Writing Well

There is no single skill more important, more powerful in its ability to shake the foundations of our world than the ability to write well. There are several factors that affect peoples inability to see this truth, as they often don't consider the knock-on effects of writing, or the sheer variety of skills that writing well encompasses. Writing well helps us consider, reflect, and organize our thoughts. It lets us write our speeches, revise them, and turn them into powerful orations capable of toppling entire regimes. It helps us remember key details and important facts, learn how to use persuasive appeals, touch the heartstrings of those we so desperately want attention from. It informs and persuades our potential employers, helps us communicate with loved ones on a daily basis, even helps us mend our own souls through reflection. What's most amazing is that writing well is an even more necessary skill in today's global environment. We are competing on a scale never seen before, and the smallest grammar mistake could be the difference between success and failure. We are keeping up with correspondences all across the world, spanning all the worlds cultures, and so now we need to exhibit global mindedness when considering audiences along with all our previous skills. Writing is becoming more and more complex, with new text types and mediums appearing all the time- from Twitter to Linkedin, Tinder to Facebook. Writing well is simply too important to your daily life in both personal and professional settings to not be considered the single most important skill you learn in school.

My current method of teaching writing is slightly strict and conservative with regards to the fact that I focus on students learning the features of individual text types before beginning an active reading process. From start to finish, text type and context of the text is always analyzed first. Then a prereading exercise designed to prime students to be attentive learners. This can be seen in various activities such as watching a short video directly related to the subject or showing an image or piece of writing and discussing the conceptual issues seen within, or with students demonstrating prior knowledge by saying or writing that they know and want to know about the subject, with a discussion following. Assuming basic reading skills have been taught in prior lessons, (annotating, highlighting, research, basic terminology and literary devices) we then move on to a particular focus depending on the text type and the criterion I am attempting to work on. I then model the process I want the students to work on- if it's an argumentative piece, I'll provide a projector showing my model, discuss its organization and strengths/weaknesses, and gradually release responsibility until students are working alone on creating their text as the final part of the lesson. (Occasionally an exit task to prompt reflection and consolidation of skills)

I can request my school to buy books for the next semester, but I actually prefer to get as many of my resources as possible from the internet. I have taught around a dozen text types or so with resources solely from online resources, and I have very little doubt I could continue doing that. The Online Gutenberg is an excellent resource for free books, I have even done a unit on autobiographies using Benjamin Franklin's gathered from the website. I have taught graphic novels, speech, persuasive, argumentative essays and articles, science fiction, dystopia, poetry,(a number of types of poetry from war poems of WW1 to Victorian) frame stories, memoirs, and so many others.The IB curriculum gives us the complete freedom to pick and choose texts, making sure to follow a few strict guidelines in terms of text types and varieties of contexts/cultures. Anything I feel I want to add, I'm certain I can. I have also used every aspect of the writing process in my classroom, including publishing (I've had students publish an online newspaper, videoblogs, even brochures to work with local coffee shops cross-promoting them.

The video of small group writing (Rosenzweig, Jennifer) was intriguing. I've never paired students with the express purpose of writing an argumentative or persuasive piece. I like the idea, and while the video did give a clear idea of what the benefits of such a activity would be, I have to wonder about how it is actually implemented and modeled for the first time. Often this is the case with these types of videos when it comes to a question of regulating student interaction. Perhaps this is simply a cultural difference, as all of my experience teaching is in Asia, but I find getting students to talk in a constructive manner- using a turn-taking model, or any of the other common strategies of adding on, (yes, and...), is rather difficult.(and I really think that level of analysis of language is really better left to higher grade levels) The hurdles that accompany ESL learners learning through a literary context such as writing in a group means that I really need more explicit instruction in order to effectively implement it.

                                  

Works Cited

Rosenzweig, Jennifer. High school writing lesson idea Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/video/high-school-writing-lesson-idea