Getting Your Students to Write

Having your students write is a great way to understand their voice as well as their connection between the material and their learning. There are multiple ways to have students write such as writing to learn, public writing and writing for tests and assessments. In the reading, the book explored the more formal options of public writing and writing for tests and assessments. Through requiring your students to write for a grade it is vitally important for us as a teacher to prepare the students for this task.

In public writing, it is must the opposite of the different writing to learns tasks we have previously discussed. As a teacher, it is more of the intentional writing we require from students that will be taken for a grade as well as being more time consuming for the writer. The work the students should submit should be written so that it could go out into the world for show to the audience. In order for students to submit the best, us as teachers require from them, we must prepare them for their writing. Some ways the book has mentioned to do this was to allow for choice, writing during class and a response or feedback of their writing. I thought the most interesting thing the book pointed out though in regards to modeling the activity, was the use of trade books. As an aspiring math teacher, public writing may not be as apparent in my classroom, but in order for my students to understand how a mathematician would formally write about certain topics would be through the use of trade books. This chapter again just solidified by preconception on the use of trade books in my future classroom. 

When discussing using writing during tests it is vitally essential to make students aware of the expectations for the writing as well as prepare them on how to write for the test in order to allow for continual learning. As a teacher, if we are going to require writing for a test we must make sure that the question or prompt for the task is clearly written and asks what we expect the student to know. The prompt is the key in writing process for a test. If the prompt is poorly written it will lack a detailed or expected response from the students. Fun, this is a key aspect that is missing from a lot of writing tasks on tests and if this is brought into the writing a teacher will see better responses from students as well as continued learning during the writing process from student.s To have this teachers must prepare the students to take these tests as it has been seen in the other forms of writing. Preparation is key in order to get the students to write what is expected from them.