The Process-Oriented Classrrom

“As Eric Erickson and others have shown, identity formation is the consuming developmental task for adolescents; and writing comes closer to these kids’ urgent personal concerns than any other school subject. After all, in learning to write, students are invited—compelled, really—to make sense of the world…” (Zememan 3)

I’m reading A Community of Writers. I’m eager to investigate building critical thinking of content information through the writing process. The text opens talking about all of the writing that students do—whether it be essays, notes, letters to friends (the book is from the late 1980s; I suppose this would be replaced with tweets and posts) and how these different writing tasks shape their personal identities and understandings of the world. When I first looked at this quote, I was struck by the seemingly optimistic view of our student’s approach to writing.

As the introduction continues, the authors begin to describe students who seemed to make up all of my past classes—kids who write, but who write with absolutely no sense of purpose. This was my biggest dilemma last year with my history students…they write, but only because I tell them to write…only because they know it is what the have to do. This is a big problem when teaching kids who are motivated by the extrinsic reward of a grade as opposed to the intrinsic reward of becoming a greater writer and developing as a knower.

Again, I want to reiterate that this text was published in 1988, and the authors are interesting in focusing on the new paradigm switch in the approach to writing instruction. They define this shift in ideology by 15 principles which deviate from the traditional grammar dominated instruction to the “process oriented” classroom. There list is awesome, its what we all want to have in our classroom—including things like:

            2. Regular and substantial practice in writing

6. Rich and continuous reading experience, including both published writing and the work of peers and teachers.

8. Collaborative activities that provide ideas for writing and guidance in revising drafts in process.

            9. One-to-one writing conferences with the teacher

All 15 are awesome, but these 4 really struck me, because this is what I want desperately to see in my own classroom. I want constant writing. I can still remember our timed-free writing…10 minutes solid…no stopping. Man, my hand hurt BUT I loved the writing that I did. I loved how much I could write in 10 minutes, it was always an accomplishment and I was able to get tons of ideas for future projects, essays and tests! Collaboration with peers always strengthened my writing and I loved the feedback from my peers. I became a great writer because my 10^th and 11^th grade English teachers did all 15 of the things that Zememan and Daniels say make strong process orientated classrooms.  It didn’t matter that were 25+ students we always had the one-to-one writing conferences with the teacher. I don’t really recall a lot being “instructed” to me, the one-to-one conferencing was the chance for me to verbalize the needed changes and to get reinforcement…that was the process and it made me a better writer.

I realize that what my English teachers were doing was giving me the power over my own writing instruction. I became intrinsically motivated in my own writing but I haven't seen that in my own students. Instead, I think that we (those in my school and schools like it) have become so focused on what kids can't do, that we're obsessed with giving them direct instruction. We feel like we don't have time to let students explore and to test their own boundaries and thus they become passive in their learning experience.

As I continue to go through this text, I am excited to dive into these tenets of a process-centered classroom and brainstorm ideas to make them central to my classroom and the culture of each class of students.