How does one motivate a student to write? What I took away from Chapter 10 in Best Practices is that students will be motivated to write if the writing is meaningful and interesting to them, but that’s not quite all. There must also be a real reason to write whether it’s to solve a problem, to think through a theory or idea or to communicate with the public through a published piece of writing (even if that publication is only read within the class or school.)
In addition, students must feel competent or they will not want to write. This reminds me of how many people feel about math. Maybe it’s because I tend to be in classes with English majors, but I’m very used to hearing people say, “I hate Math. I’m terrible at it.” It’s a way to shut down and protect yourself from struggling and failing at something. But many people do the same thing with writing. It’s important to make sure students understand that everyone struggles with writing—even the greatest writers.
But this also means making them aware that writing is hard work but that nothing worthwhile in life comes easily. (That right there may be the single most important thing any of us can teach our students, I think.) On page 219 the writers remind us that, “When learning to view writing as a meaningful activity, students should also be helped to recognize and face its complexity.”
There was a wonderful example of this in Grammar to Enhance and Enrich Writing by Constance Weaver, which I read for my grammar class last fall in which a beautiful piece of student writing was used to start the chapter. It was about the student’s grandmother passing away. (Damned if I can find it in the book right now.) Later in the chapter, the original draft was shown. It was riddled with grammatical mistakes and punctuation issues. It was the barest bones of what it was to become through revision. I think it would be helpful to show “before and after” writing from previous students who are willing to share their work so that students can see that no one produces a beautiful piece of writing without many revisions.
I was intrigued by the notion of collaborative writing, because I don’t have much experience with that. But it builds on another element, which is the social aspect of writing and the fact that writing isn’t only about expressing emotion, which I think is sometimes the only form that writing takes in school. You spill your guts about something you’re very passionate about. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there are so many other ways that writing can be done, such as “playing with writing,” which is discussed on page 212.
This leads to something that seems to be becoming a theme. Writing needs to happen in every subject area. It must be integrated into everything that students learn. In Chapter 12 Dolores Perin discusses writing to learn as an essential element in adolescent writing. This really made me think about how stunted a person’s entire academic life can be if they aren’t able to translate their thoughts and ideas into written form. If they can’t summarize or ask and answer their own questions, than how can students form theories and test them in science or grasp complicated mathematical ideas? I wrote in the margin of page 257 under Recommendation 11: Writing to Learn, “Again integration. Science teacher should be reporting to English teacher about kids’ progress.” It seems essential to me that teachers in the middle and high school level communicate with each other about kids’ progress, not just to monitor their reading and writing proficiency but many other factors as well, not the least of which is emotional well-being. But I’m getting a bit off topic there. Perin says it best, “Not only should content-area teachers teach writing skills, but language arts and literacy specialists should teach writing using tasks, vocabulary, and reading material drawn directly from discipline courses.” Again, this is a whole school challenge. The question is, what can teachers do when they don’t have the support of the whole school? Or better yet, how do they fight to change the culture of the school from the inside and get more teachers working together?
The final realization that Chapter 12 brought to bear for me is that every student is an individual and different approaches must be tried for different students. Hence the eleven recommendations—and probably many more—must be in your bag of tricks at all times.
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