Incorporating Student Choice and Multiple Genres

Creating space for student choice.  In my PBL charter school, and in my own teaching philosophy, this is a driving concept.  If we want our students to be curious, to dig deeply into their learning, to produce excellent work, than they must feel that they are engaged in something meaningful.  They need to be passionate about it.  In my own life, I am fiercely protective of my time.  As a mother and teacher, with other passions and a household to run besides, I feel the need to squeeze every last drop out of the day.  When I’m met with a task or situation that feels inefficient or smacks of busy work, my response is disgusted anger, and the resulting product is sub-par.  I imagine most of us, including our students, feel this way.  Time is precious, and time spent doing work that has no meaningful application is time wasted.

In the self-contained classroom, writing time seems the most sacred of all.  It demands a good chunk.  Generating ideas, organizing, drafting, revising, sharing, refining- not to mention teacher time in reading, commenting, assessing.  Even when woven throughout subjects and curriculum there is never enough time.  And so, I want my students to be fully invested when the clock starts.   In writing, I’m looking to give my students opportunity to explore genres and find their voice.  At the same time, I’m beholden to standardized testing and recognize my responsibility in getting my students prepared for it.

To this end, I’m pulling much of my curricular ideas in writing from Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This.

First and foremost, he advocates for teachers to write with and model their own writing for their students.  It is imperative that they literally see the writing process in action.  As we move through the writing process- from generating ideas, to graphic organizers, to drafting, revising and editing, students will see me grappling alongside them.  Not only does this provide them with examples and the understanding of how writing happens in real time, it provides me the opportunity to write myself!  Valuable stuff indeed.  Additionally, my goal is to allow students to approach a subject from a variety of real purposes.  Take baseball for example:  one might write a personal or fictional narrative of a situation involving baseball, or maybe one is more interested in researching and explaining the evolution of the game, or perhaps instead one prefers to write and defend their opinion as to why one team is the best.  This allows students to recognize that there are multiple genres with which to approach a topic, as well as giving them the opportunity to write about what is most engaging for them.  If I was asked to write a story about baseball, it would be a poor story as I have absolutely no experience in the game.  However, I’m interested in history and I like to research, so that avenue would provide a richer experience for me.

Ultimately, my job as a writing teacher is to help students find and develop their voice as they explore topics that they care to write about.  In this way, hopefully, my students of writing become adults who can recognize and articulate multiple perspectives in a given situation.  Ours is a multi-layered world with many viewpoints.  We need our young people to be able to research and inform articulate opinions, and develop personal narratives they are proud to share.  I mean for my time in their lives to be a step in that direction.