Student as Writer, Teacher as Writer

When I look back on the courses that I have taken in graduate school, it seems that I have been prepared to be more of a reading teacher than a writing teacher. I enjoyed this week's readings because they focused on teaching writing and practicing writing myself. It is hard for me at times to imagine a classroom that, as various writers recommend, maintains the perfect 50:50 ratio between reading and writing. I really appreciated the chapter that discussed how to plan a unit of study because I was able to see each step of one teacher's journey through a unit that blends reading and writing effectively.

Tom Romano's chapter really made me begin thinking about writing as an important learning activity for both students AND teachers. His chapter revealed that when teachers travel through the same writing process as students they have more "empathy for student writers and also gain more credibility in students' eyes" (BPR 171). When teachers model their own writing process step-by-step, writing suddenly becomes a more manageable activity and students have an idea of where to start. Another writer suggests that modeling also benefits teachers' instruction as it helps them monitor how long a given assignment might take for students to complete, and it also helps teachers become aware of problems that students might experience in the process of writing. The most important thing that I got out of the BPR readings was that I will need to practice patience when I am approaching students' writing in the classroom. I must be aware that not all students encounter the same problems in the writing process, and students may have different ways of arriving at a polished final piece.

The Bridging English chapters and the assessment article that we read this week discussed portfolios as a way of measuring student progress. I remember completing one portfolio in my high school career, and, looking back, I do not feel that it reflected my best writing. Unlike the ideas discussed in Bridging English, my teacher did not have us write in several genres and we did not continuously work on our portfolio for the entire semester. As a graduate student having completed various writing portfolios in college, I now understand that, as Milner and Milner note, students must actively participate in the compiling of their portfolios and revision must be an intense, on-going, and engaging undertaking. Portfolios should also be assigned with rubrics that are distributed to students so that they are aware of a teacher's expectations, requirements, and methods of assessment. I would really like to use portfolios in my English classroom one day because they are a great resource for students as they monitor their own progress and reflect on just how far they've come.