My Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing

I believe that teaching writing does not always have to be taught in one specific manner. There are many different ways in which to teach students the art of writing. In my future classroom, I plan to incorporate journal writing along with on-demand writing prompts to assist the students to write faster when they are pushed for time. Along with having on-demand prompts, I also want to create a Writing Workshop where the students write a creative piece and share it with their classmates for critiquing. I really enjoyed doing this in my Teaching Writing and Composition Class and feel as though it would be an effective tool for the future.

Included with teaching writing is the teaching of grammar. My belief about the teaching of grammar is that it should not be forgotten or ignored. Students should learn the rules of grammar in high school so that they are prepared for college. To teach grammar, I want to execute it in an inclusive way that helps the students see their mistakes in their own writing. The problem with the standard way of teaching grammar is that most students do not apply the work they complete on the grammar worksheets to their own writing. To fix this error, I plan to hold workshops over various grammatical errors that I often notice occur in my students’ writing. This way the entire class can benefit from the given exercise. I also hope to teach Harry Noden’s Image Grammar because it helps the students vary their sentence structures and create more descriptive and effective sentences.

Lastly, I believe that grading students’ writing can be extremely subjective. For this reason, I plan to utilize Holistic, Analytic, and Narrative techniques to grade my students’ writing. I also plan to hand out a rubric for each writing assignment so that my students will know exactly what I want for each prompt or assignment. This way there will be no unknowns in my class and every student will have the opportunity to succeed. Finally, I want to create a learning environment in my future writing classroom that inspires every student to believe that what they have to say in their writing does matter because I truly do care.