Entry 1: "What was the point of having them write?"

My experience in teaching writing in a classroom is little to none. I have had ample practice at assigning writing and then reading my students writing... and then judging my students writing. But I have never given constructive feed back, nor have I ever given my students time to revise and edit their pieces. The first (and only) time I assigned a writing project (a brochure on renewable energy) was two years ago to my Environmental class. It was a disaster. It was given at the end of the year and I didn't even grade it until after the last day of school. Looking back I can pinpoint numerous problems with the entire situation. First, the students didn't really have a true purpose to write. While they did have somewhat of a choice, there was no true audience. No one would read the brochures besides me, and even I wasn't really reading it to learn from them, I was reading it to judge how well they conveyed information. I had students plagiarizing all over the place. I don't think many of them even realized they were plagiarizing. I was never able to give them constructive feedback, so my students really didn't learn anything from the project. They didn't learn any new writing skills, and for those that just copied and pasted information, they didn't learn factual knowledge either. Which left me with the question: What was the point of having them write? Because of this disastrous experience, two things resulted. Number 1: I enrolled in the literacy program at Nazareth due to my new found and vital appreciation for the importance of literacy skills. Number 2: I did not assign another writing assignment to my Environmental class for almost two years. Side note: I have never even attempted to have my Earth Science kids write more than a summary because of the limited amount of teaching time due to curriculum requirements.

I have just recently (in the past week) assigned a research paper to my current Environmental students. The project required them to come up with a question or topic that they had a genuine interest in. Their research was to revolve around one of three topics that we had studied in class. I had my students spend an entire class period coming up with their topic or question. I visited with each student to give them feedback on their question. I felt that this portion of planning was important to ensure student buy in and alleviate anxiety over the writing process. I next provided my students with a graphic organizer to assist them in writing a generic five paragraph essay. I provided them time in class to do research and required that the graphic organizer be filled out before even beginning the writing process. Next week, I plan on having students participate in the "read around" peer review strategy to facilitate discussion and understanding of what good writing looks like. I think it is extremely important that students understand that writing a good paper requires more than one sitting down and pounding out some words.

There are numerous things that I would like to start incorporating into my Environmental class, but nothing that I have done on a continual basis.

While I have a better understanding of what should be done when asking students to write, I do not feel comfortable explaining the writing process to them because I'm not entirely sure myself how it is to be done. 

.... Dr. Jones you told me to stop!