My Way or the Highway!

Oracy and writing are two fundamental skills that I feel students must learn and have a firm grasp on.  These two skills are used in day to day life, and communication is extremely important for any interaction.  It is important that a teacher does not simply just teach these two skills, but makes it enjoyable to children so they will be inclined to engage in using their skills and want to learn more.  The key to this is having a balanced program.  This is something that I have really taken away from this class.  A balanced program is a program that engages students in many different ways, and helps to cater different learners.

Oracy is paramount in helping children develop literacy skills and social competence.  Thus, it is very important that we incorporate oracy into our teaching, and that we help students with it.  Teaching oracy requires many things.  Having a close personal relationship with each student is vital.  This allows time for one on one interaction and a chance to challenge students to talk, think, and explore their knowledge of the world.  A teacher should almost always ask open ended questions as this will help students make meaning.  We must provide every student adequate time to answer, even though there can be that awkward silence.  A teacher must cultivate and promote a safe environment where students are safe to share their ideas/thoughts, but also to question; creating respectful listeners goes hand in hand with this.  Beyond the teacher-student interactions, it is important to promote structured partner and small group talk.  This can be done through some different strategies such as the garden party, or tea party strategy.  Collaborative work is an excellent way to promote oracy.  It is important for students to have the chance to vocalize their ideas and thoughts, and this will lead to more dynamic writers.  The use of drama within ELA would be a fantastic way to help children explore literary works but through the use of role playing and dialogue.  Drama is not just a fine art, it is an excellent cross-curriculum tool that can strongly promote and teach children oracy skills.  Creating podcasts would be a great outlet for students to practice their oracy skills.  Students could record stories they have read or written, they could share information on a particular topic, or it could be an interview with someone.  The options are almost endless for this and it would be a great tool for teaching oracy.  Listening is a key component to oracy as well, but I am not going to dwell on this.  There are many other ways to help with teaching and improving oracy skills, so these are just a few of the many different strategies.

For developing writing skills and trying to create dynamic writers, there are many strategies.  One of the most important things for writing is giving the students time, which is not always that easy.  A form of free or informal writing is very important.  This gives students the chance to write down many different ideas, thoughts, and feelings.  From this students, with the help of peers and teacher, will be able to make meaning and explore their ideas further.  All in all, what this is stressing is we need to allow students the chance to simply write and experiment without being assessed or restricted by any rigid and strict writing structures and rules.  Students also need time to reflect, reshape, and redraft their pieces of writing.  Having students work once on a piece of writing is not conducive to creating dynamic writers.  The ability to go back to older pieces of work allows students a chance to edit (very important in the writing process) and solve problems within their work, perhaps after consulting peers or the teacher.  Collaborative work and/or writing conferences are very important.  Not only does this promote oracy, but it allows students to lean on others for support and to gain more insight into ideas and thoughts.  It makes a child’s inner speech explicit, and from this a deeper understanding of writing and ideas can occur.  Speaking about the writing process needs to be permitted and ample time should be set aside for this.  Certainly what I have learned from all this has been that to teach writing effectively, a lot of informal writing and peer/teacher conferences are very important.  There are many other ways to teach writing, but these two ways I feel are very key.

I look forward to taking some of the many strategies we have learned in to my classes, and hopefully it will lead to children who are not only strong in oracy and writing, but also find enjoyment in them.  I envision in my classroom that I am able to give the students lots of time to write and interact with one another to help enhance oracy and to help with the writing process.  On the wall there should be visually stimulating work that helps students with the writing process.  There will also be displays of students’ works.  Although not focussed upon, there would also be some things up around the room to help students with writing conventions.  Overall, beside the numerous strategies taken out of this class, the biggest thing is that balance seems to be the key!

Not much has changed since my first blog, besides I now have many different tools and strategies to help teach, strengthen, and promote oracy and writing skills.  The biggest change is probably seeing the need to promote free writing, and that writing conventions are even less important.

The Writing Program

Writing is a very important skill children must learn and practice continually throughout school.  It is not simply limited to English Language Arts (ELA), but transcends the whole curriculum and general society.  Writing will allow students to help them make sense of their learning, whether it is in ELA, Science, or Social Studies, etc.  Thus, writing must be properly and thoughtfully taught to students.  In particular this entails that there “is a focus on balance in a writing program” (Constructing Meaning, 262).  This balance will result in creating “dynamic writers [who are] excited about their abilities to blend exposition and imagination for more creative communication” (Casey and Hemenway, 2001, 68).  There are several things I think that are very important when teaching writing.  Allowing children to write freely and in a variety of genres, forms, and voices, are extremely important.  Self and peer editing is important, and time is necessary for giving the children a chance to do this and also to work on one piece of work for an extended period of time.  Social interaction with peers and teachers via writing conferences is also an excellent way to produce creative and dynamic writers.

