Growing up, I definitely came from more "Traditional Writing Classrooms" than "Process Classrooms." Writing was always very prescribed. I was taught how to form letters, words, and sentences. The parts of the paragraph were taught explicitly. I don’t remember receiving any type of feedback or coaching before my work was graded. Everything was returned with the dreaded red pen leaving its mark on my attitude toward writing. The teacher didn’t comment on any of the content in my writing, but she circled and underlined everything that I was doing wrong! We very rarely had the opportunity to choose our own topic. The process of writing was ignored. Reading and writing were two separate times in the day, and they never blended together. There was no chance for the “spillover” to occur.
In Second Grade, I did, however, have a teacher who taught more process than traditional method…Mrs. Keen. I loved writing that year. She let me spell words the way I heard them and didn’t mark my papers with that red pen. My attitude toward writing bloomed. We were able to write stories, plays, and skits. I learned all about butterflies, and I wrote a detailed report about all I had learned and even produced an art project to go along with my report. Second grade was the year I won a poetry contest in the library! I remember my mother talking about how Mrs. Keen was a “Whole Language” teacher. She had an old fashioned claw foot tub in the middle of her room, and we could read and write in it! My teacher that year encouraged me in my writing ability. She always had something positive to say about the content of my writing. It was a great year!
Unfortunately, that was the only year that I had a teacher who taught writing as a process. In the years that followed, I had more of a traditional classroom experience, the teachers had more of a “Learning View” of literacy. I say “Unfortunately” because I didn’t love literacy as a child. I had to grow into it as an adult. My year with Mrs. Keen was my favorite, and I believe that is because of her views and approaches to teaching literacy. I am left to wonder if my experience had been a balanced combination of both approaches, and I had more process teaching in my school experience; would I have loved literacy more as a child? I venture to guess....yes!
Hi Mary,
ReplyDeleteCan’t that red pen be so daunting?!? I think so many of us grew up feeling negatively toward writing, because we weren’t given proper confidence by our teachers. How terrible to just hear what’s wrong with your work and not receive any validation for all of the effort that went into it. It’s so incredible to me that even in elementary school, students are often guided away from creative expression with formulaic prompts as their substitute. Then as adults, when so much of our creative expression has been pushed further and further out of our repertoire, we really long for those days when being creative was fun and not a challenge! How wonderful your teacher Mrs. Keen sounds! I’m so glad you got to benefit from her approach to literacy—how much more you learned about enjoying literacy from her!!