Writing about writing—by the Write Source staff

The National Writing Project (NWP) has caught my attention again. In my last blog entry, “Writing to Learn Revisited…Again,” I expressed my concern (alarm?) about an Education Week article discussing a writing-to-learn workshop for teachers in Oakland, California. As I stated, writing to learn has been around forever, and I thought it was pretty much a standard teaching strategy known about and used by most teachers. I also called NWP’s effectiveness into question since they are still spreading the word about writing to learn, some 20 or 30 years after it was first introduced.

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Education Week published an online article called “Writing to Learn” on August 27. Since I write about writing, and believe strongly in writing as a learning tool, I was interested in what the article had to say. My guess was that it would explain that writing to learn is a common strategy used in today’s classrooms—and that it is proving to be an effective learning tool for students.

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Writing is essentially a solitary act wherein writers put their fingers to the keyboard or pen to paper to create something that is truly their own. But writing should also be a communal or shared activity. Most writers, in fact, do their best work when they have the support of their peers. As educators Dan Kirby and Tom Liner state in their book Inside Out, “…learners and writers need to construct personal versions of the world around them, but then they also need to submit those unique versions to peers for response, negotiation, and confirmation.”

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I started teaching middle school language arts at the tender age of 22. A few years later, I started teaching high school English. I went straight from being a student in one classroom to being a teacher in another one.

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At a recent family get-together, a cousin and I were talking about her oldest daughter, Katlin, a high school sophomore-to-be. My cousin mentioned that Katlin had a required reading list for the summer as preparation for an honors English class. Frankenstein and Brave New World were two of the titles she mentioned. She then asked me what I thought about the choices.
I said that Katlin might be in for a rough go of it. And I left it at that.

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This blog entry is in response to a June 6, 2008, article at The Atlantic.com entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” In the article, the author, Professor X, shares his thoughts and feelings about his latest teaching assignments.

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“The narrative is the first story, the primal story, from which all others come. It is your story.” These thoughts by writer John Rouse speak clearly to the importance of narrative writing. I share them because I, too, feel that narrative writing is a valuable or, dare I say, the most important element in an effective writing program.

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Richard Nordquist’s June 16, 2008, blog entry, “Ten Pros on Prose,” lists 10 accomplished writers (including the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and E.B. White) who have written about their craft. Hyperlinks direct readers to additional blogs that “nutshell” each writer’s thoughts on writing.

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