When posed with the question on what my beliefs were about writing, I had to concede that I really did not have any. Prior to this course, I had not given much thought to the writing process and how it should be developed and nurtured in our students.
In the classrooms the major skills necessary for success are reading and writing and writing appeared to be a very basic part of the learning process: you read to comprehend the information being presented to you and generally you make responses to questions via writing.
Even in the English A classroom, it never occurred to me that writing truly was a cognitive process that should: a. ) begin with some type of experience to stimulate ideas; b.) be followed by the emergence of the ideas themselves; c.) lastly would then be expressed in writing on a piece of paper in one's note book.
However, in spite of the short period of time thus far spent doing this course I have come to understand that writing is a lot more than putting words on a page for an audience (usually in our students' case that audience is the teacher). Instead, I realised the importance of the pre-writing phase- that is brainstorming- to the entire "writing" process. During the period of brainstorming, our ideas emerge. But even prior to that, there must be a deliberate attempt on the part of the teacher to allow students to connect with the topic on a cognitive level so that the ideas can be generated.
I think this is where we fail in the classroom. We give topics and urge students to write on this topic, without giving them the opportunity to strategically develop their ideas. I anticipate that from now on there will be a change in the way that we approach "writing" with our students.
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