Teaching Students to Be Writers

1. Teaching Students to Be Writers Seven suggestions

2. Focus on why we write • Treat students as authors • Teach the Tricks of the Trade • Give driving lessons • Provide lots of models • Praise • Publish

3. 1. Why we write • To demonstrate knowledge, understanding and skills 2. To communicate – inform, persuade, entertain

4. 3. To record (?) information and experience There is only one reason to write, and it is not to serve literary fashion or scholarly fads. It is, as it was in the beginning, to get a grip on our existence. Or to flag it down for a moment as it flies past. If we also win a little harmony from the human bedlam, that is serendipity. Maurice Shadbolt, New Zealand author

5. 4. To understand ourselves & our world better … students need to be taught that the act of writing is intrinsically valuable to them. It crystallizes one’s thoughts in a way that nothing else can. As a physicist, I find that I often learn more from writing papers and proposals than I do from working in the laboratory. I rarely find writing easy, but I always find it rewarding. Louis Bloomfield, Professor of Physics, United States How can I know what I think till I see what I say? E.M. Forster

6. creative pleasure! 5. The same reason we build sandcastles and draw pictures: Ultimately, there is only one reason to write. Because you have a cool idea, and you want to see what it looks like on paper. Michael Duffhttp://www.livejournal.com/users/michaelduff/129882.html

7. I write to communicate, to survive, to make the world more understandable and bearable, so that people may be moved by the things that matter to me, to firmly establish the need for a collective endeavor, to build a world where there is room for love, solidarity, laughter, the pleasure of the senses, the growth of the spirit, and imagination. I write because if I didn't I would die.Isabel Allende

8. Writing: The real outcomes we seek • Students write with passion and commitment about things that matter to them. • Students use writing as a way of coming to grips with their experience and their world. • Students wrestle with language in an attempt to make their writing engage with readers. • Students enjoy experimenting with written language for the sheer joy of the creativity involved.

9. Resources for Writing: The Student’s World Their Social Environment • Immediate family • Extended family • School community • Neighbourhood • Peer group • Teams, clubs etc Their physical environment • Home • Street • Suburb • Parks • Beaches • City • State • Buses • Trains • Shops • Restaurants • Markets • Experiences

10. 2. Treat students as authors engaged in constructing texts, rather than as students completing assignments Observers of Life Critics Opinion Writers Consultant Advisers Story Makers Memoirists Oral Historians Expert Advisers Guidebook Writers Journalists

11. Give them choices - focus on the writing objectives, not the subject matter

12. 3. Teach the Tricks of the Trade • Beyond set and collect: process, process, process • Treat all tasks involving writing as tasks where students are learning, and therefore need to be taught, how to write • Spend a lot of time teaching students how to generate ideas, collect information, mind map and draft

13. Drafting and revision: help them find their own way • One sentence, one paragraph

14. Sentence level tricks of the trade: an example How many ways of expressing these ideas are there? I would like to go out with you. I have a nasty disease. Syntax: Illustrating that there’s always more than one way

15. I would like to go out with you, but I have a nasty disease. • I would like to go out with you. However, I have a nasty disease. • Although I would like to go out with you, I have a nasty disease. • I have a nasty disease, but I would like to go out with you. • Although I have a nasty disease, I would like to go out with you. • I, who have a nasty disease, would like to go out with you. • Having a nasty disease, I would like to go out with you.

16. 4. Driving lessons: One on one conferencing

17. Be realistic: - You’ll never do it as well as you want but what you do will be better than nothing • Be strategic: - You are not editing their work for them; you are looking for teaching opportunities - You don’t have to read everything - Ask them what they want you to look at

18. 5. Models • Provide models - write for them and with them ‘People may doubt what you say but they will believe what you do’ • Provide different models so they know there is no one right way • Keep interesting examplesby previous students

19. 6. Praise, praise, praise • We live by encouragement and we die without it - slowly, sadly, angrily. (Celeste Holm) • Remember they are developing and reward experimentation: learning to walk involves falling over a lot at the start

20. 7. Publish, publish, publish • Read aloud • Photocopy and distribute • Display • Reader Comment Sheets

21. Using the internet – Blogger and Word Press – free, multiple users, restrict access, can be for all/best work

22. You can make magic happen in the classroom Your students are waiting for you to do it. Don’t let them down.