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Texts
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Nancie Atwell, In the Middle.
Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1998.
(This is a second edition. Do
not purchase the first edition.) |
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Zemelman and Daniels, A Community of
Writers. Heinemann,
1988. |
What you will
do
 Research:
Each lesson asks you to do research on a particular topic or set
of topics. The research may involve reading, teacher interviews,
observation, and working with students.
Discuss:
You will share what you are discovering through threaded
discussions.
Reflect:
At the end of each lesson you will write a reflection summarizing
and responding to what you have learned.
Contribute
to two resource banks (below): an annotated bibliography
of resources for teaching writing (articles, books, Web sites.), and a
list of activities for teaching writing (the Idea Exchange).
These banks will be available to you and your mentor teacher.
We teachers need all the help we can get.
One class activity will be to build a database of great resources
for teaching all aspects of writing.
I want you to find and take a look at some books, articles or Web
sites on writing/teaching writing that your mentor teacher or other
teachers in your school find useful. These might be books in the school’s curriculum center,
books used in a class, or Web sites your mentor teacher uses as a
resource. To build our bibliography, each of you should post a review of
one textbook on writing, one Web site with ideas for teachers, and one
article in a professional journal on some aspect of teaching of writing
over the semester. These will be
posted on
Blackboard in the "Bibliography
of Great Resources" discussion topic. Pick
materials to review that you think are useful for us to know about.
The first must be posted
by lesson 5 the second by lesson 8, and the
third by lesson 11.
Format
for Bibliographic Entries
| Provide a full source citation,
in MLA style. |
| Provide a one-paragraph
annotation in which you describe (in one or two sentences) the focus
of the article, book, or site and the level for which it is
appropriate. In the
rest of the paragraph give us a synopsis of the main point, the
approach, the nature of the book and its potential for teaching
writing. |
Did
your mentor teacher blow you away with a fantastic mini-lesson on
subordination? Did you read
about a great way to teach students to eschew clichés?
The Idea Exchange is set aside for postings of “great ideas”
for teaching some of the nuts and bolts of writing.
Each of you should post at least three activities to the "Idea
Exchange" topic in Blackboard over the course
of the semester. This site is then available for you to use as a resource for
current and future teaching. You may get your ideas from anywhere except
the required readings for the course (Atwell, Zemelman and Daniels):
your mentor teachers, English Journal or another
professional journal, books or sites you are reviewing for the
bibliography (described in the next section), the Internet, a conference session,
bathroom walls in the faculty lounge :). Make sure the sources are credible so the activities
are truly “tried and true.” The more activities you post the better,
so we can accumulate lots. When you go to the site you will see my
posting and the format (you can also print the format from this
PDF
file). And let’s aim for a range of activities, so
your three postings should be on different topics.
Here are some possible topics:
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Prewriting strategies |
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Revision (how to re-see
writing by layering, changing point of view, adding description or
detail, etc.) |
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Improving organization |
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Writing intros and
conclusions |
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Avoiding logical
fallacies |
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Writing description |
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Writing dialogue |
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Issues of style:
tightening and eliminating wordiness, sentence combining,
sentence patterns, avoiding cliches, slang and jargon, active verbs,
etc. etc., |
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Writing summaries,
abstracts, precis |
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Strategies relevant to
writing in various expository modes:
persuasive, argumentative, personal narrative or memoir, |
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Strategies for writing
in various literary modes |
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Paragraph organization,
structure, coherence, development |
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How to proofread |
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Conventions of usage,
punctuation that apply to writing (other than the ones in Atwell Chapter
6). |
The
best activities are those that engage the students and teach something
worthwhile. Avoid
activities that seem like busy work.
Avoid “skill and drill” activities-- exercises lifted from
grammar-usage textbooks. The three activities you post should be on
different subjects. I encourage you to read others’ postings and respond.
Maybe one activity you read will trigger another; maybe you try
it and it works or doesn’t—post some feedback.
The first must be posted by lesson 5 the second by
lesson 8, and the
third by lesson 11.
Listserv (remove?)
“Help; I have to teach a mini-lesson on proleptic devices and I
don’t even know what they are!”
“How do I get students enthusiastic about participles?”
“One student keeps writing stories from soap operas in her journal.”
“What do I do about late papers?” The listserv is our
help-line, the place to call for help or ideas from classmates, tell us
something amazing that we should all hear (good or bad), pick our
collective brains. Messages
you send on the listserv go to everyone in the class, and replies to
messages also go to everyone in the class. This is the place for talk
that isn’t specific to the lessons and on-line discussions.
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