I love writing. To me, writing is the best way for me to express my thoughts. I love speaking, but often, my mind prefers to sit with my thoughts for a while before developing them into statements and opinions...this is why I love writing, it allows me to carefully flesh out my ideas before making them final. I can think, edit, and rework statements on my own time without the pressure of coming up with an idea out loud and on the spot. I enjoyed that Hinchman mentioned that the kind of reflection and thinking that is used in writing is not often viewed positively by schools who deem students daydreamers when students do participate in deep thought that steals their attention away from their surroundings.
I agree that students' writing potential is not often obvious to them. They do not consider their outside of school writing to align with the writing done in schools. Our job as teachers is thus to make the connections between these two different realms of writing, and mold them into one. We need to talk to students about their own experiences with writing and how those experiences can shape the work they do in school. The idea of students investigating their own writing is a cool way to this. Students can take writing that is meaningful for them (blogs, poetry, online chats to name a few that were discussed) and explore what their style of writing tells them.
When writing becomes an experience, students have the chance to really develop. Writer's notebooks, a common classroom method, continues to be enjoyed by students who like to act as story tellers versus those who try to answer factual questions based on evidence and inference. My writing journal in the 8th grade was composed of the daily "bell-ringers" my teacher posed at the start of each class. After a chunk of classes, she would collect our journals and respond to them. There were multiple advantages to this: 1. daily writing practice right at the beginning of class 2. Giving the teacher the chance to know us better as students through our personal stories and voices as writers (also giving her the chance to informally assess our writing) 3. Entries only required personal responses, no right versus wrong answers, taking off the pressure and letting us as students to just write freely and truly. Another thing I think of when talking about writer's notebooks is one of my favorite movies- Freedom Writers. The teacher used writing notebooks to let students write about whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and she gave the option to offer to read them if students wished. The students all wanted to have their teacher read their stories and personal experiences which awakened the teacher to the struggles the students faced outside of school. Writing allows for a window of opportunity for students to share things they may never get the chance to share aloud, or that they may never want to share aloud. Another memory of my middle school language arts experience came to mind as I went through the section on writing for audiences. My teacher's husband was a teacher at another local school in the area, and she decided to have our two classes become pen-pals with one another. We were each paired with a student who we got to write to several times. At the end of the pen-pal experience we got to have a picnic with the other class and meet the students we had been writing to at the other school. Looking back, I would not have even thought about it as schoolwork, it was just a fun experience! Experiences such as this along with the implementation of writer's notebooks help give students confidence in their writing as they go on to compose more formal or challenging pieces.
Hinchman's chapter 10 had a strong emphasis on the synthesizing of other sources. I think this is an ideal that definitely needs to be encouraged in middle and high school as I have found myself doing several college assignments that require it, especially research papers. Synthesizing is also a skill that many will be required to have in future careers. Even as teachers, we read educational research and strategies and attempt to synthesize them into means of practice and application for our classrooms.
I totally agree that having multiple texts from different audiences/sources assists in enhancing comprehension for students. It also appeals to the differences between students such as what grabs their attention and what genre or style of reading they comprehend the best. Reading multiple texts also helps students more accurately create their own dispositions; they have multiple voices influencing them versus just one that they either agree or disagree with. Reading other individuals voices and opinions can help connect the dots for students who are still developing their thoughts.
Writing is an area that I feel you never stop growing in, I still feel like my writing is advancing with every semester that passes. My writing has advanced through practice, collaboration and peer review, getting to explore different styles of writing (whether it be from peers, authors, or scholars) and through writing experiences that have called for personal reflection and thought. We can offer the same opportunities- AND MORE- to our students who are in a stage where their writing skills have the highest potential to grow and develop for the future. We can encourage our students to "Write On," a statement I recall with a smile thinking of my professor's PowerPoint title for his presentation on writing instruction last semester.
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