Friday, June 21, 2013
Writing to Learn
The main focus of Chapter 2 in my book was what the authors dubbed WTLs, no nothing like WTFs! WTL stands for writing to learn. These are short, spontaneous, informal, personal pieces of writing that help students synthesize information. And even better, the authors claim that it's best not to grade them, so no sitting, poring over papers to find a zillion spelling, punctuation, grammatical errors, if one feels they have to grade them, or is mandated to grade by your school, they can easily be considered participation grades, you do it, you get the credit. How is this different from taking notes or answering standard end of the chapter questions? These activities are more than just simple recall of information, the authors ascertain that these activities are more beneficial because they require students to act on ideas and think, something that is sometimes left out in more traditional assignments. Getting students to act on and actually think about whatever the topic of study is, will help students learn more and retain information better. This chapter explained what WTLs are and why they are effective, they promise to provide examples of what these activities look like and how they can be used in the next two chapters, I'm looking forward to it!
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I like this concept. Although, don't you think there needs to be some structure at some point? In fact the exercise of not creating structure or grades is in itself a structure. After a student begins the exercise, how does a student begin to transpose their idea to other assignments? These are the questions I have. Like I said in the beginning, I like this concept, it brings value to every individual's contribution.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a useful and interesting book. I am a firm believer that writing to learn really works. This class taught me that. I'm not sure I'v ever gained so much knowledge in such a short period of time than I have with writing to learn. I'm interested to hear what other great things you and your book have to offer.
ReplyDeleteEldon, as far as structure goes, I might have glossed over that trying to make my blog short, but the authors do emphasize that for this work to be most effective, teachers have to spend some time setting the parameters, somethings through modeling, like a think aloud, other times by sharing examples of work, both high and low end. They do say that the short writings can often be nuggets that start a longer, what they coin "public" piece of writing, which is a piece of polished writing that evolves from the writing process. I think that the ideas in themselves can be used to introduce new topics or help students see relationships between concepts. I hope this addresses what you were asking.
ReplyDeleteWill have to read your further reviews of your book. The idea sounds interesting and of course we all like to grade less papers. I like the idea of taking the grade stress out of it for the student as long as they are benefiting from the work. We always talk about the A-F system and when we can get away from that on assignments I think we are going in a good direction. I look forward to hearing more about this concept.
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