Despite our best intentions, we might be hurting our writing instruction with some of our habits. Learn which ones you might be unintentionally using.
Using Daily Writing Prompts
Are you using daily writing prompts as your only source of a writing curriculum? While they can be great once in a while, using daily writing prompts can start to have negative effects on your students’ writing and hurt your writing instruction.
Our young students have a lot to say and a lot of imagination. Using writing prompts day after day will begin to stifle their creativity. Students need to be able to choose their own topics to write about. Yes, they will need experience with writing prompts in order to do well on state testing but that doesn’t mean our entire curriculum should be built on daily prompts.
Giving students the freedom to decide what to write about rather than being told what to write will increase their enthusiasm for writing. You’ll start to see longer writing and more engaged students.
Related Post: Why Writing Prompts Should Not Be Used As Your Writing Curriculum
Publishing Every Writing Piece
Another habit that is affecting your writing instruction is having students publish every writing piece. While I absolutely love and encourage teaching each step in the writing process, it is not necessary to go through the entire process and publish each piece.
I like to model my writing curriculum similar to a published author. Published authors write, edit, revise and sometimes never publish some of their writing. Instead they choose their favorite writing piece to polish up and send off into the world of publishing. I love having my students go through and pick the piece they’d like to publish at the end of a writing unit.
When students are not publishing every writing piece, they take more care on the ones they do publish. Publishing a piece of writing should be exciting and special. When we publish every piece we write, it no longer becomes special but is something we have to do. It loses its publishing magic!
Related Post: The 5 Steps in the Writing Process
Lacking a Clear Learning Path
Teaching writing can be one of the most challenging subjects to teach. Most school districts do not provide a curriculum for writing and most universities do not teach aspiring teachers how to teach writing to students. All of this can result in a lot of overwhelm and teachers struggling to teach writing.
If we plan writing the way we might plan out a unit for math or reading, our writing instruction would have a clear learning path. We would teach our lessons to build upon each other to reach our end goal.
Let’s look at an example. Say we want to teach our students to write an opinion piece. To start figuring out our learning path we consult our state standards.
What standards are students expected to learn? What skills do students need in order to meet that standard?
Working backwards from the standards we can create a series of skills that students need to be taught. This provides us with a clear learning path for our writing instruction. After we know the skills, we can use a pre-assessment to determine where to start our lessons.
Related Post: Using a Writing Pre-Assessment