TE 848: Methods of Writing Instruction -- Fall 2011
Instructor: Anne Heintz (heintza1@msu.edu)
Reflection: TE 848 helped me think about how I teach writing and provided me many opportunities to hone my personal skills as a writer. I completed this course during the time my school was considering a 1:1 laptop program and had just become a Google Apps for Education school. This influenced my choice of teaching project and I chose to study the effects of implementing digital reader's notebooks using Google Docs. Through the genre lens of the course, I chose to focus another project on writing fiction. My work example is the first chapter of a middle grades novel that I am continuing to work on and hope to publish.
Description: This course explores writing theory, research, and pedagogy. Writing processes, strategies, assessments, and environments for teaching K-12 writers are addressed. Through coursework, students develop the ability to design and implement strategies for teaching and assessing writing, differentiate writing instruction for diverse learners at various stages of development, and use and critically evaluate technology-based writing instruction.
Module 2
Part 1: Think about and judge the recommendations set forth in the The Neglected R: The Need for a Writing Revolution (National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, 2003). Offer your opinion on which recommendation(s) deserve priority or the most attention. What is the greatest challenge in implementing the recommendations set forth in the Commission’s report? What is to be done? What can we (teachers, Reading Specialists, higher education faculty, researchers, community members) do?
Part 2: Describe ways in which genre pedagogy, as you interpret it from the Cooper and Hyland readings, fits in with your current practice and/or ways it is different. Knowing what you do of other models or ways of teaching writing, what are potentials of this model? We'll be using a genre lens in this course. Using the Cooper and Hyland readings, discuss the presence and implications of the genres that seem to be most prevalent in the lives of your students, youth or adults today.
Part 3: Using the Daniels and Zemelman chapter or Graham video, conclude by sharing how you see yourself as a teacher, staff developer or researcher of writing, and how you’d like to develop further.
Module 3
Module 4
Find a few quotes, excerpts or sections in Ralph Fletcher’s What a Writer Needs that struck you. . . explain why you found those excerpts interesting, helpful, moving, etc. What are a few key ideas or strategies that you took from Fletcher that you might use in your own teaching? Your own writing? Please remember that initial posts should be approximately 1000-1200 posted directly in ANGEL (this does not include any attachments).
Module 5
Part 1: The Hicks text p.128-134 set forth a number of questions--Select any two of these questions to answer regarding students, subjects, or spaces. (You don't have to answer two from each two category, two across all categories.) Please type the question you are answering as well as your answer.
Part 2: Using ideas from the assessment chapter, the whole text and/or the readings, revisit one of your previous posts from this semester and describe how digital writing could play a part in what you've mentioned before. It may be your ideas on how to save time or to better communicate about writing with colleagues from Module Two; it may be digital writing's place in part of the genre instructional cycle, it may be instructional ideas you want to try from the expository module; it may be one of Fletcher's strategies you want to try.
Pick out an idea you've already had, and write 600 words or so on how you'd adapt or "re-mode" that idea for a context that makes use of digital writing (be it blogs, Google Docs or other collaborative word processors, wikis, social networks, photo essays, digital stories, portfolios, or something else). You may consider writing about how you'd prepare students to use the technology, what learning objectives would be important to you, how you would observe student progress (See Merchant, 2005), how you would assess formatively and summatively, how this would further your entire writing instruction agenda for your students.
Module 6
If, and if so, how, has your thinking about poetry changed? If it has not changed, what are some points from this module that help to reinforce your understanding and provide you with additional resources?
Genre Exploration Project
You have the opportunity to select 2 genres to explore more in depth and to write in this course. I encourage you to select two genres that are new to you, genres you have not visited for a while, and/or genres that are common in your subject area of field. I encourage you to write with your students in one or more of these genres. You may tie the genre exploration project in part or whole to your Teaching Project, although you do not have to.
