Blog Post 3: Helping Students Build Habits to Enhance Their Writing Lives

Hello everyone! I hope everyone is feeling good as we wrap up the first nine weeks of the school year!

 

Prioritizing Student Writing Habits

Today, I am considering what I can do as a teacher to design instruction that helps students develop habits that enhance their writing lives. This is a crucial topic to consider and prioritize because of how beneficial writing can be for our students. When our students are effective and confident writers, they can apply these skills in all of their classes and in their personal lives. 

 

My Schooling Experiences

When I think back to my experiences in middle and high school, I remember a few instances in which I felt that my teachers really supported my writing. However, I remember that in most of my schooling, writing habits and practice were somewhat neglected other than when the time for writing essays came. Even when I think back to many of these experiences, though, I remember often being encouraged to quickly write a rough draft, make revisions that included only correcting a few grammar mistakes pointed out by my teacher, and then turn in a final copy without much time for genuine inquiry or a real writing process. 

Although these experiences gave me some practice writing, they did not give me many opportunities to form habits to enhance my writing life (Bomer, 2011, p. 187). While getting practice writing is almost always beneficial, there are types of writing and manners of approaching writing that I think work much better in helping students to build habits that enhance their writing lives. I believe that these approaches include teaching students how to use writing as a way of thinking, teaching students how to draft meaningfully in ways that help them get their ideas down on paper to be refined and expanded upon later, and encouraging students to engage fully with different types of writing and different topics to explore in writing (Bomer, 2011, pp. 190-193).

 

My Teaching Experiences

So far in my field placement experiences this semester, I have noticed some roadblocks my students seem to be consistently running into as they try to write. For example, many of my students are able to express very impressive and complex points and arguments during class discussions but then struggle to record these thoughts in writing or apply them in unit writing assignments. I think that this is because my students have likely never been exposed to the idea of writing as thinking (Bomer, 2011, p. 187).

Many of my students seem to think of writing as something that has to be perfect and fully fleshed out from the very beginning. My students struggle to see writing as a process of recording thoughts and ideas, connecting experiences, and changing and refining ideas as new thoughts are formed. Bomer describes that many students struggle to realize that “no one is listening in to their drafting” and that they can write in a low-stakes, explorative way without having fully-formed and coherent ideas (Bomer, 2011, p. 204). He goes on to explain that teachers should show students that writing is a process that includes lots of change, and that writers must be “strategically lowering” their standards as they begin writing something new (Bomer, 2011, p. 204). Many of my students, unfortunately, believe that they must have something perfect and thought-provoking to say at every stage of writing and that if they don’t, they shouldn’t write anything at all. There are a few different ways I have been trying to combat these struggles in my placement.

One way I have been trying to help students build habits to enhance their writing lives is by having them frequently engage in low-stakes quick writes related to the texts and ideas we are exploring in class. In my upcoming unit that I will teach later this month, my students will have a chance to engage in a quick write and in a more extensive writing assignment which they will have chances to think about and revise as their ideas change. Both of these assignments will also allow students to take some creative liberties in their writing, allowing them to choose whether they want to relate events from the texts to other pieces of media or to their own lives, or if they want to put themselves in the shoes of a character we are studying. I hope that giving students a calm, low-stakes environment will help them practice writing informally and as a way to think through their ideas. I have done my best to create these assignments in as non-intimidating a way as possible so that students are encouraged to write freely as their thoughts come to them.

I think it could also be effective for me to model my own writing to students, showing them through a think-aloud and writing exercise how I myself write to think and frequently write down half-baked ideas to return to later. This will allow students to see my unique writing process and hopefully understand that they have one of their own that will work for them and allow them to create a writing life and process that works for them.

I am excited to try these strategies and ideas out in my placement classroom and look forward to helping my students build writing lives!

 

References:

Bomer, R. (2011). Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.