Gallagher provided great foundational and practical strategies for helping students take their writing to the next level. In many ways, I feel like I was already familiar with these strategies on the surface, but seeing them written beside actual models and examples really drove the ideas home, and I'm not even a visual learner.
I have always been a firm believer that the only way to become a better writer is to actually put words on the page, but after reading in Ch. 2 about just how often other contents completely neglect writing, I feel an even larger responsibility to have my students piling up pages in their writing portfolios. I'm sure it depends on the school and the teachers, but I am curious about how open teachers from other content areas would be to collaborating and allowing students to convey their level of knowledge through writing, especially since writing is one of the core skills which they will unequivocally use after their schooling careers are long over.
I also really liked that Gallagher emphasized writing alongside students and "demystifying the writing process." The instinct to simply provide a model definitely exists, especially when unpacking the process step by step is so tedious and time consuming. Regardless, Gallagher's argument to directly model and specify each step of the writing process, as well as identifying and modeling each component for whichever medium we are covering, actually prevents a lot of the mistakes before students even have a chance to make them, which saves a ton of time in the long run, not to mention the confidence and self-efficacy that it provides students.
My questions about how just how structured or "formulaic" our writing instruction should be was directly addressed in the Kenney article. I really enjoyed how English teachers at her school developed their own acronym, which the school adopted, as a way to teach students how to write effectively for standardized tests. Still, the fact that teachers are even having to teach this kind of writing is frustrating and discouraging, and the time required to teach students this formulaic writing method which they will never use in any other facet of their lives, steals time that could be used to empower them as writers and encourage them to write about things that are actually relevant and engaging. As long as these tests exists, even the pliability of standards won't be enough to allow teachers to fully empower their students as creative and critical writers.
Dustin,
ReplyDeleteI am too struggling to grapple the complications that come with teaching writing. Depending on the experiences of the future students that face us, it could just as easily be a challenge to get them to put a few words on the page than to write lengthy pieces. However, I am determined to get students writing as much as possible despite what other content teachers might be doing. Instead of figuratively catching other teachers red-handed with the lack of writing happening in their classrooms, I’m wondering if there’s a way to invite the participation of other educators as opposed to pissing them off or embarrassing them. I don’t think that that was what Gallagher intended, however, as we read, these teachers had real responses to his approach to teaching writing across contents.
Moving forward, I’m looking to gathering a bunch of different handouts and strategies in order to get students writing often, but in a variety of ways. Just because we want students to write, that doesn’t mean that it always has to be the kind that involves responding to a journal prompt. As Gallagher explains, just because we teach English, that doesn’t mean that we are solely responsible for teaching literary skills to students.