Self-directed Writing: Giving Voice To Student Writers

In today's teaching environment, writing and language arts teachers face real challenges

, both professionally and personally. Professionally, we know what is expected of us and what abilities our students will need to succeed in academia and in the real world. We are cognizant of the pressures from inside and outside our institutions to prepare students to perform on tests and to show their learning. For many teachers, the emphasis on test scores has driven curriculum content and pedagogy. When we consider what it was that first appealed to us about the profession, we may often feel the pull, the tension, between our classroom practices and our deep-seated beliefs and experiences that first brought us to the classroom door. I believe as teachers we have all shared these moments of tension, and we have all asked ourselves if we are effectively communicating the passion for reading and writing that motivated our interest in language and literacy. In these moments, I ask myself whether I have taken the Tight Jeans time to connect with students' lives, hear their stories, understand their frustrations, and discover what each brings to the classroom as a social context for learning.

We can reclaim the passion for reading and writing that often gets buried in times when cur-ricular and legislative mandates become the focus of attention in a testing environment. With schools becoming increasingly more diverse, I want to suggest "self-directed writing" as a way to build a community of diverse writers who share their knowledge and interests, and who strive for clear, effective communication.

Self-directed writing is an opportunity for teachers to write with their students, and it's writing that ultimately ends up in the student's portfolio at mid-term and end of term. It's one component of a structured writing class in which students also do other writing assignments. Teachers can easily adapt self-directed writing to their classes, but it's important that students know that their work is valued as part of the curriculum. It's also important for teachers to communicate their expectations of finished pieces. Some teachers and students might think that this kind of writing is "anything goes"-unstructured and useless. However, self-directed writing that's taken to completion-a decision the writer makes-always communicates something Discount Jeans meaningful and employs language effectively, even when it doesn't conform to edited American English; it holds the reader's attention, is often creative and inventive, and is always clear and coherent-all the features that we expect in good writing.

In my classes, self-directed writing fulfills a number of objectives, which I enumerate and explain below.

by: Dill Smith

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