Teaching Writing as a Process:

Shifting the focus from the final product to the process of creation and development seems like the obvious way to teach writing (and reminds me of some popular life philosophies that emphasize the journey over the destination). However, like a lot of students, my own educational experiences with writing rarely reflected this idea. In my opinion, a high school education should serve as a training ground for the college and the “real” world. The finished products shouldn’t matter as much as learning how to do things. I see my job as helping students to learn how to think better.

A lot of the ideas presented in Chapter 3 reminded me of similar things that we’ve read about relating to student learning. Primarily that in order to motivate students they should be given the opportunity to work with subjects they are passionate about. While it is true that students will inevitably have to write about things that they don’t care about at some point (in other classes, in college, in their careers, and in life), high school language arts classes should be a time to focus on the process of writing. The most important thing is not that they have an amazing final product, but that they have a better understanding of the process and of how to get to the final product. After all, they won't always have a teacher around to tell them what their writing needs.

The Dornan reading reminded me of our experience in Woodbury where students were working on personal narratives. The process was explained to them as a very linear procedure, and they were given graphic organizers to help guide them through the process, but there was very little opportunity (that I saw) to brainstorm, to revise, to go back and forth between coming up with ideas and writing a draft. Reflecting on this experience with student writers also reminded me of how hard it is to guide students toward their own problem solving (rather than doing it for them) and I particularly appreciated the list of questions to use when conferencing with student writers (Dornan, 62).

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The website I chose for the week is a “fiction writers character chart” that gives writers a huge variety of questions that can help to help flesh out characters with detailed backgrounds and lives. It would be important to emphasize that writers would not have to include all of this information in their stories, but that it exists to help the author understand their character’s actions, and intents.

http://www.epiguide.com/ep101/writing/charchart.html