Writing Struggles

   In my three years of teaching communication arts, I have noticed how writing is gaining ground in its importance. See when I first started teaching, I knew I would have my students work on DOL's (Daily Oral Language) a few times a week alternating with journal reactions, and every quarter my students would write a paper that would  be taken through the whole writing process. I was never told to cover certain things with writing; I was handed the benchmarks and indicators my students were tested over for reading and inferred that I was to focus mainly on the items tested. It seemed to me that reading took precedence over writing.

  Since then, our district has required that we have Writer's Workshop in our classroom one to two days a week. I was excited to try something new, yet I was a bit confused with the idea. We were going from not having writing as the main focus (or so I believed) to basically becoming entrenched in writing, which was utterly overwhelming. The concept of Writer’s Workshop seemed so laid back and student direct, I couldn't understand how I could just let my students write without giving them guidelines. I understood that I would have mini lessons that I would teach to cover certain things like transitions, writing an appropriate introduction or conclusion, etc. Still, I had no idea what my students were to have mastered by the end of the year, and whether we would have our students write the same papers we had done the year before.

   Going into this year I feel as though I have writing better figured out because of the trials and tribulations I experienced with Writer's Workshop for the past two years. I had started out with a rigid, inconsistent mode of teaching writing. Since then I have learned the importance of determining what is essential for the students to learn, and how to make writing more exciting and useful to them. This past year I had an “aha” moment when it truly hit me how important it is to model writing and to show writing to my students. I pulled out old papers I had written in college to show students examples of thesis statements; I dug out former students’ essays to give my students ideas on different writing and my expectations for them; I found articles that discussed writing as a lifelong skill. With the help of my Elmo, I finally could project my student’s writing for the class, and draw attention to what areas the student had done well. There is still more I need to tweak with writing in my classroom, but I feel I have the means and desire to improve my writing lessons