Week 6, Pedagogy Forum

I really like Amy Ellison's idea of distributing her old papers to her class to see their comments. Often, I take off the names of students and distribute past work, but I have never shown the class any of my writing for workshop. I like the attitude that this process fosters in the classroom and the workshop environment. By giving students my work, it would allow them to see that no one reaches the perfect pinnacle of writing. I think in public education, we too often rely on the teacher as the authority and the students are expected to copy that perfection. That will never work with writing. I even notice this attitude in my comments to student writing and in my workshop comments. I use words like "I would," and "we should", etc. This language reinforces the idea that I have all the answers, and the students will just never understand. I am making a concerted effort to change this belief because it goes against the nature of teaching writing.