My favourite part of teaching English has always been the freedom that comes with teaching it. As an educator, I never feel like I am bound to specific rules or instructional strategies when it comes to teaching writing to students. As explained in Reading & Writing in the Disciplines, writing is a process that students work on to improve over time. My goal as an educator has always been to empower students to believe that their writing voice is important, and that they have something to say. This epiphany didn’t come to me easily though. My students, many of them are struggling writers and a lot of them are English Language Learners, have a hard time engaging critically with works of literature: short stories, novels, etc. When students can easily engage with the text by reading, they have a much easier time writing about that same text.
One day during a writing workshop, as I was helping one student decide what topic to write about, I found that I was asking him a lot of questions. My questions were scaffolded, and they moved from description to analytical questions. As the student answered each question, he was able to discover his focus. The success of using inquiry to strengthen students’ writing is also what led me to create The Writing Project.
Here are some examples of questions to ask students to help them to understand and interpret text:
– See the rest of the blog at Annenberg Learner blog.
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