Classroom Writing
Classroom writing is one of the most important tasks that students learn, if not the most important. Reading and writing are essential for pretty much every sector of our society. You can get by without basic math skills, a sense of direction, or the most rudimentary knowledge of mechanics in our modern society. If you don’t know how to write a good paragraph or compose your thoughts in a logical manner, however, you’re probably out of luck. This is why classroom writing exists –to turn people into good thinkers and good writers.
I ran a classroom writing workshop for home schooled kids for several years. I learned a lot about the process of teaching writing. One of the most important things is to create a comfortable writing environment for the classroom. A lot of public schools don’t really think about this, but where you are influences the work you produce. I like to have a very informal classroom, with decorations produced by the students and posters I find inspiring. I also like to make a lot of different classroom writing supplies available to students. I let them use quirky notebooks, colored pens, lined or unlined paper – pretty much anything they want. I don’t care, as long as they can write fairly legibly and extremely intelligently.
When I began, I assumed the classroom writing instruction had to vary a lot depending on what age you were teaching. After I had been teaching writing for a while, I was surprised to find that the same techniques work very well with a wide range of people. The most important thing in classroom writing is to get your students excited about the work, and any way you do that is a valid way. I like to share my own personal passion for the written word. Sometimes, I share my own compositions with them. Other times, I read aloud, emphasizing particularly moving or exciting parts of the story. Often, I will discuss literature with them, inviting them to contribute in any way they want to. As long as I can get them engaged in the writing process, I can really make big strides.
Of course, you can’t do classroom writing and forget about mechanics. The mechanics of writing are one of the most important things to teach students. Whether you like it or not, if you can’t spell correctly, use proper grammar, or figure out how to end a sentence, no one is going to take you seriously. Usually, I tackle the mechanics once the students have already gotten excited about the other stuff. It’s a sort of a trick that I use. I get them really engaged in the stories they are writing, then pull a sort of bait and switch on them, bringing in a lesson in punctuation.
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