Málfríður - 15.03.2011, Page 14

All of these teaching “moves” and much more will be
covered in depth when Jeff and his wife Peggy Jo visit
Iceland this summer. They are looking forward to meet-
ing many of you and helping you to help your students
through various kinds and processes of composing.
– – –
Jeffrey D. Wilhelm is Professor of English Education
at Boise State University and the Director of the Boise
State Writing Project. He is the author of 18 books
about literacy and literacy teaching. He is the win-
ner of the NCTE Promising Research Award and the
Russell Award for Distinguished Research in English
Education.
Jim Fredricksen is an Assistant Professor of English
Education at Boise State University and a Co-Director
of the Boise State Writing Project. His research focuses
on the conversations teachers have with one another
about their work as educators.
Peggy Jo Wilhelm has been a teacher of music and the
humanities for 25 years, and was a professor of music
education for 8 of those years. She is dedicated to the
teaching of wisdom through the humanities, arts and
languages. She is the author of two books on educa-
tion.
Works Cited:
Bolter, J. D. (1991). Writing space: The computer, hypertext and the history of
writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Egawa, K. (1998). Writing in the middle grades. Urbana, IL: National
Council of Teachers of English.
McLeod, S. & Miraglia, E. (2001). Writing across the curriculum in a time
of change. In S. McLeod, E. Miraglia, M. Soven, and C. Thaiss (Eds.),
WAC for the new millennium: Strategies for continuing writing across
the curriculum programs (pp. 1–27). Urbana, IL: National Council of
Teachers of English.
National Writing Project and Carl Nagin (2003). Because Writing Matters:
Improving student writing in our schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-
Bass.
Shanahan, T. (2004). Overcoming the dominance of communication:
Writing to think and learn. In T.L. Jetton & J.A. Doyle (Eds.),
Adolescent literacy research and practice (pp. 59–74). New York, NY:
Guilford Press.
Tierney, R. and Shanahan, T. (1991). Research on the reading-writing
relationship: Interactions, transactions, and outcomes. In R. Barr,
M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P. Pearson (Eds.). Handbook of reading
research: Vol. 2 (pp. 246–280). New York: Longman.
Smith, M. W., & Wilhelm. J. (2002). „Reading don’t fix no Chevys“: Literacy
in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Smith, M. and Wilhelm, J. 2006 Going with the Flow. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Smith, M. W. and Wilhelm, J.D. (2007). Getting it Right: Fresh approaches to
teaching language use and grammar. New York: Scholastic.
Wilhelm, J. (2001). Improving Comprehension with think alouds. New York:
Scholastic.
Wilhelm, J.D. (2007). Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. New
York: Scholastic.
Wilhelm, Jeffrey D., Wilhelm, Peggy J., Boas, E. (2009). Inquiring Minds
Learn to Read and Write. Toronto: Rubicon.
to technology, a low-tech scrapbook could be created
with student writing, photographs and the like.
Blogs or gallery walk. Blogs, chats and forums are
all on-line discussion platforms that students enjoy.
Students can be asked to create and contribute to blogs
and forums in different ways. A low-tech version is to
have students post a piece of writing somewhere in the
classroom and then ask each student in the class to visit
each post and to write a comment or response to it.
Pen pals. Pen pal projects have been found to pro-
vide authentic audiences and contexts of real commu-
nication for students at all levels, elementary through
college, with huge positive effects.
Artist statements – BSWP fellow Jerry Hendershot
has students create various visual responses to read-
ings, and then to create artist statements that explore
what they created, how they created it, and what this
composition means and how it means this. This is a
kind of culminating process analysis of their compos-
ing process.
Formal writing
All of this informal writing helps students to get the
“stuff” or content to use for more formal composing,
and to practice putting this “stuff” into the form of a
conventional argument, extended definition, classifica-
tion scheme, narrative, etc. We’ve devised and made
good use of a heuristic called the inquiry square that
takes students through five kinds of knowledge nec-
essary to formal writing: knowledge of purpose (e.g.
through essential questions), procedural knowledge of
substance (knowing how to get the stuff to write about,
e.g. frontloading and formative assessment activities)
and declaration knowledge of substance (knowing
how to name the concepts you have found to write
about, through all of the activities above), procedural
knowledge of form (knowing how to shape the stuff
you have into a conventional form, e.g. Frayer charts
for extended definitions) and declarative knowledge
of form (knowing how to name the form of a piece of
writing and how this form works to create meaning,
e.g. process analyses and think alouds).
A benefit of such work, in our experience, is that it
naturally leads to public writing and service learning.
Such efforts “help students understand the connection
of learning to life, to stimulate students’ social con-
sciences, and to help establish writing as social action
(McLeod & Miraglia, 2001, p. 9). Additionally, writing
to learn “provides students with meaningful writing
tasks – real projects for real audiences . . . that links
writing to a particular social context and knowledge
base, demonstrating the important of contextual issues
in learning how to write” and use language (p. 10).
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