Writing Instruction

I would have to say that the amount of writing instruction I see in my placement classroom in minimal. In all of my time there this year, I can only recall a couple times in which the students were engaged in writing workshop, as defined by Tompkins. According to this format, the teacher gives a short mini-lesson at the beginning of the session, and then for the rest of the time, the students are allowed to work on their writings. I have noticed that during these sessions, the teacher keeps track of his students' progress in lists on the whiteboard, much like we discussed in class. One list is for drafting, the other editing, and then the final one was publishing. This way, as we discussed, the teacher can keep track of the students progress, and assess at a glance if some students are stalled in their writing process. Also, during this time, the teacher is available for conferencing. The three writing workshop instruction foci that I have seen this year have included narratives, compare and contrast papers, along with biographies, which the students are currently working on. Most students seem rather motivated while working independently, while others noticeably struggle and put off publishing. Many times, the teacher had to prompt them to continue working.

When I was in school, I remember my writing instruction to be much more extensive. We were constantly reading and writing responses, in the early grades, and in the later grades in elementary school, we were constantly writing in different genres. Additionally, a great deal of our writing instruction included grammar as well as stylistic instruction. This is one area that I do not see in the Language Arts Curriculum, explicit grammar. Although I have noticed that many teachers try to shy away from using explicit grammar instruction in the classroom, for fear of boring students, I think it is important for students to know grammatical terms, because this will help to enhance their writings. For example, when I was doing a mini-lesson on adjectives, my four students did not know what an adjective or a noun was. Therefore, I think it would be difficult for a teacher to tell the students that their writing doesn't have correct subject-verb agreement, if the students didn't know what the subject and verb were. Because of this need to have a common vocabulary when talking about grammatical elements within writing, I was very grateful to have had extension explicit grammar instruction in school. Additionally, when I had writing instruction in school, most of our work time was devoted to homework time. Every once in a while, we would have sometime to work on our writings during class, but many times, the teacher had us take our work home, work on it, and then bring the drafts in for editing. This is a large departure from the writing workshop activities I see in my placement school.

On a final note, there are definitely some areas of writing instruction I would tweak from my placement school to better suit my style as a teacher. As previously stated, I would most definitely use some explicit grammar instruction integrated within writing. This would help students work on their meta-linguistic skills while simultaneously giving them a chance to employ, as Cambourne suggests, their writing skills. For example, we might do a mini-lesson about subject-verb agreement, and then I would assign the students to write a narrative. I would tell them that they would need to focus on subject-verb agreement while working on their narratives. This type of grammatical emphasis could also be accomplished by instructing students on the use of adverbs and instructing them to write an action story and to use at least ten adverbs. I would also want my writing instruction to be more integrated across the curriculum and to be more structured. For example, we would have certain days for self-editing, peer-to-peer editing, turning into the teacher, and then final self edits. This way, the students would learn how they can perfect their writings of styles. Additionally, I would have students write reports in their science class as well as social studies. This way, they can see the value of their writing, and that it is important across curriculum and genre. Basically, there are many different ideas I have with writing instruction, and I am very excited to start!