Were I to walk into my student
teaching assignment tomorrow, I would do so feeling like a growing teacher of
writing. Everything we have done this
semester has taken me one step further towards feeling like a competent teacher
with a repertoire of tools, ideas, and endless options for teaching writing to
even the most resistant writers. I have
been fully convinced of the necessity (as well as the difficulties) of juggling
my writing self and my teacher self.
Coming into SED 445, I had a somewhat truncated idea of what
it meant to teach writing. Specifically,
I was unsure of what digital literacy
meant, and I couldn’t imagine what it had to do with me and my future
classroom. I had little experience with
crafting digital texts, and little interest in doing so. I have done my best to overcome these issues. First, I am now aware of the necessity of
considering digital media of all kinds in my teaching—digital literacy is a
thing, and I don’t get to ignore it.
Second, I have come to the realization of the value of digital media in
teaching writing. At worst, giving
students the option to create digital texts will enhance student interest. At best, it will engage students in becoming conscious, competent users of technology they already use (maybe unconsciously
or incompetently?). I actually can’t
wait to create a class blog! I have become a new and improved version of myself in this area.
There were so many A-Ha! moments
for me in SED 445. It is difficult to
choose only a few, but for the purposes of this reflection I have chosen the
two most important to me. The first is
of enormous importance as I move forward into my future teaching career. I had not explicitly considered writing
teacher and writer as two separate but intertwined roles. You can be a writer and not a teacher of
writing (or an English major but not an English teacher). You cannot, or should not, be a teacher of
writing without also being a writer. This
concept awakened something in me—why should students do something they never
see me doing? Why should they feel
confident in something they never see me doing confidently? Why should they put their blood, sweat, and
tears (never literally) into their writing if I never do?
That last question leads me to my
next A-Ha! moment. Why should students
work hard at something that they never see
me working hard at? That’s just the
thing: they should see me working hard at something. Modeling and mentor texts are imperative in
teaching writing. Most kids are
unconfident writers, because they imagine “the writer” as something outside
themselves. Showing them that “writers”
like me go through the process and work hard at it can help develop confident
writers, and that’s where it all starts. There is a myth in literature classrooms that insists that writers are born and not made--I will make every effort to subvert that myth. SED 445 taught me that!
My I-Search (soon to be seen in
this blog, by the way) is another area in which I experienced growth during
this semester. Connecting the teaching
of writing to something as cool, interesting, and anti-lame as graphic novels
and comics was thrilling for me. It was
during my I-Search process that I suddenly realized something: I can do this. I can create with my students in ways that
they have (maybe) never created before. I
can apply this stuff to my teaching in real life with real kids. How
often do we get that opportunity in school? Not often enough.
The most important Teaching Writing
Golden Nugget that I take away from SED 445?
Do it! Write! Do it all the
time. Do it formally. Do it informally. Do it with low stakes. Do it with no expectations. Do it in homemade journals!! The more you write the more you feel like a
writer. The more you encourage your
students to write (and write and draft and write and write and draft) the more
they will feel like writers.
I began this class with an image of
“teaching writing” that was bogged down with the grammar worksheets and
sentence structure exercises with which I was taught. I leave with an entirely new conception of
what teaching and learning writing at the secondary level can be.
