Third Response/Journal: Teaching Writing Fluency
Briefly describe the writing abilities of one of your classes. Then, talk about how you have worked with students to build their writing fluency.
posted by Brady Kelso @ 10:27 AM
Friday, June 16, 2006
About Me
- Name: Brady Kelso
- Location: San Diego, California, United States
I've taught English in San Diego City Schools for the past 25 years. I've taught at Mann Middle School, Serra High School, Muirlands Middle School, Lincoln High School, and Crawford High School. I currently teach English to freshmen and seniors at Scripps Ranch High School. I developed and taught English Methods for twenty years at San Diego State University before "retiring" in 2004.
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3 Comments:
The writing abilities in my classroom range among various levels. I have students that understand several aspects of the writing process including how to use the 6 traits of writing in their work. On the other hand, there are a few students in my class that are still emerging from learning how to construct paragraphs in their writing. They write full pages with no use of indenting paragraphs, or organizing their writing.
To help my students build their writing fluency, I have been using a program known as ‘WriteTraits’. The WriteTraits program is a program developed to help students enhance their writing skills by teaching them to incorporate the 6-traits or writing into their writing. I was given this program last year when I taught 5th grade, and adapted it to meet the needs of my 7th grade students. Unfortunately it is not a program that has been adopted by my school, because I strongly feel it would help our students increase their writing abilities.
As I have used this program throughout the year, I have noticed a positive change in many of my students’ writing abilities. I was able to teach my students trait-specific lessons. From here, we would analyze both student and professional models for them to identify the traits that were included in the writing. Following this, I would give my students detailed assessment rubrics that gave them the opportunity to see what qualities a good paper included. With the use of the student and professional models, as well as the rubrics, my students were able to recognize the elements of good writing and then incorporate them into their writing.
I have noticed that for those students that did not grasp all of the concepts of fluency in writing, it was due to outside factors. These factors include the number of absences they had, and/or how much time they spent out of the classroom. I truly feel that had they been in class for the majority of the lessons, their writing abilities would have increased, or at least, they would have been able to understand and apply the strategies behind writing fluently through constructing accurate paragraphs.
Sandy Jenkins:
When reading the passage about student prewriting strategies I felt as if that passage was written about my 8th grade class. It's disorganization; students who didn't want to write or know what to write felt as if it were a scenario was right out of room 502 on the Memorial campus. I've tried several pre-writing strategies and they have often been harder to explain than the writing prompt. So I appreciated it when the author stated how difficult this process is for most. That when he gave the explanation of the cluster map, I saw the quality of work product and could instantly match students faces to this work sample. I've never thought of pre-writing strategies, as a generalization to students needs. That clustering may not (and more that likely does not) meet the needs of all of the students in the classroom.
As a teacher, I more than likely have done this on every writing assignment in my class. For the 5 writing assignments I've given, we've clustered, outlined, group and brainstormed. I feel that this variety has drawn away from the generalizing and tried to meet the organizational needs of all students. I know this may not be the case. I'd like to get more prewriting ideas to implement in my class who would benefit from this structure greatly. I feel that having more prewriting strategies would help everyone move away "from progress suggested by the classroom and real progress".
What the book lacked was practical implementation. The advice of, "think about what may stump students and then avoid it" was not beneficial. Earlier the author talked about creating strategies that would not be a waste of time, but then it gives very little advice on how to create that. The stronger the strategy the more organized a students writing will be. If I can find methods that would help me accomplish this then my reading of student work will be far more enjoyable.
The writing abilities in my class this year were--well—varied would be an understatement. Some students already knew about (or at least heard of) thesis statements, topic sentences, and transitions, etc. Others could barley string together a sentence once out of every four attempts. During workshop some students wanted to be left alone, and others wanted me to tell them what to write, because if I would just tell them, they would write it down and it wouldn’t be so hard anymore and they could get on with their lives, thank you very much.
Really, there are some advantaged to a situation like this. Or, if not advantages, things you can do. The writing workshop and explicate teaching of the writing process work well in this environment. The most obvious thing then I’ve done is a lot of peer sharing, revising and editing. This way the stronger, more independent students can help the weaker students, and thus help themselves as they develop their critical little eyes. Also, the stronger students provide endless examples of student work.
I use these examples as teaching points. I pick examples that exemplify satisfactory writing, but have a few common errors, or stylistic problems that I discuss in some ol’ fashion direct instruction. After that, I will have the students revise their papers to correct the error, or improve style. For example, if we were talking about descriptive verbs, I might then have the students exchange papers and circle baring verbs. Then the author must change those verbs to more descriptive verbs.
I guess a lot of my writing instruction has been letting the students play with matches and then putting out the fires. Usually I hate this type of teaching because it gives me a headache. But, with writing, I think it is a sold way to build on what the students know (even if it isn’t much) and develop fluency in a more authentic way.
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