After having some time on my hands to analyze some of Jim Burke’s thoughts, ideas and concepts, it is quite clear why he’s one of the most smartest teaching figures out there. Jim Burke’s The Six Academic Writing Assignments: Designing the Users Journey does an extremely effective job at churning out enough content to fuel a student’s passion and drive to succeed in becoming an effective and efficient writer. It’s not always about being a good writer, but if we can motivate students to want to write more, that in itself is a major way to stimulate their drive to improve and better themselves to become better learners, as well. So, without further adieu, let’s dig into some of what Burke highlights in his famous guide to becoming a better and more motivated writer.
Writing to Learn
We immediately open Burke’s instructional guide to a topic that gets the conversation about writing going. “Writing to Learn” is extremely necessary and must be something that one can grasp before they really start putting pen to paper or fingers to keys. If you don’t have a goal in mind or reason to learn from your writing, you’re clearly doing it wrong. Now, personally, I write and always feel I have something to learn and appreciate helpful feedback. All throughout middle school and high school I’d write papers as fast as can be and hand them in as soon as possible. I hated to delay the process and procrastinate, so I’d sit there, hours at a time, and hammer away at the keys, trying so desperately to finish the assignment so that I could put it in my rear-view mirror. However, what I wasn’t doing was listening to enough feedback from my peers. I never had put much stock into what another student thought about my writing and maybe it was because I was still immature and naive in a way. I always figured that they had their piece they wanted to articulate and I had mine, and that nobody should be trying to change what I had written. Narrow-minded, eh? Once I got to college, Suffolk County Community College, I began to use peer reviews for ideas, grammatical errors, etc. Before I handed in a paper, it was going to reach the hands of at least one other student and the teacher, and if not the latter, I’d give it to two students to look over. I continued this when I got to Stony Brook and continue to do it for final papers. I want feedback, I want to learn from my mistakes or ways I can improve what is already put on the virtual screen or paper.
“Progress Journals”
An idea that I’m seeing more and more teachers discuss is the thought of having students keep logs about the progress they’re making with writing inside the classroom. The idea is beneficial to helping a student see his/her progress taken over the course of the year. I don’t know about anybody else but I always thought it was cool to reflect on stuff I had written months in advance or even years in advance. To this day, I still find some of my writing notebooks downstairs and flip through the pages remembering what it was like to sit in a second-grade classroom and talk about my Sunday soccer game and the snack I had after the game (haha). But with writing, it’s important to demonstrate some sort of understanding from past mistakes and bad habits. There is so much to learn in life and the same goes for writing in any discipline. Grammatical mistakes, the improvement in that area over the course of a grade year, the punctuation errors, etc, all of this is something I analyze as I’m flipping through the pages. Now, Burke had his students take part in an interesting group assignment: he decided to take his students outside onto the football field, as Rhiannon mentions in her blog, and had them stand on a yard line according to age. This was a way to stimulate their brains for the eventual beginning of the novel Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Taking your students and placing them into a different, unfamiliar territory or enviornment can open up an entire new world to them and how they approach writing. As far as my own experiences, I went outside the Humanities building to write in a class on a beautiful 70 degree afternoon one late afternoon almost a year ago, and it was the best experience ever: sitting outside, enjoying the sun and writing. It wasn’t something I would’ve typically done, but it was different and enjoyable.
Making Teachers Reflect
School isn’t just to test a child’s knowledge or the growth they’re making throughout the course year, but it’s also a moment to find out how much the teacher is progressing, as well. Teachers that recycle the same material for a decade and are set in their ways will find it challenging to adjust to different students. Our generation is different than others: as we spend a majority of our time learning electronically. The days of scouring through textbooks, physically at least, seem to be dwindling. It is important for teachers to demonstrate progress and mature as an educator of bright, youthful minded learners. As Sean discusses in his blog, that teachers should reflect on the type of assignments they have given. Have they given an exercise that has been enforced a tad too much over the course of the year? Have they neglected to teach students enough about research papers and why they’re important? Hopefully they haven’t. This is why I only see it as a benefit to mark up a checklist of sorts so that each exercise is covered and touched up on with as much time given to it as possible over the course of the school year. As Sean said, putting together lesson plans can be challenging, and so far, I have only experienced this with Methods I under Professor Thomas Mangano’s leadership, guidance and instruction. Allowing yourself, as the teacher, to become redundant, causes further stagnation with both yourself and the crop of students. Having a balanced diet of instruction and writing creates an organic classroom environment and allows everybody’s thoughts and ideas to flow better, thus making it rewarding to participate on the daily.
Writers Uncensored 