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Writing-Based Teaching: Essential Practices and Enduring Questions
Offers candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges.
Written by the team at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, this book is designed to provide practical guidance regarding the challenges and potential of writing-based teaching, and suggestions for how to adapt the practices to particular classroom situations. The contributors share candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges. As teachers of literature, composition, poetry, mathematics, anthropology, and education, they offer philosophical and theoretical reflections, practical guidance, and personal stories about how to help students become better, more-fluent writers, close readers, and reflective thinkers. This book will be of interest to writing center directors, for what it says about how to do collaborative learning and revision and seeing writing as a way to build community, and to writing teachers for how it demystifies freewriting, focused freewriting, and dialectical notebooks.
“Instructors interested in developing a classroom ‘practice’ of writing will find this collection a rich resource. The essays are well formulated; the volume itself, thoughtfully organized. Iteratively captured in a range of voices and teaching strategies, the underlying argument is compelling.” — Teaching Theology and Religion
“As a former teaching assistant I would have benefited from experiencing a program like that described in Writing-Based Teaching.” — Paul Baker, Wordsalad.wordpress.com
“Any individual, program, or institution seriously interested in understanding and practicing the writing process would benefit from using this text.” — Alison Cook-Sather, author of Education is A Metaphor for Change in Learning and Teaching
“One of the most important ideas in this collection is that we, as writing teachers, need to develop habits of action and habits of mind that students can take with them.” — Pat Belanoff, coauthor of Being a A Community of Writers Revisited .
Written by the team at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, this book is designed to provide practical guidance regarding the challenges and potential of writing-based teaching, and suggestions for how to adapt the practices to particular classroom situations. The contributors share candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges. As teachers of literature, composition, poetry, mathematics, anthropology, and education, they offer philosophical and theoretical reflections, practical guidance, and personal stories about how to help students become better, more-fluent writers, close readers, and reflective thinkers. This book will be of interest to writing center directors, for what it says about how to do collaborative learning and revision and seeing writing as a way to build community, and to writing teachers for how it demystifies freewriting, focused freewriting, and dialectical notebooks.
“Instructors interested in developing a classroom ‘practice’ of writing will find this collection a rich resource. The essays are well formulated; the volume itself, thoughtfully organized. Iteratively captured in a range of voices and teaching strategies, the underlying argument is compelling.” — Teaching Theology and Religion
“As a former teaching assistant I would have benefited from experiencing a program like that described in Writing-Based Teaching.” — Paul Baker, Wordsalad.wordpress.com
“Any individual, program, or institution seriously interested in understanding and practicing the writing process would benefit from using this text.” — Alison Cook-Sather, author of Education is A Metaphor for Change in Learning and Teaching
“One of the most important ideas in this collection is that we, as writing teachers, need to develop habits of action and habits of mind that students can take with them.” — Pat Belanoff, coauthor of Being a A Community of Writers Revisited .
220 pages, Paperback
First published November 5, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 16, 2015
The book describes various facets of the work done at Bard College's Institute for Thinking and Learning. Chapters cover some specific classroom practices that I'm interested in trying out with my students. Personal freewriting at the beginning of each class is proposed as a way of grounding students before beginning classroom activities while also enabling them to see themselves as writers. Focused freewriting prompts, which work best when the prompts ask students to look at a text from an "off" angle, give students the chance to discover something new as they are writing and think about a given text before tackling others' viewpoints. The most interesting technique I learned from the book is the dialectical notebook, in which students record observations, often in the form of quotations; reflect on their observations; receive feedback from peers; and then respond to that feedback. The method requires a lot of work, but I can see something really worthwhile coming out of it. The radical revision prompts provided in the book also look really helpful. The more general information on creating a community of writers in the classroom really rounds out the book.
I'd recommend it particularly to high school English teachers, but also to post-secondary educators of any discipline (the book even has a chapter about using writing in the sciences). It's the kind of book I would like to have seen in my English methods courses.
I'd recommend it particularly to high school English teachers, but also to post-secondary educators of any discipline (the book even has a chapter about using writing in the sciences). It's the kind of book I would like to have seen in my English methods courses.
August 11, 2020
Did anything think I would ever finish this? I surely did not.
Really, the ideas are great but we learned about them in workshops. And so this felt slog-y.
The last couple of essays were the best in terms of the types of classes I teach in and thinking about what this might play out like.
Really, the ideas are great but we learned about them in workshops. And so this felt slog-y.
The last couple of essays were the best in terms of the types of classes I teach in and thinking about what this might play out like.
November 26, 2015
I gave this three stars because I didn't enjoy all of the chapters although I really did like the one about odd angled questions. I read this as a component for a program called Writing Across the Curriculum that I'm taking via the college where I teach.
February 11, 2016
It's hard to expect a book to bring to life the incredible practice of Bard's Institute for Writing and Thinking, but this comes fairly close to doing it justice. My students (and I) respond incredibly well to this philosophy of writing.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews