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This may be the place to mention that the "writing process" -- a philosophical approach to the teaching of writing which burst upon the scene about ten years ago [ed.: Lucy Calkins?]* and has attracted passionately loyal adherents--isn't the one and only way to teach writing. Junior high and high school teachers, along with college professors, are telling us that students who have been brought up only on the writing process are hooked on "finding their own voices"--spending enormous amounts of time for very small output and having trouble shifting among different kinds of writing. For example, they have trouble with expository prose; producing clear, written summaries; or writing on demand. Students are ill-served by the exclusivity and chauvinism which unfortunately have framed the cultish aspects of a good idea.
source:
Finding Ways to Helpk Your Struggling Writers (pdf file)
by Priscilla L. Vail
Excerpted from Words Fail Me! -- How Language Works & What Happens When It Doesn't
I guess we could pretty much see that one coming, right?
* yup, Lucy Calkins: "That educator is Lucy McCormick Calkins, the visionary founding director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Begun in 1981, the think tank and teacher training institute has since trained hundreds of thousands of educators across the country. Calkins is one of the original architects of the “workshop” approach to teaching writing to children, which holds that writing is a process, with distinct phases, and that all children, not just those with innate talent, can learn to write well. She is author of some 20 books, including the best-selling The Art of Teaching Writing (250,000 sold). According to the project web site, books by its leaders are “widely regarded as foundational to language arts education throughout the English-speaking world.”
The Lucy Calkins Project by Barbara Feinberg
help for the struggling writer
sentence combining exercise
we're starting a copybook
man-eaters of Kumaon - text reconstruction
6 comments:
Sigfried Engelmann said this about the "writing as a process" approach:
"The process is to brainstorm, write, rewrite, re-rewrite, edit, and publish, or something along those lines. This is among the more brain-dead approaches you could take to teach writing effectively. Why? Because, you want to give kids the idea that they can write as fluently as they talk. Yes, Virginia, they have to learn some conventions. But the main goal of the program should be to let them express themselves on a topic—without straying in a manner that creates conventionally acceptable prose. In other words, they do it fast. Today they complete a piece; tomorrow they complete another, and both of them are pretty good. How do you do that? The answer is you provide kids with templates that are in standard English and that help them with the parts of an essay they typically screw up. They copy the rote parts and make up the rest. Then they read what they've written out loud and realize that it sounds pretty good."
oh my gosh --- he's already been there!
thanks!
For example, they have trouble with expository prose; producing clear, written summaries; or writing on demand.
Oh, yes! This is where my boys are after 3-4 years of "Writer's Workshop" (one time, my younger son had to write and rewrite the same piece for about 10 weeks).
I have so many horror stories about the process. But the end result is this: I have two otherwise academically capable kids who hate to write, who have terrible writer's blocks, and who don't know how to do expository writing at all...
And if reader's workshop had been implemented as enthusiastically as writer's workshop, I'm sure they'd both hate to read, too. Luckily, one of them escaped that fate.
I have two otherwise academically capable kids who hate to write, who have terrible writer's blocks, and who don't know how to do expository writing at all...
Same thing here, Vicki. After years of mimicing structure points to regurgitate on the state tests, my bright kid is now frozen.
So, along with all of the other stuff I have to finally force him to write, which I have done.
He even forgot cursive since no one has made him use it for years. He writes like a third grader, very labored.
Now, after having him write (and rewrite) several short bios and a couple of essays in cursive, he seems to be getting smoother and faster.
"...you want to give kids the idea that they can write as fluently as they talk"
this strikes me as a profoundly
bad idea. certainly in my own
experience, writing demands
constant revision. i've hit
the backspace key at least 20 times
in composing this short paragraph;
this is just about typical.
i correct myself when i talk, too ...
probably a lot more than most people ...
but to give up one of writing's
chief advantages in the interest
of what look to me to be
dangerously close to "self-esteem"
related issues? --
why, it's un-englemann!
(the rest of the para strikes me
as just about right; i'm really
just picking a nit here ...)
I STILL want to know how the British teach writing instruction.
The Brits produce remarkably fluent writers; their output is so huge it's bizarre.
(Christopher Hitchens, Niall Fergusson)
I agree that it's a little strange to talk about writing being like talking, but I think he's probably talking about a form of fluency we don't produce....
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