Entry One: Teaching Writing; The misconceptions and new beliefs of a English teacher

In my past experiences with teaching writing, I have not focused a great deal of time on the subject. I included writing in my lessons, but never focused on explaining why we write.  Students simply wrote to express their answer and not often enough to express their feelings or ideas. To me teaching writing is a difficult concept. Not all students enjoy writing or understand how to write. They see it as a chore, part of the daily routine of the class. Breaking this thought seems too difficult of a task to undertake as I too often struggle to write.

The above paragraph was my old concept from student teaching. Although I still see it as a difficult concept, I now understand the importance of teaching students to write. The many literacy courses, as well as Dr. Jones, have molded my outlook and core principles for the better. Writing is a process. Students do not learn to write overnight (even though we wish this was the truth). Writing takes years to learn and students develop their skills through every grade. Now I begin to assess my old core principles and begin to replace them with new and effective principles. Writing needs to be taught throughout the year. This could occur in a lesson, a unit, or at any given opportunity. Students learn through repeated practice. Writing should be taught as a group in order to model the new concept. After the concept is modeled, the whole class can work together with the teacher as guided practice so students can start understanding how to complete the process on their own. After group practice, students can meet with partners and share their understandings and completions of the process until they are comfortable on their own.

Now in the classroom that I have, I have begun to implement my new core principles. In the back of my classroom I created a writing center. Although all I have now is a kidney shaped table with three chairs and a folding table with no chairs, it is still a start; over time I hope to acquire chairs from the school. There’s only one set of computers near the table and the walls are so far blank.

.... to be continued