One of the presentations I attended at last month's TESOL Convention made me think about the types of support materials I provide my students -- and how often I expect them to "just know" things.
"Teaching Writing in a Multilevel Mainstream Classroom," led by three teachers and a professor of teacher education, took us through an eight-week unit on writing fictional narratives with students in grade four. But the lesson had a twist. Before writing the stories, each student had to research a particular animal from a scientific point of view, describing, among other things, its behaviors and habitat. Once they had that part down and had moved on to the fictional piece, those behaviors had to be reflected in the character development. The habitat became the setting.
Let me first say how impressed I was that these teachers had been able to devote eight weeks (eight weeks!) to this lesson; I know that effective writing instruction is surprisingly time-consuming. But what stood out for me most was the range of support materials they had provided for their students. Among them:
* a graphic organizer for the research component
* a separate graphic organizer for story development
* a list of possible character traits using enriched vocabulary
* a chart to back up each proposed character trait with evidence in the form of behaviors (my personal favorite)
* a list of transitional phrases to help with order and pacing
It's easy to forget that many students don't carry these structures or techniques around in their heads already, and to simply instruct them to go ahead and write. This workshop helped me to keep in mind that even the most basic writing assignments are really not so basic. They require a pretty wide range of tools if they are to help students develop their own internal templates, which is really the ultimate goal.
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