Entry 8: Bless, Address, Press

After reading through my peers blogs, I have chose a section of Jeff's entry five blog to bless. I chose this section because I feel it is a very true and relevant issue faced by many teachers, especially novice teachers like us. Jeff was writing about how he intends to spend more time teaching the writing process in his future classes, and reflecting on his past teaching experiences with the writing process. The part that really stuck out to me was this:Tompkins (2012) says that "the writing process is a way for looking at what writers think and do as they write" (p. 4). In this sense, I did not allow students to see and hear what a writer should be doing because I provided them the tools without teaching them how to develop them on their own. This stood out to me because I could see his honest reflection, and I understood all too well what he meant. If we use this analogy of "tools" and apply it to a growing civilization, we can see that giving the tools will not suffice, we want to teach them how to make their own tools. This also reminds me of a proverb that I cannot remember completely. but it says something along the lines of "give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he will never go hungry."

I am impressed that Jeff noticed and acknowledged this, and this helped me see that when I am not allowing my students to fend for themselves in certain situations, or when I jump in to save them before they even have the chance to see if they can make it on their own, I am doing them a diservice.

I do know that students (this is especially true for my students) are fearful of writing. They shy away from it if they do not have some sort of crutch. So for me, I would want to ask myself, what tools could I give them that would give them just the right amount of support, without giving them everything?

I used to model essays, and have students write as I wrote, but I found they were blindly copying, even though I was modeling my thinking as well. So now I try to make them more active when I first model. I come up with the topic sentence and then it is their job to help me find evidence, then I will interpret the evidence. Another "small" tool that works for my students is a sentence starter. This works well because often what my students fret about the most is they don't know how to start.

Going back directly to the writing process, I have never truly integrated a writer's workshop in my class (although I'd like to), but I feel that would be the ideal place to let students roam free to explore the process. As long as the environment is set up so all feel comfortable and safe, then they could easliy rely on peers for advice and experience the joy of sustained free-writing, which would build their confidence and their own tools.