Topic Choosen, Defined, and Explored

It’s here! After much soul searching I have decided on writing my I-Search paper on (drum roll please) the effectiveness of teacher modeling in the classroom!

Thinking back through my own high school English classroom career I never really had a lot of teacher modeling. I can remember back in my sophomore year my American Lit teacher gave us a fill in the blank sheet of paper that we could use as a template for virtually any essay on a book we had to write. 

It would start off like In ____________’s novel ________ the theme of ____________ is shown through _________,___________, and _______________.

No, I’m not kidding.  This is the closest to teacher modeling I’ve had. My school was big on every student writing in TBEAR format, (Topic sentence, briefly explain, Example, Analyze, Relate). This rigid format is so stifling it can complete turn students off to writing, and every teacher enforced it. If they modeled, they modeled all this. Luckily, writing came easy for me and I was able to just ignore this cookie cutter method all together.

But I do wonder what it would have been like if I had a teacher who was sporadic like Kelly Gallagher. Don’t get me wrong, I had some awesome English teachers, some who even inspired me to become an English teacher, but not very many great writing teachers. If I hadn’t been so turned on to writing I probably wouldn’t be as good of a student as I am. It still can take me eight hours to write a five page paper.

So have an animated writing teacher, one who would take risks and put themselves out there in front of the class and just start writing in front of us would have been so cool. It would have strengthened the relationship we, the students, had with the teacher. Teacher will push brainstorming for every single paper, but I have never had a teacher brainstorm writing in front of us. If I had, I feel lie writing wouldn’t be so intimidating to me. For me, starting a paper is hard, I always trip myself up and that’s why it takes forever. I feel like it’s got to be perfect the first time around. If I had a teacher that practiced what they preached and modeled and gave us opportunity to revise, and when I say opportunity, I mean like plan in revision in class time, my formal writing would be stronger.

I feel like teachers know they have to model, and know they have to have students revise, but they all kind of just say the words. So this is why this topic is important to me. This is why I want to write and research this. Because I don’t have a real life example to go off of, I will need to read up and understand modeling in order to be an effective model for my future students.