Teaching Project
In this project, you will connect learning about writing theory, research and pedagogy in your current setting. This could be a new genre or an aspect of the writing process in your field, grade level, or discipline. You will conduct online MSU library research in this area to review the research and recommended practices while, if you are currently teaching, implementing something in an educational setting. The purpose of the teaching project is for you to go in depth with one topic related to writing, to familiarize yourself with the research literature in this area, to improve your teaching and the writing of your students, to write in an interesting and technically-skillful way about the topic, and to think about pursuing an authentic audience for your work.
Part 1: Think about and judge the recommendations set forth in the The Neglected R: The Need for a Writing Revolution (National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, 2003). Offer your opinion on which recommendation(s) deserve priority or the most attention. What is the greatest challenge in implementing the recommendations set forth in the Commission’s report? What is to be done? What can we (teachers, Reading Specialists, higher education faculty, researchers, community members) do?
Part 2: Describe ways in which genre pedagogy, as you interpret it from the Cooper and Hyland readings, fits in with your current practice and/or ways it is different. Knowing what you do of other models or ways of teaching writing, what are potentials of this model? We'll be using a genre lens in this course. Using the Cooper and Hyland readings, discuss the presence and implications of the genres that seem to be most prevalent in the lives of your students, youth or adults today.
Part 3: Using the Daniels and Zemelman chapter or Graham video, conclude by sharing how you see yourself as a teacher, staff developer or researcher of writing, and how you’d like to develop further.
Module 3
Module 4
Find a few quotes, excerpts or sections in Ralph Fletcher’s What a Writer Needs that struck you. . . explain why you found those excerpts interesting, helpful, moving, etc. What are a few key ideas or strategies that you took from Fletcher that you might use in your own teaching? Your own writing? Please remember that initial posts should be approximately 1000-1200 posted directly in ANGEL (this does not include any attachments).
Module 5
Part 1: The Hicks text p.128-134 set forth a number of questions--Select any two of these questions to answer regarding students, subjects, or spaces. (You don't have to answer two from each two category, two across all categories.) Please type the question you are answering as well as your answer.
Part 2: Using ideas from the assessment chapter, the whole text and/or the readings, revisit one of your previous posts from this semester and describe how digital writing could play a part in what you've mentioned before. It may be your ideas on how to save time or to better communicate about writing with colleagues from Module Two; it may be digital writing's place in part of the genre instructional cycle, it may be instructional ideas you want to try from the expository module; it may be one of Fletcher's strategies you want to try.
Pick out an idea you've already had, and write 600 words or so on how you'd adapt or "re-mode" that idea for a context that makes use of digital writing (be it blogs, Google Docs or other collaborative word processors, wikis, social networks, photo essays, digital stories, portfolios, or something else). You may consider writing about how you'd prepare students to use the technology, what learning objectives would be important to you, how you would observe student progress (See Merchant, 2005), how you would assess formatively and summatively, how this would further your entire writing instruction agenda for your students.
Module 6
If, and if so, how, has your thinking about poetry changed? If it has not changed, what are some points from this module that help to reinforce your understanding and provide you with additional resources?
Genre Exploration Project
You have the opportunity to select 2 genres to explore more in depth and to write in this course. I encourage you to select two genres that are new to you, genres you have not visited for a while, and/or genres that are common in your subject area of field. I encourage you to write with your students in one or more of these genres. You may tie the genre exploration project in part or whole to your Teaching Project, although you do not have to.
Teaching Project
In this project, you will connect learning about writing theory, research and pedagogy in your current setting. This could be a new genre or an aspect of the writing process in your field, grade level, or discipline. You will conduct online MSU library research in this area to review the research and recommended practices while, if you are currently teaching, implementing something in an educational setting. The purpose of the teaching project is for you to go in depth with one topic related to writing, to familiarize yourself with the research literature in this area, to improve your teaching and the writing of your students, to write in an interesting and technically-skillful way about the topic, and to think about pursuing an authentic audience for your work.
