Source: http://www.teachersteachingteachers.org

Over at Teach a Gifted Kid, Angie writes:

How can a teacher better met the needs of their gifted learner without taking away from the others? When you assign a writing, allow the gifted learner to take it as far as they wish. I have approached more than one writing assignment this way. After buffeting several, “so how many pages does this need to be” type questions, students exploded. Some turned in one or two pages, others took the opportunity to write stories of great lengths! I encouraged students to come to me with a proposal for a project or topic for further study, then I made sure there was somewhere that they could present or publish their work.

This is a great idea, especially since most kids don’t get a chance to do much REAL writing in school. The writing that’s done is usually prompt-driven and seldom meets Nanci Atwell’s criteria. What do you think of Delightful Descriptions? Writing in blogs and wikis, crafting podcasts give students–especially gifted ones–the opportunity to get a little crazy with it, or as Wes Fryer titled one of his workshops (which he swiped from someone, too ) “get wiki with it.”

As I shared with an audience of administrators recently in Texas, blogging is about real life because you can’t write stories of great length UNLESS you write about YOUR life. “We no longer just read articles,” writes Cheryl Oakes, “we live them.”

As a writing teacher, it always bothered me that we were teaching writing and reading divorced from real life. It is probably for that reason that I sought out a different way of teaching writing.

Cheryl reminded me of Nanci Atwell’s writing about writing/reading workshops in her book, In the Middle. As I dug into In the Middle, an old friend for a writing/reading workshop practitioner, I ran across this statement:

I nudge students to explore the social, political, and ethical issues that encircle personal experience…when they have avenues for considering the shape of the world around them…students will take on the world in their writing, confronting such issues as civil rights, acid rain, animal rights, environmental protection, nuclear power, and peer pressure.

Wrestling with reality in their writing, our students–whether they are the victims of a hurricane or negligence–can find a way of organizing the seeming chaos, the powerlessness of being a child. In my writing workshop, fifth grade students wrote about how they captured rattlesnakes, poverty, their friendships, and more. The power of students writing is that it enables them to fight back. Instead of passive receivers, doormats for adult goals and initiatives, children can write their way out of hopelessness and despair. They can find their voice in a world that increasingly shouts them out via various media.

As a director of instructional technology, I often feel powerless in the face of mandates for high stakes testing that render teachers as little more than mindless drones drilling their students in test-taking skills. This focus on technology assessments–some call them benchmark or interim assessments–sucks the life out of classrooms, constraining teachers to a scripted learning path that has little room for students writing to find their voice. Writing about it that powerlessness does grant me perspective and control. Often the result is not safe to share with others, but is valuable to me. As a writing teacher, I found students gaining the same benefit as they wrote in anticipation of something that would be “publishable.”

As a teacher who modeled writing for his students, as well as writes, I found that the juxtaposition of life experiences, current events, and emotion in writing could result in novel inventions. When writing touches the core of who we are, then that’s when it’s powerful to others, regardless of what we’re writing about. Every time I sit down to write, I have to dig deeper to find that core of passion. Yet, writing from the heart may be a moot point in education today.

A short time ago, I had the opportunity to be in a school district meeting with English/Language Arts teachers. As we sat around the table at lunch, I shared with them that my students learned how to write via The Writing Workshop. Although the school I worked at promoted grammar (Houghton-Mifflin) books, working through the exercises, I based my entire class around mini-lessons, group shares, and students writing…and I wrote, too. We published our work in anthologies, and my kids wrote like crazy…even those that were terrible at it when they began, saw significant improvement. So, I asked the district experts on English/Language Arts, “Do we still teach writing this way?” The sad answer was, “No. We can’t. We’d like to but standardized tests make that impossible.”

And, just as I was the only teacher in a small school district in Texas teaching writing and reading a la Nanci Atwell, suffering the sanction of the more experienced teachers focused on grammar instruction, so will those who use blogs in the classroom or any technology that puts the focus back, not on testing and diagnosing student problems, on allowing students to take interest, ownership, and be given the time to communicate.

It is for that reason that we must encourage blogging in our schools today. At the simplest level, blogging technologies enable teachers and their students to write for a larger audience than their teacher and/or peers. They are aware that technology has broadened their audience. This was something I witnessed just last week when I walked into Ms. Johnson’s classroom in the middle of a large, urban city district. When I asked her, would you like to have your students publish their work online, perhaps even perform their writing about Martin Luther King topics such as prejudice, she calmly replied, “Why don’t you ask them?”

I repeated the question to them, and the enthusiasm in this low socio-economic group of students was electric and nearly overwhelmed me. I had not felt such enthusiasm in years…not since I’d asked my own students if they wanted to publish their writing in a print anthology. Contrast the wisdom of this writing teacher with another commenter, Susan Bishop. Susan shares, “I have tried everything I can to encourage our teachers in our school to use the Blogs I set up for them.”

Maybe, what you should try is asking the students, gifted or not. Our students crave
the power to make their work known to others. Writing about our lives, from what makes us real, living what we write…that’s a power that can shake the foundations. If we teach children to write without them understanding that they have to live their words, what have we really taught them?