The Missing Ingredient

According to the authors, the missing ingredient in teaching writing is "writing to learn (WTL)." It can be defined many ways. The authors spend most of their time defining it via example and through contextual inclusion. All of it boils down to two basic outlooks. The first is private, informal simplicity. The second is public formality. Their next step describes a continuum from formal to informal.

I object to this characterization because in their writing they tell the reader that the informal is the start of any writing and the formal is the outcome. To me this indicates that informal should be the anchor of the continuum while formal should be the end result of the progression from informal. In other words; informal on the left with a line connecting formal on the right.

Never the less, they come up with examples from everyday life that have made me more aware of the distinction between the two ends of the continuum. They describe the informal/private as lists we make to jog our memory for certain events. My favorites are grocery lists, cue cards for presentations and reminders jotted into a calendar in a palm pilot. Palm Pilot? Most readers of this post are probably too young to remember this first attempt at a personal electronic assistant. Electronic personal assistantl? Hmmmmm.... that would be a speechless Seri. Or is it Ceri?

In any event, these are writings for our own personal consumption that are short, not grammatically correct, devoid of attention to spelling and maybe even contain our own personal graphics. Could they mean hand drawn mind maps?

These writings start us on the road to "tuning" our thinking about a subject, an event or an expected result. The authors term is a "tool of thinking." As such we use this tool as a way of getting what's in our head out onto paper where we can manipulate it; i.e., moving it around, adding to it, and taking from it to form a cogent idea or idea stream. Whether words, sketches or mind maps, or quick outlines, the informal private list is a description of how we are thinking.

The how we are thinking idea carries over to reading as well. We engage in different kinds of reading on a daily basis. We are all do some deep reading from the first capital letter of an opening sentence to the final period in the sentences and paragraphs that spill the ideas contained in books, opeds and many other types of documentation we encounter daily. We also "skim" all of the above documents from time-to-time. We skim to get highlights. We skim when time is short. We skim when the material is not very interesting or not very important. So, just like with writing we have different ways of reading.

The formal end of the WTL continuum is occupied by public writing. Or, more precisely, writing for public consumption. It is (hopefully) grammatically correct, free of misspellings and is the crystalization of our thinking. As students we are very familiar with the formal/public form of writing. It has been an assessment tool used against us since first grade! In fact, isn't this blogging experience an assessment of our interpretive skills? Our ability to synthesize? Or, maybe just making sure we have read what we have said we read?

Public writing then is twisted up with the tyranny of summative assessment. The authors put out an interesting twist on writing and assessment. They suggest moving daily to formative assessments via WTLs. They suggest stopping instructions, lessons and labs for two to three minutes. During those few moments have our students write down everything that is swirling around in their engaged, inspired minds at that moment. These writings aren't to be graded. They are just a break to stimulate thinking.

I like the idea. It reminds me of the student created KWL (know, want to know, learned) beginning of science unit artifact I have come know during my first semester of student teaching. Here's a tool for my teaching bag. Sorry, I mean my public lingusitic repertoire.