Teaching kids to write...how do we do it?

Retrieved November 12th 2016 from: BBC World Service

One of the things I wanted to talk about this week was how unprepared I felt going into high school and university. When I started my Undergraduate program at Brock University, I had only ever written a handful of essay papers in English, let alone ever looked at proper formatting and citing methods. If someone had asked me what APA or MLA or Chicago style formatting were in those first few weeks of school, I would not have known how to answer them. 

Are we setting these kids up for success or failure by teaching them the typical Introduction, three main paragraphs and a Conclusion? Nowhere in the writing strand of the curriculum does it say that this is the required format of writing. The curriculum states that students should "draft and revise their writing, using a variety of informational, literary, and graphic forms and stylistic elements appropriate for the purpose and audience". I personally think that by teaching students they must write using the "Hamburger" method, (your top bun is your introduction, your lettuce, tomato and hamburger patty are your three development paragraphs and your bottom bun is your conclusion) holds children back and doesn't allow creativity. 

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In all honesty I think that teachers are set on this style of writing because it is easier to teach and easier to evaluate. We read an article this week that focused on a model that has been introduced to teachers called the IMSCI model, this model focuses on teaching students how to brainstorm and how to get their ideas out. I know personally as a student, being forced to write 3 development paragraphs was always very intimidating because I have never been able to force myself to have more ideas, even when writing exams, I would always race through it, put down my main ideas and forcing me to stare at my paper would not magically make me have more to say.

Students should be given the liberty of writing in a way that they are comfortable, I understand that there must be guidelines that have to be followed for evaluation and assessment purposes, but restricting students to a certain style of writing is not going to allow them to do their best work. As many of my fellow teacher candidates have noticed in their practicum sessions, many of the students simply want to rush through their work and get it done which causes several grammatical and sentence structure errors as opposed to taking the time to focus on those things, they simply want to rush through their three paragraphs and be done with it because that is what they have been taught to do. 

The curriculum states that students should be able to "reflect on and identify their strengths as writers, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful at different stages in the writing process". In my eyes, this means it is our obligation as teachers to provide students with as many possible opportunities to write as possible in many different ways to help them from a young age learn how to build on the ideas they have rolling around inside their heads. We need to make sure that we are setting these kids up for success and that they are able to brainstorm what is the most important that needs to be said about a topic, find those key elements and be able to elaborate on those key elements instead of trying to pull things from thin air. 

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Retrieved November 12th 2016 from: Twitter