Conversations With Leaders: Principles Of Effective Writing

According to a study done by Achieve Inc. in 2005, fifty percent of students that graduate high school are not prepared for college-level writing (Santrock, 2011, 370). While this lack of preparedness roots all the way back to the beginning of learning how to write, a great deal of knowledge about becoming a better writer can be learned in high school English classes if the teachers apply different writing techniques. In chapter eleven of John Santrock’s textbook Educational Psychology and Sharon Zumbrunn and Keegan Krause’s article “Conversations with Leaders: Principles of Effective Writing Instruction” many best practices for teaching writing are given in hopes to provide teachers with numerous ways to teach their students to become better

This approach emphasizes “writing is best understood as being culturally embedded and socially constructed rather than being internally generated” (Santrock, 2011, 372). Santrock brings up that each student in a class will have a different writing background, some will come with a lot of natural ability, previous experience, or almost no knowledge on how to write. Teachers need to be able to teach to the lowest level of writing skill without boring the other students, finding a balance to where everyone in the class is learning how to become a better writer. This approach states that teachers should provide opportunities for students to write scholarly papers, but also provide times where the students can write about situations meaningful to them. When students write about real things, it is easier for them because the students are writing what they know, and the skills students learn doing this will translate into writing the more academic papers. Along with this, Santrock writes that teachers should set up individual conferences to discuss with students their writings. This gives the teacher an opportunity to provide the students any support they need and give feedback, which improves the students’ writing skills. The next idea brought up is to have peer collaboration and peer editing included in the writing progress. This provides the students with an opportunity to hear

When the students can see what the point of the writing they are doing is, they will be more willing to learn writing techniques. Along with this, teachers need to be flexible with their lesson plans as different questions or examples will come up that were not planned. For example, if there is a speech given by the president, it is a great opportunity to look at the conventions and rhetoric of the speech in class with students (Zumbrunn and Krause, 2012, 349). Oftentimes teachers only have their students write for a brief portion of the school year, and with all the other subjects that need to be taught in order to do well on state assessments, writing is the easiest to cut. In order to see a positive change is students’ writing ability, there must be writing done every day. Teachers must think creatively in order to implement writing practice into other activities. In a secondary English classroom, this is an easier task as writing is a larger component, but it can still be difficult, as there are many other topics to cover as well. With all of these, “effective writing instruction includes more than just daily practice. It focuses on individual student needs and provides instruction to help students meet their goals” (Zumbrunn and Krause, 2012, 349). Teachers should begin their time with students with a writing activity that will