Reflection 1 - Trends and Challenges in Teaching Writing.

Teaching writing takes time and effort. According to Anne Lamott “almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” As a teacher who will be teaching writing, should be aware of strategies to help struggling writers become effective writers. In this writing course, I was introduced to a variety of strategies to include grammar instruction, summarizing, publishing writing and writing to start class, just to name a few. However, we were enlighten with short demonstrations of how each strategy should or can be used. I was impressed by the strategy “choosing topics to write about”, because this strategy allows students to choose their own topic, so they can better relate to it. Also, there were other strategies I was confused about and still confused of such as teaching writing explicitly. However, I think that all the strategies are good and useful, and they will allow students to become effective writers and to help teachers assist students with difficulties. In addition, we looked at some possible writing challenges students may struggle with including “Writing does not have prosody, body language, facial expression” and “The writer cannot assume there is shared context with the reader.” For instance De-contextualized task, students may be asked to write about their 'Easter vacation', the challenge for them is to rely on their memory and will then indicate to the teacher by saying “teacher I can’t remember or don’t remember” which makes the task difficult for both the teacher and students. Nevertheless if this difficulty arises, strategies are usually used to address or fix these difficulties. So, in class I learnt about trends in teaching writing and found that if this problem arises teachers can utilize gallery walk to help students to remember or to make the task more easier and fun.

 EXPLORING TRENDS AND CHALLENGES IN THE TEACHING OF WRITING

My introduction to teaching the trends of writing has been uplifting and motivating. It was a true eye opener confirming and refuting many things that came to me during the course. The style of writing was most interesting for me. Prior to this unit, i never thought that i would have been able to make writing so fun for my students. I use to struggle to find creative ways to bring it out of them. When teaching the trends to writing, it is important to note that they play an integral role in getting students to become proficient and expert writers, beginning from the basics of sentences write down to the finished product of students writing their own stories and publishing them for others to see. Many trends to writing were new to me, but i loved the way they are designed to allow the students to mimic great writing, while having fun and staying focused on the tasks at hand.

The Gradual Release of Responsibility Model was brought out in teaching writing explicitly. This trend also stood out for me and is the complete package. It allows the student to get much needed practice when creating a piece of writing. This model is also known as the I do, we do and you do model. This allows the teacher to model in the beginning what expert writers do when writing, as they think aloud. The students will then write along with the teacher, all the while helping him/her to build the story. Students will then be placed into collaborative groups of varying numbers where they will create their own stories together while learning from one another's experiences. The final stage is known as the you do stage, where students are expected to individually produce a piece of their very own, following explicitly the steps shown within the previous phases of the model. In addition to the GRR Model, trends such as think alouds, publishing writing, writer's workshop, gallery walk, inquiry activities, writing at the end of class and writing at the start of class, all stood out to me and are great activities which will help to enrich my future children's writing pieces and make the process more meaningful. I am extremely eager to return to the classroom where I will use all of these trends interchangeably to ensure that my future students become the expert writers that they can be. 

Jack Prelutsky once said that" one must not limit their challenges but challenge their limits." This is true in keeping with the many challenges to Writing, these would include for example, where writing requires simultaneous coordination of a variety of skills (phonics, grammar, spelling, vocabulary and reading), but with every challenge in writing, there is a trend which can work towards bettering or eliminating, altogether the problem mentioned, this would be process writing or grammar instruction. Further, writing has been said to have no prosodic elements to include, stress, juncture, pitch, or voice but utilizing the digital story telling will help to bring these elements to a piece of writing. By and large, there is clearly no excuse for me as an educator to not allow my future students to write and write well.