Ch. 8 QtCs

Teaching writing may be one of the hardest but most useful things I will have to address in the classroom. Unfortunately, I will not have the privilege of guiding individual students through the entire process of improving their writing; rather, I will have a group of students for only one year to either introduce or refine their writing skills.  Thus, I do not want to take lightly the importance of using my time in a classroom down the road efficiently.

I have always enjoyed writing, down to young elementary school when I was writing books and printing them off for my entire family to see. Throughout high school—my first experience with a teacher grading my work other than my mother—I always received exemplary grades on papers, a trend which has typically continued and perhaps led to my English major. I can’t help but wonder…what led me to this point? Perhaps I had some natural ability, but I also believe the way I was taught writing benefited me greatly, if not completely formed the way I write. The actual program was called Institute for Excellence in Writing, and its main goals were to initially—think Elementary years—instill ideas about structure and drill rules about how to formulate sentences, paragraphs and essays, until as an older student one would use these practices naturally.  One day, I would like to require some of these ideas in my own students. For example, I will require a checklist to be turned in with each paper, indicating exactly what I am looking for. There will be items dealing with technicalities such as “MLA format used,” or “Do not use first person such as ‘I’.” There will also be items dealing with stylistics, such as “Use at least two vocabulary words we have studied in class,” or “Thesis sentence is arguable and at the end of your introductory paragraph.” This checklist will give a structure and focus for my students to begin thinking about the way they are writing—which, essentially, is thinking on a page.

I hope to encourage and foster metacognitive and problem-solving skills in the way I compel my students to analyze their own writing. The organizational pre-writing process is extremely vital to the creation of a paper, especially for students who feel as if they have never mastered the writing process in the first place. To improve this, I hope to create a classroom culture in which taking notes, making annotations or summaries, and highlighting important information within the books or other works of literature we read will be necessary for success.

The final step I will use in teaching effective writing skills to my students will be to organize small-groups of peer reviewing.  This will require convergent thinking, as several minds will be put together to try to come up with the best possible way a paper could be organized or bettered. However, it will also involve divergent thinking, as one paper—seen through the eyes of multiple students—could potentially take on several different forms. In the same way, this activity will involve both algorithmic and heuristic problem-solving strategies, the students can use the checklist and other resources to go through a sequence of steps to eliminate errors, but will also be asked to improve the quality of the content of the paper—a task which may or may not fully be achieved.