Different Writing techniques = Better Teaching

Reflecting upon my time at Hawthorne and through this course of Writing Across the Curriculum (and my entire year during my Bachelor of Education) I have learned that there are many different teaching resources, and strategies for helping students improve their literacy and writing skills. While my content area is English, I know that different kinds of writing techniques, strategies and resources can help stimulate student creativity and writing ability all across the curriculum. Most students don't respond well to simply writing a formal essay on a given to which they have no connection to. In this case students will often be bored, disinterested and no produce their best work. However by connecting writing to the subject matter they are learning and giving them creative choice and freedom to make the writing piece their own, they will produce much better pieces of writing.

For instance early in the semester, we learned about different strategies for teaching poetry. Instead of simply having students read the same Robert Frost poem every year and have them create a poem about winter, it is much more engaging to find a variety of formats of poetry. Have the students explore everything from Haikus, to spoken word/rap poetry, to funny poems which they can relate to in their lives. After that in the creative writing assignment, give them choice yet make restrictions so the students won't get lost in their choice. The "Why I Love Math/Why I Hate Math" exercise is a great example. Or just like at Hawthorne, creating a long list of assignments which the students can chose from and make their own works very efficiently as well.

Finally, in this course with all the blog postings and different assignments, I have come across many great resources which I will be using in my classes in the future in all sorts of different subjects. From graphic organizers, to videos, to project ideas, to jazz chants for social studies it all works in a great cross curricular manner. I would be excited to test out the unit plan my group created which merges geography and writing. At the end of the course, I feel more confident in teaching writing both in language class and  in other subjects as well.