“When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something.”

As writing instructors consider which philosophical approach will work best for them, they must be aware of the types of assessments that will be most effective in producing their desired results.  This is such a key aspect to teaching that is often overlooked.  The standard has always been to create a test or essay prompt to check for student learning.  One of the most beneficial professional developments I have attended was on instructional design, and the focus was on "backward design", the idea of starting by planning your assessments and then figuring out how to instruct in a way that prepared students for those assessments.  It seems so obvious now that this is a better method of planning, but for years I would teach content and try to figure out at the end how to assess for student understanding of that content.   These types of summative evaluations did not produce the quality of writing I was hoping for.  I am improving on this aspect of my teaching, but there is still a dilemma that must be dealt with when it comes to the types of standardized assessments that are gaining momentum in the education system.  Brooke Horvath, in here article titled The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current Views, shows that formative evaluations will create compositions that allow "students to learn from their mistakes, extrapolating advice in shaping better prose in future writing situations."  A standardized test cannot do this.  Students approach these types of assessments with the idea that when it is over, I am longer accountable for this information.  An educators goal should be to foster continual learning, so there needs to be more of a focus placed on formative assessments.

I was discussing assessments and value of grades with some fellow writing instructors when one of them made the observation that we have made great and dramatic changes to the ways in which we present content, but we have not changed the ways we grade in over a hundred years.  This is troubling because the letter grade that is attached to an assignment is probably the most influential feedback students receive, yet what does a "B" really say about the progress and development of a student? There needs to be a paradigm shift in how educators measure growth and development of students.  I will be more specific on this in later posts, but for now let's consider how to incorporate more formative assessments into the writing process.  Brooke Horvath again states, "Texts should be treated as unfinished, each stage an ongoing process; students are encouraged to see revision as a desirable, necessary event that should occur."  Our focus as writing instructors should be to to give as many opportunities to progress through each writing assignment.  This of course starts a debate about grade inflation.  If every student can show progression throughout the writing process, how does a teacher not give favorable marks to each draft?    Our goal should be to produce writing that the students are proud of and has the ability to reflect understanding of the higher order thinking skills that occur through writing.  Grades need to become secondary to this.  First, a teacher needs to establish the standards that they feel are essential to writing, then teach in a way were every student has the ability to meet those standards.  If every student can do this, then every student deserves the highest marks possible.

"I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say, lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may"

As an English teacher, I struggle with how best to instruct the "nuts and bolts" of writing.  I had a difficult time paying attention when my English teacher attempted to show the mechanics of the writing process.  We learned the parts of speech, we diagramed sentences, and we learned that for every grammar rule there were a myriad of exceptions.  None of this was fun for me.  So, why would I want to turn around and teach my students in this current-traditional style of instruction?  I shouldn't.  It doesn't really work for me, but this is what I know. When I feel the pressure to produce students who write effectively, I panic and fall back on what I know, even if it is not the most comfortable and engaging method for my students and me.  This dilemma has placed me on a quest.  A journey to find the magic method of writing instruction.

Over the past month, I have scoured a variety of publications on this matter.  Today I would like to explore The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook edited by Edward Corbett, Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate.  In this book, Richard Fulkerson would refer to the method of instruction that I went through in my early days of eduction  as the "formalist approach."  This type of writing instruction clearly has value.  It places a focus on grammatical structure, and students learn that "good writing is 'correct' writing at the sentence level"(4).  With this philosophy, students will judge the effectiveness of writing by its "semantic intent" without considering the intended audience of the piece, the background of the writer, or the reality the writer wishes to reflect.  The advantage of this lies in what I will call "the formula."  Young writers will learn a prescribed method in which to write.  This makes it easy to self correct.  A writer either followed the "formula," or his/her writing was incorrect.  The problem that I have with this is that it does not hold true in the publishing world.  Some of the greatest pieces of literature do not follow this "formula."  My favorite authors do not follow this "formula."  It is safe to say that most people enjoy the individuality that comes from a writer taking a unique and fresh approach to a given work.  I personally could not live in a world where everyone wrote the same way with the same structure that produced the same tone, yet many student papers are all structured the same exact way.  It can cause a brutal night of essay grading.  I don't want any more of those, so it will require a new tactic.

The "mimetic approach"  seems to be more in my comfort zone.  The most intriguing idea with this method is the notion that good writing is linked with good thinking.  Here Fulkerson states that "the major problem with student writing is that it is not solidly thought out" (5).  With this philosophy, teachers should help students with how to think, or give them enough information about various topics so that they feel that their idea are worth sharing.  Ideally, a writing instructor would do both.  The AP Language and Composition exam has already moved in this direction.  For the past five years, the College Board has been using a synthesis essay topic that provides at least five sources that the students can refer to as they develop their essays.  I have seen this type of essay improve some of the analytical skills that are required on other part of the AP exam.  Students become aware of the break down in logic that occurs in argumentation, they become skilled at recognizing emotional appeals that exist in writing.  For me, this seems like the perfect way to introduce rhetoric.  Teach students the various ways to think, then apply aspects of structure and show how that structure changes the effect and meaning.

