Writing Philosophy
My goal as a writing teacher is to help my students see themselves as writers and to value the thoughts and voices in their own heads and be able to organize, develop, and articulate those thoughts for the good, whether that be for their own good in challenging, changing, or confirming something in themselves, or for the good of the wider community around them.
In order to reach this goal for my students, I believe it is important to help them understand that writing, first and foremost, is a product of thinking and that by using (exercising) their writing muscle, it strengthens their thinking skills. Therefore, I believe helping students increase their cognitive awareness is the first step in teaching writing. By maintaining a strong focus in the classroom on metacognition, not only will students increase cognition, thereby improving writing skills, but they will also increase their self-efficacy, a key to stronger ethos as a writer.
Another vital understanding I work to help my students understand is that writing is a process. It is a complex process of continually circling back and forth between a number of cognitive, writing, communication, and learning tasks in order to ultimately make forward progress in meeting the goals of improved communication. Whether we are learners or teachers (who should always be learners), as we move through this complex process, we make continued connections that construct stronger, more vibrant writing, thinking, learning, and communication skills.
My pedagogical objective as a writing teacher, then, is to facilitate these vital connections through creating both a course and classroom atmosphere that challenge and develop students’ cognitive invention abilities, critical thinking skills, collaborative abilities, reflective practice, and attention to the rhetorical situation.
Three primary ways I manage these goals is by teaching and using the rhetorical tool of R.A.F.T. (Role, Audience, Format, Topic). I next put a heavy emphasis on pre-writing through brainstorming and idea generation activities. Then I rely heavily on peer review, teaching, modeling, and practicing a vast array of peer review forms. I see small-group work as not only extremely helpful but crucial to the typical writing student because a great percentage of a human’s learning is done through observing others and their modeling, either through direct interaction or through vicarious experiences. Small-group work facilitates this beautifully because a typical writing student is more willing to learn from his peers than his teachers, and the interaction is more active, thereby creating a more cognitively challenging learning environment. In addition, it also helps develop students’ collaborative abilities, which strengthen not only their learning, communication, and thinking skills for the remainder of their academic life, but also aids them in becoming a strong part of any professional discourse community in the future, thereby helping them become productive citizens, one of my “hidden” objectives as a teacher.