Teaching+of+Writing+Philosophy+of+Teaching+Writing

//**Context:** Another one of our major assignments for the Teaching of Writing was to compose our philosophy of teaching writing. The goal of the philosophy was to help us discover why we feel the way we do about writing in terms of the ideas, concepts, and theories we had discussed over the course of the semester. //

What does it mean to be a writer? Many of us have favorite authors – the ones that we find ourselves in awe and wonder over. We ask ourselves how certain people can just seem to make magic out of words that we can’t put together if we were told it would dictate whether we lived to see another dawning day. But how many of us would consider ourselves writers? Probably not many. In a conversation with my students about what makes a writer a writer, many said that writers could just “write better than anyone” or “had a way with words that not everyone else has.” I asked then what the definition of a writer was, and one of my students tactfully replied, “one who writes.” I asked the entire class why they didn’t consider themselves writers. All I heard was the whir and rattle of the heating unit in my classroom rage back to life. So why is it that many students will not or choose not to classify themselves as writers? Despite the many reasons I could go into about students’ negative ideas and reactions concerning writing, I would like to go into the concepts and strategies that I believe can foster, grow, and nurture writing in students that help them take ownership of their writing, and incidentally, themselves, for any purpose or process.

Most of my memories in life have centered on writing in some way, shape or form, but none of those things deal directly with school; rather, writing has performed a different role – to learn about myself – as a student, writer, person, human. Therefore, I’ve placed an emphasis on this type of writing – to celebrate our human ability to write and take ownership of that – in my classroom. Each day at the beginning of class, my students write on a topic in their daybooks that I recommend or on a topic of their choosing for at least five minutes, sometimes more when we are participating in a free write. During this time, I’m asking my “students to use them [daybooks] to write about their lives, to keep track of their thinking, and to notice all the world around them with open eyes and ears and hearts” (Brannon, et. al, 2008, 3). Students are challenged and encouraged during this time to write about what comes from within that allows them to express the experience of self, something that focuses on themselves as writers rather than what they are writing. Because it’s important for my students to see this modeled, I also write with my students each day. This allows me to build “trust and community in the classroom” (Urbanski, 2006, 27) by allowing my students to see me work and write and sometimes struggle with them along the way.

While writing to simply write is important, it’s also important for students to see their writing as a tool for them to discover knowledge and to learn at the same time. I utilize a daybook approach to all writing in my classroom. While also housing all of my students’ writing at the beginning of the class period, a daybook gives me and my students a way to focus on writing expressively in order to encourage “making sense of their world and communicating that understanding to themselves and others” (Brannon et al, 2008, 13). Writing for this purpose allows students to tap into their inner speech, write those thoughts down, and make connections between those things that present themselves within and outside of the classroom. While reading any text, I encourage my students to take different styles of journal notes or write down lines from a text that catch their attention in some way. When we participate in whole-class or fishbowl style discussion, students take brief notes/ideas about the topics that were discussed. The daybook allows my students and myself to find our voices while also giving our thoughts from many different areas of the class a permanent home where we can reference and reflect on them at later dates.

Because students do multiple types of writing in their daybook – much of which I do not see on a daily basis – I utilize the portfolio process in order to assess student work. Portfolios fall under a social epistemic view of writing, focusing on writers writing not writer’s writing (Hartman 2012). Portfolios allow me to see the “process and development of writers” (Brannon et al, 2008, 97) by allowing students to highlight some of their own learning and growth using their daybooks and some of their other work, specifically some of their “formal” writing assignments. After choosing daybook entries and other writing pieces to show, students are also asked to craft a reflective letter to me where I ask them to make connections and/or show evidence of growth as writers, thinkers, and learners.

When students can learn to harness their inner voices and put ideas and thoughts down on paper and then learn from those thoughts, writing what many students term “the essay” can begin. Any sort of writing assignment in my classroom begins and ends with reflection, then my students witness me modeling what I expect from them in all aspects of the writing process, starting with brainstorming or prewriting. Through modeling every other part of the writing process - drafting, individual conferences, writing groups and revision – students see a writer write, giving them the opportunity to see how each step of the process works for and within each other. During any part of the writing process, students are encouraged to give and receive feedback in order to take advantage of the collaborative and social nature of writing.

Through the utilization of daybooks, modeling, and writing workshops, it is my hope that the students that come into my classroom who do not recognize themselves as writers can see how much they have grown and changed in the course of a semester, sometimes a year. There is nothing more rewarding than hearing students proclaim that they have to start a new daybook or watch them flip back through their work and say, “Hey! Look at how much we’ve done already! It’s only the third week of school!” When students have ownership and entitlement to the words they have written on a page, a magical thing can start to happen – students write what they truly hear going on inside their heads. No longer are they restrained and held back by meaningless assignments or writing prompts. They discover the beauty that lies within writing – whether that writing is a part of being human, writing for writing’s sake, writing to learn, or writing to craft an essay.

References

Brannon, L., Griffin, S., Haag, K., Iannone, T., Urbanski, C., & Woodward, S. (2008). //Thinking out loud on paper: The student daybook as a tool to foster learning.// Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Hartman, S. (2012). //Composition Theory Part II// [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from []

Urbanski, C. (2006). //Using the workshop approach in the high school English classroom.// Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.