Enhancing Instruction

This class has allowed for me to think critically about my own teaching. During undergraduate schooling, I always felt that there was a lot of instruction on how to create readers out of your students. We spent a lot of time focusing on reading strategies and how students can use these strategies to enhance their reading. Not as much emphasis was placed on the writing component. This class allows for me to think about how I'm not just creating readers but I am building a room full of writers as well. My writing instruction is for seniors in high school so I am trying to focus on how my writers can craft writing that goes beyond the five paragraph essay that they have dealt with for the past three years of high school. I am trying to push my students to feel less like a class but as a workshop where there is true ownership of their writing.

Looking at my own teaching, I feel that it is easy to get stuck in a very regimented style of teaching writing. I teach seniors in high school and it can be easy to get caught up in the literature aspect of an English class and to not spend as much time with writing. I also can spend too much time with just the five paragraph essay form. As spending time with this class, I can see where I can make beneficial changes. One of the biggest changes would be to allow my students to explore other genres and take a more multimodal approach to exploring them. I think seniors would appreciate having some autonomy when it comes writing at this stage. Allowing them to do their own exploring, would make them more interested in the writing process. Sometimes for the older grades, getting students to feel excited again about writing is it's own challenge. Giving the students a choice to choose not only the subject of writing, but what form they use can entice them to participate. The idea of choice fall in line with what Tompkins and others have said about keeping student's interest.   

One of the changes that I actually have taken since starting this class would be trying to create a more workshop atmosphere within the classroom.  I wanted to see what I could do to make the classroom feel like a community of writers. I have been trying to keep instruction to just mini-lessons and then giving them time to write (Tompkins, 2012). I have also used the status of the class in my senior English classes and have found that it has been very helpful in creating the atmosphere of a workshop. It allows for students to pair up with others that are in the same stage as them and it gives them a sense of accountability because they are setting their own goals. One thing that I would want to do better in as I continue teaching would be what Richards & Hawes (2007) mentions when it comes to making "explicit connections between reading and writing by focusing on components of author's craft" (p.370).  I would want to spend more time with mentor texts and have students look at how writing is crafted. The lists of mentor texts provided by Tompkins, could be very helpful. Even the mentor texts for younger grade levels I feel could be very beneficial. I could see my students enjoying looking at primary level mentor texts to see how authors craft their writing. I have come to appreciate the use of mentor texts through our use of these texts in class. The more time spent looking at these texts, the more confident I feel about act of writing. I think my students would feel the same way. Once you can recognize aspects of writing in other author's work, it can help create a blueprint for when you have to. It would be nice to give my students that blueprint. That is one of the biggest changes I would hope to make when it comes to my instruction. 

One mini-lesson that I think would do really well in my classroom integrated technology into the lesson. The digital toolkit lesson on p. 79 in Tompkins (2012) is something that I think would improve writing instruction in my classroom. The lesson focuses on going online to look up author information. The idea of focusing on the actual author is something that I need to improve on when instructing on writing. Allowing seniors to choose authors that they like and to dig into how these authors view the writing process would significantly impact the way my students look at the writing process. This would also connect with bringing in mentor texts as I mentioned earlier. As a teacher, I need to always be looking to improve my instruction. I must thank this class because it has been causing me to really take notice of how I write and how I teach writing. It has allowed me to gain a fresh perspective that I am excited to show my students!

References

Rickards, D., & Hawes, S. (2006). Connecting reading and writing through author's craft. The Reading Teacher, 60(4), 370–373. https://doi.org/10.1598/rt.60.4.6