Teaching Conventions in a State-Mandated Testing Context
In this article, Warne does a great job of demonstrating ways to connect student learning of literature, writing, and testable conventions. When students are immersed in good examples of how to use different conventions, they will begin to imitate and include these ideas in their own writing. The teacher just needs to be deliberate about naming the strategies and conventions that the students are working with. I am not sure how much this applies to my current classroom, but I know it is important that I expose kids to listening examples of the concepts I am teaching them to use in their own playing. Including the proper vocabulary not only helps them to do well on assessments, but also allows us to communicate with one another.
Writing Steps: A Recursive and Individual Experience
As a student, I was taught that the writing process was supposed to proceed in order, step by step. This always made it difficult for me to get started, because I felt like my first completed draft represented the final shape of the writing. Now I understand the slinky idea, and I really appreciate Warne's idea of talking with students "about the differences between the general writing process steps and what might happen as they wrote." This helps kids understand that it's okay for the processes of writing to not always "proceed in a linear sequence." These ideas are freeing for writers of any age.
I am like you and was glad when I learned writing could be recursive. That whole linear thing just didn't work for me.
ReplyDelete