Kuunari

The series “Reading Write Like This” is a number of essays I wrote last year while reading Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts by Kelly Gallagher for a graduate class. While the book fails to delve into how race and culture can impact learning, it is full of engaging, student focused activities to teach writing. I highly recommend this book to teachers of writing. Even though this book is geared towards high school writing classes, I found a lot that was applicable for my elementary classroom.

In any subject area, teachers try to make the learning relevant to help students connect their learning with their own lives and the real world. Within the subject of writing, this is both necessary and much easier than most other subjects. Writing surrounds us. We read social media and blog posts, we text and email each other and we are constantly absorbing new information through text.

If students want to be able to impact the world, to be able to change the world, they must be able to clearly and concisely convey ideas to others. Sometimes it will be as simple as sharing news with friends over social media while other times it will be trying to convince a larger readership of something important or vital. 

As the National Commission on Writing stated, writing is vital for employment for current and future students. “People who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired, and if already working, are unlikely to last long enough to be considered for promotion.” (3) Even in education, I have numerous examples of fellow teachers and administrators whose writing is verbose and imprecise, leading to misunderstandings and a lack of respect.

I myself send upwards of 20 emails a day to parents, fellow staff members, and supervisors. My ability to craft coherent passages makes all the difference in making my point heard and conveying information. Outside of my work, I am part of a number of organizations whose communication is done entirely through websites like slack or email. We live in a busy, asynchronous, increasingly virtual world. It’s self-apparent to me that students must be prepared to write in such a world.  

I currently teach 4th grade in a International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme public school in Minnesota. We are guided by an action cycle that encourages the students to move from passive learning to being an agent of change. We write nearly every day, and my focus for my fourth graders has been to make them think about and be aware of the audience for their writing. Some of our writing assignments include letter writing or posts on discussion boards. Other writing gets published in a classroom newspaper or in a class book.

I try to make sure that we are not simply writing to “hit” all the standards, but to help the students develop their authorial voice through a wide variety of writing styles and formats. I found myself resonating with Gallagher’s statement: “writing well does not begin with teaching students how to write; it begins with teaching students why they should write.” (7)  It is a belief that drives my writing instruction. 

Still, there are a number of ways that I could encourage even more connection between my students writing and the real world. The first is to use model writing. There is only two times this year that the students saw me writing and grappling with what to say. Most of the time, I send my students off quickly to start writing on their own, thinking that they will need more time to explore their own voices. Second will be bring in more mentor texts.

While it can be challenging at times to find mentor texts at a 4th grade level, there are a number of resources that I should use more to develop a collection of texts that students can use to analyze and build their understanding of the six styles of writing. 

The six purposes of writing, while sharing some things in common with my school’s current “genre” approach to writing, are an excellent way to organize styles of writing and allow students to develop their topics at a much deeper level. Every year I have students who write descriptive pieces about the sport they are currently playing, and I really struggle to find ways to help them think about and write at a deeper level about the sport.

The six purposes can help guide those students to come up with richer topics about the sport. It makes their pieces both more interesting for the reader to read, and more interesting for the writer to write. Ultimately, that is the goal with any writing curriculum.