Memo 5

Writing along students is something that may make sense to me, but may not make sense to all. I’ve always thought that as a teacher, you must find yourself through the requirements of being a teacher. Your ideas and passions must somehow break through the things the school board sees important, like test scores and testing.

You need to be prepared to take hold of your ideas and back them up. So putting myself in the shoes of a teacher or writing, I imagine my weaponry to look something like this.

Teacher modeling is one of high importance and benefit to every student no matter how far along in their writing ability. Nancie Atwell writes that although not every student gets the same amount out of a lesson, the important part is they grasp something. After modeling in front a student, they may realize how to create better paragraph transitions, or realize that they need to tighten up their sentences, or they may simply learn how to properly indent a paragraph. Any learning is important learning matters.

There are three main benefits to teacher modeling for students:

1)      Creates a positive writing role model.

2)      Shows students that writing is possible and takes practice. Writing can always be perfected.

3)      Teachers put themselves in the students’ position and can begin to emphasize with them.

Teachers can remember a time when they weren’t excellent writers, but often times they are very removed from that memory. Writing alongside also works in a way that helps the writer notice things about how they write. Tim Gillespie explains “as a writer paying attention to my own work, I learn to be more keenly attentive to my students' work” (Gillespie 1).

Writing is not something that can be perfected and left, it is ever changing and there is always room for growth. That being said, writing is a process. It is important for a teacher to model each step. When going through each step, Kelly Gallagher has his students pick apart his work. He asks driving questions like what is working and what words are weak? The idea of teacher being able to more keenly aware of their students work goes both ways. By having his students analyze his work, they are sharpening the tools they need to better analyze their work.

When trying to write better, practice is essential, so it is important for teachers to give their students practice time with low stakes writing. Low stakes writing can be a quick five minute write in a journal or five minutes to gather a student’s thoughts on a class discussion. Toby Fulwiler has his students practice writing through writing letters back and forth to his students weekly. It is here that students can develop a voice, learn how to organize their thoughts, and do so through a very low stakes median. Letter writing is a mode that does not overly stress out students because only one person will be reading it. This form of low stakes also doubles as a tool for students to feel more connected to their teacher and when a student feels like they matter to the teacher they start to have a personal stake in the classroom and in their learning.

Through writing and finding out what works and what doesn’t through experience, young writers develop themselves. Through teacher modeling of the revision process, writers take the tools they learn through dissecting the teacher’s work and apply it to their own work through proper revising.  

Teacher’s as models is only one job of a teacher. Debbie Rickards and Shirl Hawes see writers as having five different key roles that all entwine with each other. Through modeling teachers become coaches for their students. They establish a better bond when putting themselves out there on the spot and coming up with writing. Being this open and vulnerable to students helps students start to open up. The classroom slowly becomes less scary of a space, and eventually a community forms. When a class is connected, learning flows better, students start to see each other differently. 

Teachers also work as assessors of their students, as explained above, teachers better access their students when they are aware of their own writing and the choices they make behind it. Going back to my picture of a teacher’s own idea of what is important for students coming through, teachers act as planners. They must balance the things to teach today and how they fall in the grand scheme of the school year. Scaffolding must occur and careful planning ensures it does on some level. Timing and placement is crucial while taking in the need of the student.

Finally, teachers must act as consultants to their students. They must find time to break free of the group and address their students directly either in small groups or one on one. Writing is an excellent way to do so because the student and teacher have a body of work to go through. Kelly Gallagher also believes in the effectiveness of teacher meetings and prefers them over marking up a student’s paper. He believes it is more beneficial to a student to spend three minutes with them talking about their work rather than spending five leaving comments in the margins.

Through writing, teachers do what they set out to do: teach. Writing is a constant battle with students, and one teacher must be willing to be there for. When writing instruction isn’t taken into consideration the student suffers. Writing is the core of many real life activities and is crucial for a student to be a functioning adult in the working world. Writing helps sort through thoughts, express emotion, and relieve stress as well as communicate ideas and information. Writing is a way for the human race to stay immortal. It works on so many different levels that it’s hard for a teacher to ignore its importance.  So by taking hold of the five roles of a teacher, putting yourself out there and making yourself raw to your students, and being bold against the tides of testing, teachers can change a  student’s life forever. When the fear of writing is taken away, when the stress is lifted and a student is told that they are not expected to produce a perfect final polished daft on the first go, they are able to be really practice and grow. It is up to every teacher to give themselves to the need of their students at whatever the cost, even if that means going up to the Smart Board is writing a poorly written paragraph about their pet cat at 8 am on a Monday in the cold of January.