Teaching Methods and Implications
Process can be taught using a variety of methods intended to strengthen the relationship between students and instructor. In other words, classroom discussion and activities center on students' ability to mimic what has come before in hopes that they will understand what good writing is and learn to mimic it. Some of the methods include:
Prewriting activities. These could include brainstorming and/or other freewriting activities, drawing conceptual maps, participating in an ethnographic study, research, and more.
Drafting. Class time can be spent writing papers, and students can ask instructors for ideas or help.
Revision. Instructors can designate class time for the revision of drafts and direct students to focus on rhetorical strategies.
Portfolio-based assessment. Students are given a deadline, such as the end of a semester, and a goal, such as demonstrating skills like rhetorical awareness, conventional thinking, and source acceptance and integration. The intervening time is spent drafting and revising papers. Composition instructors serve as final authorities on the quality of work, helping students explore areas foreign to them, rather than more free wheeling teachers who tell students how to express their individuality. From among the papers they work on in the semester, students choose the papers the instructor considers to be their best and put them in a portfolio, which is graded by the instructor. Often students are graded on their drafts during the semester as well as on the work they produce at the end of it.
Reflection on the writing process.
Read more about this topic: Process Theory Of Composition
Famous quotes containing the words teaching, methods and/or implications:
“Mrs. Zajac knows you didnt try. You dont just hand in junk to Mrs. Zajac. Shes been teaching an awful lot of years. She didnt fall off the turnip cart yesterday. She told you she was an old-lady teacher.”
—Christine Zajac, U.S. fifth-grade teacher. As quoted in Among Schoolchildren, September section, part 1, by Tracy Kidder (1989)
“Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (18951985)