Friday was an in-school PD day. We began with a community circle that included all of us, teachers, the custodian, the administrative assistant, student teachers, and principal. In our own ways, we spoke about what it was that made us most proud of our school. There are numerous advantages to being at Holy Rosary. Without the problems faced by many school communities, we are obligated to continuously improve our practise.
Our attention then turned to writing. Our purpose was to develop ideas that would improve the writing quality of all students. It is important that the principal and teachers write. It is important for at least two reasons: First, it improves our ability to communicate effectively for our own purposes, and secondly, it serves as a model for students that we practice what we preach. Abby Hoffman used to say: "Don't tell me what you believe; tell me what you do. Then I will tell you what you believe." Good intentions often produce little because of 'do as I say not as I do' syndrome.
We talked about the importance of keyboarding skills to the writing process. First drafts ought to be done on the computer. Students need to be able to get their thoughts and ideas down as efficiently as possible. When the text is in the computer, it becomes much easier to shape. Outliner software, like Kidspiration and Smart Ideas, can be useful as a preparation for writing. It would be a worthwhile goal to have all graduates able to key at 40 words per minute accurately. From my own experience, this would give an invaluable edge to our graduating students.
For most schools this is already a goal. But it is a goal that is seldom achieved. There are many reasons for this. One is that the conditions for teaching keyboarding are different from what they were even ten years ago. Students are using keyboards earlier and earlier. In many ways this is good. But it does induce habits that make it more difficult to teach proper technique later. Even supposing this can be overcome, there is still the need to practice to maintain the skill. There is no point in teaching kids to type, if the skill is not maintained.
So assuming the skill can be taught, and I believe it can, then the question becomes how to maintain it. It seems to me that if students have authentic reasons to write, and real audiences to write for, then the requirement of practice becomes integral to the class writing experience. A limitation common to traditional instructional models is that they are implemented outside of an authentic context. The Internet offers some hope of providing such a context. The phenomenon of Blogging is an example. It also offers the potential of providing an audience beyond what the classroom can provide.
Our goal is to develop and maintain conventional writing skills for all our students. We need to model writing for real reasons and not trumped up ones. Web 2.0, the read/write web, offers some hope that all students will become skillful writers.
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