Teaching Writing: the basics

After five years of teaching journalism, I feel like I've learned a lot through trial and error.  My students generally like my class, and I've always thought that most of my teaching strategies were interesting and effective.  Boy, was I wrong.

Today's lessons about writing really got me thinking about all of the different ways that I can infuse interactive mini-lessons into class time to really illustrate different parts of the writing process to my students.  I've never thought to show them a short clip from a movie and then had them write "with all of their senses," and thinking back, it seems like such an obviously good idea that I can't figure out why I've never done it.

But regardless, I haven't done that before.  Nor have I ever required students to read their writing out loud (or ever handed them a ridiculously written journalistic story and asked them to read that out loud).  I've never asked a panel of writers to read the newspaper and mark (honestly) where they stopped reading or lost interest in each story.  And I've never thought of having another teacher or administrator interrupt my class to yell at me about something, then have my students take notes and write different types of leads for the story.

In fact, everything from today has me questioning myself - why haven't I ever done these things?  And what sort of activities are filling up my class period, if they aren't engaging and interactive lessons like these?  I know we still have eight days left of instruction, but today is already making me question everything I thought I knew about teaching journalistic writing.

It makes me both excited for and absolutely terrified about whatever's coming tomorrow.

Julieanne McClain
Rutherford B. Hayes High School
Delaware Ohio