Education Commons^™

"You Can't Be Creative Anymore": Students Reflect On The Lingering Effects Of The Five-Paragraph Essay, Jennifer P. Gray

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The five-paragraph essay continues to make headlines in composition and pedagogy journals and on teacher listservs. This long-cherished genre has been touted for teaching the basics to writers in college, and teachers often claim that it is the best foundation for solid essay writing. In contrast, there are numerous five-paragraph essay critics who claim that the essay is a “school-created thing” that has no real-world value and persists due to an enshrinement in textbooks as preparation for objective standardized testing. Regardless of the debate, one thing remains: there is little research on the essay from the students’ perspective. This essay …

Transforming Writing Teachers: Two Professional Development Possibilities, Jessica Gallo, Bailey Herrmann

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article focuses on two professional development opportunities, The National Writing Project and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, that provide transformative experiences for teachers. These two programs offer opportunities for meaningful, situated, and complex professional development that focus on the person and the professional.

Asking And Understanding Questions: An Inquiry-Based Framework For Writing Teacher Development, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Teachers develop when they critically examine the questions they ask about their work because questions make pedagogical beliefs visible and available for critical reflection and revision. In a standards-based educational climate—a time when writing becomes a set of measurable skills rather than a complex social practice—teachers may feel that a critical examination of their questions is (at best) a luxury or (at worst) a distraction to work they need to accomplish. Therefore, writing teacher educators may find it increasingly challenging to help teachers engage in reflexive inquiry. This essay describes a Deweyian-informed framework that shows how addressing inquiries and critically …

Co-Planning And Co-Teaching In A Summer Writing Institute: A Formative Experiment, Kelly Chandler-Olcott, Janine Nieroda, Bryan Ripley Crandall

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This paper reports findings from a two-year formative experiment (Reinking & Bradley, 2008) investigating a summer writing institute for students entering ninth grade at an urban high school. The three-week program was staffed by both university researchers and teachers. In contrast to traditional summer school, it was intended as enrichment, not remediation, for a heterogeneous group of students, and a learning experience, not just a teaching opportunity, for practitioners. The pedagogical goals of the intervention were two-fold: 1) increase students’ writing engagement and skill, and 2) improve teachers’ capacity to teach writing to diverse student populations. Findings focused on co-teaching …

Navigating Collaborative Teaching Waters: Professors Go Back And Pre-Service Teachers Move Forward To Embody The Promise Of Story, Jill Adams, Kathleen Deakin, Gloria Eastman, Jay Arellano, Andrea Nieto, Eliza Spencer, Brianne Barber

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

A group of English education professors and secondary English education collaboratively planned a 3-week class for future high school freshmen in an academic summer camp held on our campus. Reflections of lessons learned from a variety of perspectives are shared.

Introduction: Building Bridges In Writing Teacher Education, Jonathan Bush, Erinn Bentley

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This introduction discusses the editors' decision to support publications in both APA and MLA formats and also provides contextual introductions for all articles.

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Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Of Thresholds And Springboards: Teaching Them, Teaching Each Other, Erin Williams, Frank Farmer

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

In the fall of 2010, the authors were given the task of co-teaching the practicum for new graduate teaching assistants at the University of Kansas. One of the authors was, at the time, a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition. The other author was a senior faculty member in the same field. While such pairings are not uncommon, they are rarely addressed in the vast literature on the writing practicum.

In this article—written as a dialogue focusing on the themes of locations and tensions—the authors conclude that such teaching arrangements as theirs offered valuable insights into student resistance, and encouraged …

Where Writing Happens: Elevating Student Writing And Developing Voice Through Digital Storytelling, Jane M. Saunders

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

A Late Adopter's Chance To Take An Esl Program Multimodal, Erin K. Laverick

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article outlines an ESL program's journey in revising its curriculum to include multimodal compositions as a means to help non-native speakers of English improve their language proficiency by offering them greater means to communicate with wide audiences. The article also discusses means to provide faculty with the proper rhetorical and technology training, so they could use multimodalities in their own teaching.

Writing For The Audience That Fires The Imagination: Implications For Teaching Writing, Denise K. Ives, Cara Crandall

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Great authors embody their audiences through the language of their texts. Good readers learn to recognize and respond to the cues such writers embed in their texts about the kind of audience they are expected to be. They also learn from other authors how to fictionalize in their minds audiences like those they have experience being. In this article through an analysis of two texts, we showcase how two middle school writers through their texts, embody their audiences and cue readers to the roles they are expected to play. We then trace the rhetorical moves made by the writers to …

“This Erstwhile Unreadable Text”: Deep Time, Multidisciplinarity And First-Year Writing Faculty Mentoring And Support, Denise K. Comer

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Despite the otherwise rich multidisciplinary terrain of writing studies, the strategies most often used with first-year writing teacher teaching mentoring and support tend to remain discordantly anchored to a comparatively narrow version of writing pedagogy. I argue in this article that the geologic concept of deep time offers a way of infusing a multidisciplinary dimension into first-year writing faculty teaching mentoring and support that will enrich the ways faculty and students think, write, and talk about first-year writing. This article discusses deep-time pedagogy, providing specific strategies for infusing multidisciplinary dimensions into first-year writing faculty teaching mentoring and support. Such a …

Re-Thinking Personal Narrative In The Pedagogy Of Writing Teacher Preparation, Mary M. Juzwik, Anne Whitney, April Baker Bell, Amanda Smith

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

How can teacher educators mobilize contemporary understandings of personal narrative -- as socially and dialogically shaped in the context of culture and as instrumental to sociocultural processes of self-authoring -- in the teaching of narrative writing and, more specifically, in the work of teaching teachers to teach narrative writing? Rarely do teachers teach strategies that might result in good narratives. Rarely do narrative texts written in school (or any other kinds of texts written in school, for that matter) actually go anywhere beyond the teacher, thus failing to offer students experience in negotiating meanings with readers, working out the versions …

First-Year Composition And The Common Core: Educating Teachers Of Writing Across The High School-College Continuum, Justin A. Young

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article will discuss the implications of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on the education of writing instructors at the college level. The article suggests that, with the adoption of the CCSS, the most effective models of the training of writing teachers in higher education will now include collaboration with educators at the K-12 level. A model for this kind of collaborative work is described, based on an effort the author is currently leading as the Director of English Composition at my institution. A brief overview of the CCSS, and the shifts in the teaching and learning of English …

Reframing Responses To Student Writing: Promising Young Writers And The Writing Pedagogies Course, Michael B. Sherry, Ted Roggenbuck

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article describes an attempt to provide future teachers with an opportunity to practice evaluating and responding to student writing through a collaboration among members of an NCTE committee, a blended writing pedagogies course composed of education, creative writing, and professional writing students, and middle school teachers and their students in two states. Students’ texts were drawn from the NCTE’s “Promising Young Writers” contest, for which college students acted as judges and provided feedback to the middle school writers. We argue that the experience of responding to actual student writers about the texts they had submitted provided potentially important opportunities …

Teaching/Writing, Winter/Spring 2014 - Full Issue

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.