful writing assignments about issues to which they can
relate. Andrews and Smith also alleged that “writing that is connected to real
world experience is going to enthuse and engage students more than sterile
writing exercises” (p. 18). By creating writing assignments for my students
that will help them to connect with their communities and with the world around
them, I hope to teach them the importance of effective writing as a mode of
communication which will help them to share their ideas and contribute to their
communities. Making writing relevant to my students’ lives is one way that I
hope to incorporate culturally relative pedagogy into my classroom.
Winn and Johnson (2011) explain that
“when culturally relevant pedagogy is included as an integral part of literacy
instruction, the identities of marginalized youth are recognized and affirmed,
and academic achievement is expected and possible” (p. 13). If my students are
exposed to culturally relevant material, they will be more engaged in the
classroom and more engaged with their assignments with which they can identify.
By acknowledging the different cultures and backgrounds of my students through
the material that I present to them as well as through the writing assignments
I ask them to produce, I hope to create an atmosphere in my classroom that
welcomes students’ perspectives, ideas, and background knowledge. Above all, I
hope to provoke in my students the idea that they all have the ability to
succeed and I hope to give them the tools to do so.
References
Winn,
M., & Johnson, L. (2011). Writing instruction in the culturally relevant
classroom.
Urbana, IL: National Council of
Teachers of English.
Andrews,
R., & Smith, A. (2011). Developing writers: Teaching and learning in the
digital age.
New York, NY: Open University Press.
Additional Resources
This page features a definition of culturally relevant pedagogy as well as information about what it looks like in practice.
This is a fantastic place to see how to apply many different strategies in order to become a more culturally responsive teacher.
Minnesota's 2012 Teacher of the Year, Jackie Roehl explains why culturally relevant teaching is critical to closing the achievement gap.
Some ideas for making the classroom a culturally relevant place for students and their families.
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