Positioning Writers as Decision Makers

A Chapter from When Teaching Writing Gets TOUGH

Summary:
This short chapter from When Teaching Writing Gets Tough: Challenges and Possibilities in Secondary Writing Instruction offers three suggestions for changing your writing instruction to support student writers as independent decision makers.

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“Recognizing our students’ humanity and acknowledging and leveraging the interdependence in this ecosystem—among the students, between the students and the teacher, and among the students, teachers, and texts—are the keys to addressing the wicked problem of teaching writers and of positioning our students as decision makers. This positioning means addressing each writer and writing situation as unique, the heart of the wicked problem that teachers face when guiding students to navigate the ecosystem in the classroom and to raise their awareness of their own decision-making power.”

Topics/tags:

Teaching Writing

The Write Time with Author Ellen Oh and Educator Melissa Thom

By National Writing Project

Ellen Oh is an award-winning author of numerous middle grade and young adult books including The Spirit Hunters series and Prophecy trilogy, and is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. Melissa Thom is a teacher librarian at Bristow Middle School in Connecticut with 22 years of educational experience and former president of the Connecticut Association of School Librarians.

Brian Johnson: Why I Write

Teach What You Love—Chapter 5 from When Challenge Brings Change: How Teacher Breakthroughs Transform the Classroom

In 2023, the National Writing Project copublished When Challenge Brings Change: How Teacher Breakthroughs Transform the Classroom. In this collection of compelling narratives, high-school and college teachers show us how they have taken on issues such as faculty and student relationships; struggles over personal identity in the classroom; the joys and complexities of working with emergent bilinguals, developing writers, and first-year college students; and the forever question of how to engage students.