As a writing teacher, I strive to provide a learning environment that engages my students with ideas, grants them an opportunity for genuine inquisitiveness, and fosters their competence to succeed in the world not only as employees but also as citizens. Regardless of students’ future fields of study or work, they will need to be able to digest disparate forms of information as well as to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate them in order to make educated judgments and solve problems. One of my most essential objectives is to foster students’ development of critical thinking skills through the practice of critical writing and reading. My classroom provides a challenging yet supportive environment in which students hone these skills. Furthermore, I endeavor to make my students aware of the diverse and complicated world around them by generating writing assignments that force them to connect to their social and political communities outside the walls of the classroom. I encourage them to move beyond graded academic exercises and into active cultural participation.
That writing is a skill learned mainly by doing is the most important thing I can convey to students. Like playing a fabulous violin concerto, continued practice is the only way to guarantee improvement. I often begin the semester by playing a selection from a Yo-Yo Ma CD or showing a video clip of a famous athlete. I ask my students if they believe these people were born so accomplished, or if they probably worked hard to achieve results. I assure them that writing is no different. To effectively break down the common student habit of beginning an essay the night before the due date, my writing assignments are three-tiered. Students work first on topic and thesis generation, then on drafting, and finally on revision. With this recursive writing process, students learn that writing is a circular, not linear, process, where doubling back to drafting is important even while revising and editing. Yo-Yo Ma plays scales when warming up for a performance; athletes stretch their muscles before a game. Students learn that in order to advance their skills, they must continually revisit the basics of writing. I use peer work-shopping as a tool to foster the classroom writing community; students are given a series of questions to answer, and they play editor with each other’s drafts. This stewardship galvanizes responsibility, and exposing students to the writing of their peers not only builds confidence but motivates. Finally, I pair traditional and holistic assessment in order to reward not just performance on essays but also growth over the course of the semester. I evaluate my student’s work for content as well as for technical proficiency (i.e. grammar, mechanics, organization), and students are rewarded extra credit for stylistic proficiency. Written assignments are returned with rubrics so students understand exactly how I arrived at their grades. This practice also lets students easily see emerging patterns in their writing.
Whether online or in person, I am an interactive teacher. Different students have dissimilar learning styles, and I address this in my classroom. I divide material into modules containing each of the four steps of the learning process (conception, experimentation, experience, and reflection), and I do my best to reach different types of learners through different methods of presentation. Students’ experiences in my classroom are as unique to their own needs as possible. I do all of this to give each student the best chance for success. I also try to teach self-reliance, however. Regardless of how hard I work to make sure that the students have all of the information and tools they need to do well in a course, the good grades students achieve are still the result of their own hard work and effort. Each and every student can attain excellence. My students sense enthusiasm for and dedication to my field. My job is to help them learn, but that they understand that I also enjoy learning from them.