There are many genres of writing and teachers can easily get caught up in what is easy for them, what they like, and what is simple to assess.  However, this is not conducive to producing strong writers.  It is vital that teachers allow many informal chances to write, and in various voices and forms.  This could be done in the form of journals, letters, diaries, think books, learning logs, etc.  These forms can allow students to “share their thinking with their teacher or peers in a supportive environment that encourages students to expand and explore their ideas further” (Constructing Meaning, 239).  When a teacher gives children the time to write about their experiential world, this will eventually translate into more formal and abstract writing, and a better understanding of the writing process (Constructing Meaning, 239).  This “free writing” is an excellent time for children to shape their ideas, discuss past experiences, and come up with creative leads such as discussed with having writing territories, tantalizing titles, and alternatives to swear words (Carol Nahachewsky, 2011).  It is also a great chance to work on writing in different voices and forms that can be refined more as time progresses.  What this shows about teaching writing is that we should not be giving children very rigid and strict writing structures and forms.  This is all reflected in the PLO’s for Grade 2, C1 and C3 (IRP).

Another important aspect of writing is giving students the time look back at previous writings.  The writing process is best illustrated by what D’Arcy calls the three R’s of learning: reflect, reshape, and redraft (Constructing Meaning, 239).  A child needs the time and support to look back on their work, think critically about it, and make necessary changes.  This can allow children to show what they know and understand, but also allow for students to realize that it is ok to make mistakes and to ask for clarification, and this will all lead to creating a safe work environment where effective learning and writing can take place (Constructing Meaning, 242).  It is most important that a teacher allows for informal writing that is an ongoing process, where it is crucial that one piece of writing may be looked at over and over, and that changes to it can be made.  The ability and need to be able to reflect back upon writing, to uncover their strengths, what could be done to improve their writing and what attributes make a good writer are well reflected in the PLO’s for Grade 1 and 2 in C6 and C9 (IRP).

Simply writing freely, with no assessment is just one of the important steps to teaching writing.  Another very important teaching tool is the use of writing conferences.  A critical idea behind using these conferences on the content and craft of writing, is that it will “help writers discover the meanings they don’t know yet, name problems, attempt solutions, and make plans” (Atwell, 224).  Writing conferences will help children gain an audience, and share their work with each other and their teacher.  This will enable a student to receive compliments on their work, but also questions that may have arisen and need to be addressed.  At the end of such conferences, children will be able to go back and reshape and redraft their writing, making it more polished.  This social interaction is vital to the writing process, as it allows children to bring out their inner voice.  A teacher needs to make this inner speech explicit and allow the student “to wrestle with the ideas they are attempting to articulate” (Constructing Meaning, 287).  Writing conferences allow children to share ideas and learn from each other.  It gives students the “opportunities to explore the gap between thought and speech” (Constructing Meaning, 288).  It also allows students to work out issues within their writing, such as audience.  A phenomenal example of this social interaction and how it enables and enhances the writing process is that of the dialogue between Sharon and Erica in Constructing Meaning, pages 288-289.  This dialogue clearly demonstrates how discussion led the two girls to be more aware of who their audience is and how important each word was.  Talk and conferences on writing is something that should never be brushed aside by a teacher.

Conferences also allow a teacher to work more intimately with their students.  A dialogue between a teacher and student is an excellent way for a teacher to learn where a child is at and how they are understanding things.  A child can take this opportunity to seek understanding and clarification is a safe way.  The Atwell article is an excellent example of the possible back and forth of a teacher and student, and how effective it is in reaching goals and a plan for a student.

This ability to discuss is a fundamental part of writing and starts as early as Kindergarten, as reflected in the PLO C6 (IRP).  Although there is a need to have a quite setting while writing, it is important to balance that, with giving students the opportunity to discuss with each other and the teacher.

Once children understand the importance of writing and enjoy it, a writing program can become more structured.  The importance of grammar and spelling can be given more emphasis and more heavily focused on.  Giving set writing guidelines to children is a way to get the students to write in different forms, such as research papers that get the children to practice their expository writings.  This can be reflected in the PLO C2 for Grades 4 and 5 (IRP).