How We Teach Writing is Absurd

The professional development instructor pulled up a sentence by Sandra Cisneros on Zoom. He was modeling a lesson for our teacher cohort. He read it out loud. Then he said, "This is a beautiful sentence by Sandra Cisneros. Let's use this as inspiration for our own writing." And that was it.

Imagine a soccer coach who shows a group of kids a video of a professional player kicking a ball into a goal. Then that coach leaves the kids to figure out how to do that themselves. That would be ridiculous.

A soccer coach would teach their players how to make a shot like a professional. The coach would teach them how to position their foot, where to make contact with the ball, how to decide when to shoot, and how to be aware of where the goal keeper is. And then he would provide a structured way for his players to practice each of those skills separately.

This writing instructor didn't know how to teach kids how to emulate a sentence like Sandra Cisneros.

He left us hanging.

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The instructor asked our cohort of teacher attendees to break off in groups. Once inside the Teams breakout group, every teacher in my group had the same question. Why aren't we teaching kids to write effective sentences? My kids don't know how to write because we're not teaching them how. We should focus on written language instruction. This curriculum isn't useful.

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I want to break the writers workshop model.

The writing curriculums our district handed to us asked me to teach kids to put their personality on the page - to encourage kids to write in their own style, and to "get inspired" by their favorite authors.

And that was it. The instruction didn't teach kids HOW to write in their own style or what "inspiration" would do to improve their own writing.

It's like teaching a child to play soccer by telling them to get in touch with themselves and watch a few soccer games, then go play in a 45 min game. It's absurd, but that's what most teachers do in writing classes today.

r/writingisacraft

Submitted December 16, 2022 at 12:50PM by AdventurousYam8 https://ift.tt/X7HOpso