This is the core of rhetoric.  The relationship between the writer and his/her audience is a key part of recognizing good writing under the "rhetorical philosophy" that Fulkerson concludes his chapter with.  This is something my AP Language and Composition students really struggle with.  Very few students are exposed to this type of writing in the developmental stages of education.  Their audience is almost always the same person, their teacher.  Extending the variety of audience types is something that I am working on for my students next year.  Writing blogs is an easy way to incorporate this skill.  As I have been "blogging" for the past two weeks, I have become very aware of the variety of people who will read and comment on my writing.  It has pushed my writing.  I am more in tune with the sentence structures, word choice, and tone I use in my posts.  I would hope that this would make the quality better.  

With the many philosophies that exist when it comes to writing instruction, it is important to be mindful of how each one will shape pedagogy.  Teachers need to have their students participating in engaging and meaning exercises that will show them the power that can exist in appropriately sharing their ideas. Instructors need to be aware of their philosophy of writing instruction so that they can develop assessments based on their strengths and the strengths of their students.     

If this is your first night, you have to write

          

          Effective educators make every effort to anticipate the types of skills their students will need in the future.  These teachers will attend seminars, collaborate with others inside and outside of their department, and read the latest publications on their content area.  They make every attempt to ensure their class is relevant to their students.  I want to be an effective educator.  I want my students to understand how writing well will open up many opportunities for them.  The challenge before us today is to develop transformative instructional techniques that will prepare students for the types of writing that will exist in our technologically advancing world.  This summer I want to focus on the most efficient ways to teach rhetoric and grammar, utilizing the technology that will be available to my students.

            In A Short History of Writing Instruction, James Berlin states that English studies have “been at the center of the educational experience in this country, constituting one of the few requirements for all students in the grades.”  Now I am sure that every teacher likes to think that his/her subject matter is the cornerstone of education, but it seems that without the ability to read or write it would be difficult to instruct anything at all.  So much of our educational system in the United States was developed with the notion of how best to instruct writing.  Theories on this have come and gone, but the focus has always been on producing the types of learners that will most benefit society.  That type of learner today is one that can draw on technology to communicate with a much larger audience than one could have even dreamt of thirty years ago. 

            The value of writing is very clear, yet this process that requires an understanding of rules and structure, order and logic, cause and effect is met with much resistance from the majority of students.  Young writers are not grasping how this process will make them a well-rounded student.  Janet Emig stated that, “writing serves learning uniquely because writing as process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies.”  I have seen this in action as I have read through the research articles I have been collecting over the past month.  When I sit down to write about this information, I begin to see it in a new light.  I am no longer reading for information, but I am processing that information in a way that allows me to reflect on where I was prior to the writing process and what I will now do with this information in the future.  A big part of this has to do with my interest in becoming a better teacher.  This motivation helps me along the reading and writing process.  All students need a motivation of some sort.  There must be a way that educators can tap into the student’s interest in technology to successfully teach the structural components that often cause students to resist participating in this powerful process. 

            Too often, teachers resist the use of technology in instructional methods because they feel that the traditional approach that they were instructed in is the only way to teach.  I remember when I was in high school and not allowed to use calculators in math classes.  It was so extreme that students were suspended for having calculator watches.  By my senior year of high school, there was a paradigm shift, and teachers allowed students to use calculators on math problems.  Now, the problems students can solve with calculators far surpass anything students were doing while I was in school.  Current technology has the potential to do the same thing for writing.

            This leads me to the reading selection I would like to fully analyze, Chapter 4 of Engaging Ideas by John Bean.  One of the biggest challenges in my classroom is what Bean identifies as “students not taking pride in their writing and seeing themselves as having ideas important enough to communicate.”  It seems that once students have enough passion and dedication to the writing process in general, many of the perceived errors that occur will take care of themselves.  Creating that passion becomes the trick.  This is where I think technology can play a significant part.  Blogs are popular ways to get the ideas a writer cares about out to a large audience.  I would hope that students would be motivated to have better habits of editing and proofreading if they knew their writing would be viewed by a larger market of their peers.  This could also reinforce Haswell’s system of “minimal marking” that Bean indorses.  The notion of withholding a grade until the writing is free of as many errors as possible is intriguing to me and could easily fit into an online forum.  The only problem I see would be in determining at what point the student paper is deemed suitable for a grade.  No paper can ever be perfect, and if errors are connected to stylistic choices when does the writing reach a finishing point?  In any case, I now see that I was trying to do too much when it comes to teaching writing.  I need to help my students advocate for themselves if I truly what to improve their writing skills.  I hope to come to some more specific conclusions and answer some of my questions as I continue to research.