Have you ever woken up with a smile on your face and said to yourself, “Today, I am going to fail?” Can we encourage kids to ask questions, take risks in their writing and embrace making mistakes as a route to learning? More subtly put, how can we praise accomplishment, and simultaneously offer critical critique? According to Routman (2005), all students rise to be capable writers when we hold our expectations and at a level that is “reasonable and rigorous.” How do we get there? We can listen. We can scaffold. We can guide students to talk ahead of time, to help get their ideas flowing. We can lead guided writing activities.
We can encourage kids to try with out fear of failure by structuring routine; vocally sharing student work and publicly displaying published writing. Spending time on the task of writing is good advice. To be a writer we must do what a writer does and write everyday. A short, three sentence exit strategy before heading out to recess. Writing about our feelings if I feel silver or gold today and why. Opening the day by writing about what I noticed on the way in to school. Daily free-writes can build fluency and endurance. Accomplished writers share a unique voice, are legible, add interesting detail, and use correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Good writers, listen, interpret, explain their thinking and share original stories. They write with purpose and audience in mind.
This week, while teaching a homophone lesson, a student shared through written language, “I too, want to find two gold and bronze bars.” We should hold a gold standard of expectations for all of our students.
Taking risks with language and being willing to fail, however, is not to be confused with giving students permission to fail. Show me your best effort and I will show you a better way. There is always room for improvement and a way to add spit and polish to the final published product. If we demand success, correct spelling, encourage rereading and editing, and add a healthy dose of praise along the way, we will help students to believe that they are writers. Failure is not an option if it is left unchecked. Making mistakes is okay. It is how we learn.
I too believe in the importance of encouraging our kids to try without fear of failure by structuring a routine. The more they practice writing, and the more it is a part of their routines, the more confident they will become with it. In my main placement, my teacher incorporates writing into practically everything. For example, the kids had been working on brain journals. Every day before recess was their brain lesson. The teacher always had the kids write down at least three sentences in their journal (regarding the brain lesson of the day). They had to write them and have one of the teachers (myself or the master teacher) check their work before they were allowed to go to recess. What was great to see is that the kids didn’t complain about it. In fact, there were many kids that wrote more than three sentences. Writing became something enjoyable for them. There were some students, however, that had some difficulty writing and made some mistakes--- and that’s okay. We always made sure to tell them that mistakes are not bad things because they help us learn.
ReplyDeleteWhen encouraging children to write, a very powerful way to do so is to have the children write about personal experiences. You mentioned opening the day and writing about what they noticed on the way to school. This is great! If this is a daily routine for the kids, they will get in the habit of paying attention to their ride to school so they know what to write about. Essentially, you’re getting the students’ brains working before they get to class so they will be ready to start the school day when they sit at their desks.
I love your comment, “Taking risks with language and being willing to fail, however, is not to be confused with giving students permission to fail.” As teachers we want to make this clear to our students. We want to do everything we can to stretch their thinking and also make them confident writers. We are not expecting perfection when they write, but we definitely want to see their effort. It is alright to make mistakes, but only if you have given it your best shot!
One of Routman's teaching tips was to have the students do their best and then help them clean up their errors, just like an editor would do for you. I saw this in practice in my dyad placement.
ReplyDeleteWhen students are writing the teacher has them circle the words they don't know how to spell and then quickly move on, not to focus on the word, and then latter (after the first draft) go back and edit. Once they return to their circled words the teacher has them "clean-up" three words in each paragraph and then she'll help them with the rest.
I asked her why she picked three, and she said that for this class three is the average number of mistakes and there are several students who don't have any mistakes. The kids who have more than three usually have a lot and then they become overwhelmed and start to hate writing, and like you said feel like a failure. This is truly an example of knowing your students.