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We already know that the seven participating instructors’ classrooms were guided by relatively disparate fundamental interests, ranging from helping students comprehend the foundations of scientific inquiry to exposing them to the conventional structuring elements of English language and literature. We looked at the writing activities that could support academic objectives in different classrooms and discovered that they were equally diverse.
Each teacher employed straightforward exercises like journaling or freewriting in a different way, while more involved or difficult assignments derived their structures and objectives from the situations in which they were presented.
Successful Ways of Writing
We will now look at the methods in which the participating teachers successfully introduced writing into their lessons. These include both the previously used by the teachers before the project began and the newly added activities that were developed during the research. Understanding the success of these actions and the fundamentals of successful practice will be the chapter’s main focus.
We will return to these classes and observe how these activities interact with the teachers’ objectives from a new perspective. We will also look at situations in which a change in writing activities was merely a symptom of a much more fundamental redefinition of teaching and learning.
Despite the variety of shapes, the activities took in these seven classrooms, they always fulfilled the same purposes:
- To draw on relevant knowledge and experience in preparation for new activities
- To consolidate and review new information and experiences
- To reformulate and extend knowledge
Writing to Draw On Relevant Knowledge
Activities in the classroom must start somewhere, and most teachers have their own go-to routines for piquing students’ interests, gauging their prior knowledge, and directing their attention in the right directions. These are tasks that writing assignments that are properly constructed can accomplish, but only if the teachers think that their students have relevant prior knowledge that they can use in their writing.
When our collaborative teachers felt that the students’ knowledge of the subject was insufficient, they chose to begin with lectures or demonstrations rather than student writing. As we’ve seen, Kathryn Moss believed that chemistry was a formal body of knowledge that her students had no prior understanding of. In light of this conviction, commencing a unit of study with writing did not make sense.
Before her students started a unit during her participation in the project, she tried a freewriting activity, but since she did not see any evidence of the knowledge she was looking for, she never utilized that kind of activity again. She did create a number of review-writing exercises to help students prepare for quizzes, and they were successful for her since they were offered when students already had some formal knowledge of chemistry to draw from.
Graves’s Classroom
His original remark seemed casual, but as we looked into Graves’ classroom, it turned out to be a pretty accurate description of how he used this kind of writing. For instance, earlier in the year, before studying a poem on tattoos, he invited his pupils to finish a spontaneous theme (he called it a “freewrite”) on the subject of tattoos. This task, in particular, thrilled him because it addressed an initial concern the pupils had.
Such introductory writing, according to Graves, served just to pique students’ interests and was not a necessary component of the subsequent literary analysis. He attempted, in working on the project, to employ comparable early writing exercises as a lead-up to the formal final essays that each unit of study in his class concluded with. Although they never received much attention among the competing demands for classroom time, he felt at ease with such activities.
According to him, studying literature required students to take both an inward and external journey. While the trip in was reliant on students’ personal thoughts and experiences, the journey out of themselves entailed learning the relationships among concepts within a text, ideas that were more general and significant than particular experiences. Graves believed that the “travel out,” which was the core of literary studies, was more important than the “journey in” that preparatory writing offered.
Writing to Consolidate New Information
Because they believed that their pupils would not be knowledgeable enough to have something to write about, many teachers found it challenging to use writing as a way to introduce new activities. For many educators, using writing to assist pupils in reviewing what they had learned was considerably simpler.
This review writing was done in a variety of ways, including as journaling or jogging, summarizing fresh information, taking notes, and doing study exercises. One of the most frequent uses of writing in the participating schools was to review recent learning. It was especially crucial in the three science classes because they all placed a strong emphasis on memorizing certain knowledge.
Writing in review has shown to be effective in our first year’s work with Julian Bardolino. He was using note-taking and end-of-chapter study questions as review tools when we first started working with him. Additionally, he introduced essay writing as a component of the unit tests. Both Bardolino and his students found these activities to be a little annoying.
Throughout the time Bardolino worked on the project, the logs’ nature steadily changed. The first entries were often only a few sentences long and were quite brief. He hadn’t used logs before, so he brought the initial sets of entries to the project team to explore how to promote more fully elaborated responses.
Writing to Reformulate and Extend Knowledge
In the case-study classrooms, the use of language as a tool to reorganize and reflect upon what students knew or had learned was the third important purpose of writing. d. In this type of writing, instructors invited students to investigate connections between the subjects they had studied by creating classification schemes, identifying causes and effects, illuminating motivation, or making predictions about the future. Although they had different opinions on how to accomplish these goals with their pupils or even if they could be accomplished at all, all seven of the participating teachers respected these writing-related aims.
Evaluating Student Learning
Most classrooms place a strong emphasis on evaluating students’ progress, and the ones in our study were no different. The majority of the writing tasks that the cooperating instructors often assigned were created in part to assess what pupils already understood or had learned. when coupled with writing’s three pedagogical purposes.
Evaluation takes on several well-known forms: it can be used to diagnose students’ needs when planning new activities, to assess what they have learned when writing reviews, and to show how well students are able to use what they have learned when writing to extend concepts. As they created new assignments for their classes, one of the teachers’ constant worries was how these assignments should be graded.
What would be considered “excellent” work and how to keep paper grading within acceptable bounds were the two main aspects of this topic. Even our most enthusiastic teacher-collaborators soon started to feel uncomfortable in the absence of satisfactory solutions to these two questions. The methods for evaluating the activities varied from classroom to classroom, much like the activities themselves. In turn, the evaluating methods played a crucial and even controlling role in identifying which writing activities would be most successful, as we will see in the brief descriptions of each classroom that follow.
