Modern Trends in Teaching Writing ( Entry 4)

 Essentials of  Teaching Writing 

To ensure that students are fully supported as it pertains to their writing, certain essential opportunities must be given to the students to promote effective writing and to develop their craft of writing pieces that are worthy to be published. 

Firstly, Children need adequate time to write. As we know, writing is a process and a journey from ideas to publish work. If we take the time to look into the efforts made to create and publish a book by well-known authors, we will see that there are many stages a piece of writing has to go through before reaching the final stage. So too, our children need to be given fair chances for them to develop their pieces of writing. One may ask, how can writing time be added to students' schedules? the simple answer for that is for teachers to include journal writing time within the timetable to allow students to have adequate writing time. 

Another way to assist our students with writing is to provide regular responses to their writing so that they can see the areas they need to work on as well as to encourage them to continually engage in writing exercises. Additionally, Children need their work to be published. After going through the tedious process of writing their work needs to be published so that they can see how much their hard work has paid off and for them to become more confident writers knowing that their work is worthy of acknowledgment.

Furthermore, children should be given opportunities to choose most of the topics they write about. In that way, they will become more interested in writing as well as being able to write about a topic they love or are interested in. This will help them to seek more knowledge about the topic and will improve their writing skills. Moreover, children need to hear their teachers talk through what they are doing. Teachers need to demonstrate how expert writers write and the thought processes of expert writers. In that way, children can get a first-hand look at what they are expected to do as developing writers. 

Additionally, children need to maintain a collection of their work, in this way teachers can study the development of students' writing over some time and students can reflect on the history of their work.  Most importantly, Children need teachers who explicitly teach writing. This will assist them with spelling, sequencing, rereading, and supporting their ideas. Teachers must be the role models they need to be as it pertains to writing so that students can emulate the teacher's work to help perfect their craft.

 According to Fisher and Frey, the Gradual release of responsibility model is a perfect way for teachers to get students to the level of independence, especially in writing. They can have a focus lesson, provide guidance, and do collaborative learning with their students to ensure that the students can work independently thereafter. With this, they can use exemplar models to show students what exceptional writing looks like.