Teaching Writing

Spandel makes an excellent point in her fifth chapter, “The Right to Write Badly.� She explains how some students will write in ways that they are sure are right and avoid taking risks at all costs. These students will avoid punctuation that they are uncomfortable with, avoid using words they are unsure of, and take their voice out of a piece of writing in order to stay neutral. I have been guilty of all of these things. Even in the most open and encouraging environments, I still stuck to what I knew through most of school. Now, I see students doing the same thing.
In another one of our readings for this week, Tchudi lists student after student who believes that revision is not useful in their writing. Later in the article, Tchudi explains that the students, after being exposed to her form of in-class revision, have changed their minds and are now believers in the process. I have to wonder though, how much did these students actually change their minds? Have the student’s stable notions of revision as a process actually changed to the point that they would employ their newly learned techniques on their own?
Both Spandel and Tchudi highlight one of the biggest challenges for secondary teachers. That is, how do we undo the negative preconceived notions students have about writing, revision, or anything we ask them to do in school for that matter? How do we (in sometimes a semester or less) get our cautious students to take risks? How do we motivate an entire class of students to take the revision process seriously and understand its value when they have already decided it won’t help them? I understand that there are different ways to revise and a multitude of prompts a teacher might use to encourage her students to take risks in their writing. I’m wondering though; how we get students to really see our methods, prompts, and strategies as different. I continue to see students at the high school level go through the motions. Anything they are assigned, they do, but it’s all the same to them – it’s all just school. How do I break the cycle and motivate students who have already made up their minds against the revision process or any other activity? How do I make it different enough that students actually believe they are learning and practicing something useful and applicable to their lives outside of school?

http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=971
This lesson on Read Write Think has some useful ideas for introducing the different types of revision. I like how the lesson asks students to look at preexisting fairy tales that have been re-written to demonstrate how revision is not always editing for things like spelling or grammar. I think that popular songs that have been re-done or re-written over the years could be substituted for fairy tales in this lesson.