It has often been said that one should teach a man how to fish and not give a man a fish. I believe that the NCTE shares the same beliefs although they are more explicit in their discourse. As teachers, we are taught about the importance of scaffolding, using the real experiences of students and integrating and combining the reading and writing curriculum. The question, however, is how often do we put into practice what we have learnt.
Initially, some of us come with the ideology that writing is something that is innate. We seem to believe that writing can just transmit itself psychically to the students and that our jobs will be to only hone those skills. We seem to believe that the traditionally methods of teaching writing are the only ways to achieve success. Fortunately for us, the NCTE has sought to disabuse of our false ideologies. It is so easy to fall back to the same old routine of talk and chalk, never remembering that the students are separate from teaching strategies and that like the times, the teaching strategies to teach writing are evolving and to quote scripture : “One cannot put new wine in old wineskins...”
As teachers, we need to be cognizant of the fact that everyone can write despite the age of the person or even how successful academically that person is. According to the NCTE, “Evidence shows that anyone can get better at writing...”- this really helps to clarify some of the misconceptions that we have as teachers. We seem to think that the older a person is, the less likely it is that the person will be able to write. We seem to forget that to be able to write, developing writers require support from teachers who are well versed in the art of writing and who also have a vast knowledge of strategies used to teach writing. Too often it seems that we remove ourselves from the equation. We seem to become complacent and blame a student’s lack of writing ability on laziness rather than on our ineffective strategies.
In addition, we seem to forget how we were at the student’s age when we had to complete the laborious task of learning to write. We forget the boredom, the frustration and the lack of motivation that we experienced. We forget how we grumbled about the boring topics and the stories that were just of no interest to us. In order to get the students to write, we must be able to provide tools for motivation, knowing as we do that the more they write, the better they become and of course, the higher their levels of motivation. This, according to the NCTE can be remedied by giving the students opportunities to choose books and topics outside of the school that they can relate to. We, as teachers, seem to have some misconstrued ideas that writing is only the finished product of thought processes. NCTE subtly reminds us that although we seem to be doing some of the process automatically, our students need to move step by step through the pre-writing, drafting, redrafting, writing and publishing stages. For some reason, we have become more concerned with ensuring that the students pass an exam instead of attending to their level of success in the process of writing. How can they know if we do not tell them about the multiple strategies for a wide range of problems faced in writing such as audience, task analysis etc?
We often complain about our students do not have imagination and that they have no imagination. What better tool can be used to hone those skills than writing? According to the NCTE, writing is a tool for generating ideas. Imagine how much more expressive our students can become with the use of personal journals and reflective observations! The pride that one experiences when we see that they learn how to write for different purposes and as a result, how to relate reading to writing, and eventually, how to talk, all through learning how to write is almost inexplicable. This is like a teacher’s paradise! So why then do we ignore the benefits of it or overlook it?
To conclude, writing, according to the NCTE, is the one tool that can develop many of the language strands. It should not be overlooked or underestimated but instead tapped to reach the students’ full potential.
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