Write to Learn / Learn to Write in May!
January 1, 1970
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Welcome to Issue Four
Write to Learn / Learn to Write in May!
“The pen is the tongue of the mind.”~ Miguel de Cervantes
This month’s newsletter will center on a topic that will be a continuing feature each month: writing to learn. Writing to learn is not just writing essays or having students produce answers on a test. When students write to learn, they engage in activities designed to help them create meaning from what they read or learn in class.
Writing to learn is a tool to help students understand and shape meaning from the material they study. The emphasis is on the writing and not on a product at the end of the writing assignment. Writing to learn activities are those that require students to use critical thinking skills in a variety of ways to determine what they know—to connect with the subject matter. For example, in a health class where students are studying first aid, an instructor could ask students to just retell the steps that they are supposed to follow in an accident. In a writing to learn activity, the instructor could give students a scenario—a description of an accident victim’s condition—and ask students to briefly describe what they should do to assist the victim. One activity is a lackluster regurgitation of information and the other is a reaction to a potential real-life event. One engages students and increases learning. One does not.
Just as every teacher is a teacher of reading, so every teacher is also a teacher of writing. Yes, enthusiastic or not, every teacher is already a teacher of writing. If you are not an English teacher, you probably have serious doubts about how you can incorporate writing lessons in your classroom, how you will find the time to grade the stacks of papers that are bound to accumulate, how to assign point values, how to use assignments to increase student knowledge, what to do if…well, the list of issues can be endless. These worrisome issues will be covered in future newsletters. However, teachers who engage students in meaningful writing activities every day will be the first to tout the benefits of guiding students as they learn to think on paper.
√ A good way to begin using writing as a learning tool in your classroom is to get organized yourself. You will need a place to store your ideas, activities, or prompts. You can do this electronically or in a paper folder, or even on index cards. You should find a method of organization that will allow you to quickly find ideas and activities that will appeal to your students and that will enable them to interact with material in new, engaging, and useful ways.
√ Next, when you make your daily plans, think about how you can integrate writing activities into your lesson so that the writing students do will not stand alone, but rather will enhance their work. For example, in a geography class where students are studying arctic regions, it makes no sense to begin class with a writing prompt asking them to describe a friend or to explain a process. Instead, an appropriate prompt would be one that arises from the lesson. For example, show students a photograph of a dwelling in an arctic region and ask them to list the ways that the dwelling is similar to and different from homes in their neighborhood. Or, give students a chart of temperatures for a certain month in both their own region and the arctic one and ask them to draw conclusions about problems and benefits in each.
√ It is important for students to spend time each day writing. You do not (and should not) have to plan for students to write for a long time, but thinking on paper is what students should be doing each day. While activities such as movies, mobiles, worksheets, book jackets, game boards, coats-of-arms, puzzles, cutting and pasting, skits, collages, and posters all have a valid place in classrooms, they should be used in conjunction with writing activities, not in place of them. If students are to learn to think deeply about the topics they are studying, they should write about them.
Although future newsletters will involve topics such as how to integrate writing to learn in your daily plans, how to manage grading, and giving students a voice, you can get started with some of the activities in the list below. Find the ones that you think will work well for your students and adapt them to meet the individual requirements of your class. Don’t forget: writing to learn activities do not have to be lengthy to be effective. Rather, they should be designed to stimulate thought and they should be done daily.
• Choose a person, place, object, event, or idea from the unit you are studying. Or give your students a list of topics in each category to choose from. Search the free-content encyclopedia, Wikipedia.com for a brief sample article to use an as example for your students to model. Ask your students to then write their own Wikipedia article about their topic. Ask students to share their article with classmates.
• A similar activity is to ask students to devise their own definition for a word in the information they are learning.
• Find an unusual expression, saying, or motto and ask students to apply it to the topic under study. Or have them create a similar one that could be applied to the subject.
• Not all writing to learn activities should be in the form of sentences or paragraphs. Making lists is a useful way to include writing to learn activities in daily lessons. Ask students to brainstorm content-knowledge items, effects of an event, causes of an event, personal traits, mistakes a historical figure made, alternative actions that could have been taken, reactions, words associated with the unit…anything that can help them broaden their knowledge through engaging the text and a pen.
• Ask students who are learning about a historical figure, an event, a process, a place, or any other suitable subject to list five facts. If the facts can meet the familiar “who, what, when, where, why” format, your students will have extra guidance for thinking about the topic.
• Use visual prompts for those students who are visual learners. For example, show a movie clip and ask students to write a short summary of what they saw or to comment on the action or rewrite the ending or explain how it relates to the lesson. Try Google Images to find photos and Google Video for clips.
• Use an audio clip in a similar way for those students who are auditory learners. http://www.freeaudioclips.com is a good site to find clips.
• After student brainstorm ideas together orally, add a written component to reinforce the concepts generated by the group. Students can then group and classify the their ideas.
”The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.”~ Jean Malaquais