20 November 2019
Jenny Williams and Sandra Rowan discuss how teachers can create ‘writers for life’ in their K – 6 classrooms and encourage students to embrace writing and to enjoy it for their whole lives.
Our focus, as teachers, needs to be on the fact that it [writing] is a lifelong skill that all of us need to be able to use, throughout the course of our lives, in a variety of different ways. And, that is because writing is one aspect of communicating – as citizens in a global world, we need to be able to communicate by computer across to different countries; we need to be able to make ourselves understood in formal and informal settings. . .
So how do we get them all engaged? It’s about student engagement. If we offer them choice even if it is as simple as A or B (‘so you could perhaps write an imaginative story about this aspect or you could write a persuasive’) . . . when they have to stop and decide (‘what do I do? Do I want to do this or do I want to do that?’), once they have made the decision they own it. It is really important. The brain research says giving them choice increases student engagement.
Jenny Williams and Sandra Rowan
Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.