Welcome+To+My+Journey

=Welcome to my writing portfolio for 487 Seminar in Teaching Writing!= Here you will discover the journey that I have taken in this class both personally and professionally. I have had the priviledge of working closely beside a group of amazing individuals who will prove to be great educators. We have taught each other along the way as we learned about one another even in moments of tears and moments of greatness! Thank you to everyone who made this possible!

=My Teaching Philosophy=

My teaching philosophy incorporates my experiences as an education student, my teacher research, and my four years of experience substitute teaching. I believe teaching is a collective responsibility among students, teachers, and parents. This is not always possible or easy to achieve, but as an educators, my goal will be to develop a classroom of respect and safety for our students to learn. I believe that one step in teaching writing is to show students my own process and struggles in writing. Being able to model this for students will allow them to see that even those they perceive as experts in writing have a process they must go through to get to their finished piece. Allowing students to see their teacher in my own writing struggles and helping me to work through them is a great learning experience. Most importantly showing students their input matters in my writing will provide a classroom experience of respect and openness.

Writing for students must be done in several steps, not just for the finished product. I will give my students time to write, revise, and share their writing. They need to recognize that all writing they do has a purpose whether it is in narratives, short stories, song lyrics, email, or a picture book. I will use multigenre texts as models that will open discussion for their relevance and purpose. Showing them the importance of these texts will provide encouragement and opportunity to write in ways they may not have tried on their own. Students will be encouraged to share with their peers in freewrites and be given opportunity to provide positive feedback to one another.

Giving students the freedom to write and use technology they are familiar with can also enhance their writing experiences. This will give them an opportunity to write for more than a grade, but show their writing matters. They can achieve this by working together with their peers and publish their writing on the internet to reach a larger audience. Students can use outlets like tumblr, glogster, and other writing publications that they can showcase their writing. They need to be given real world applications for their writing so that they can understand why we write and how we can transform our writing to have different meanings. Teaching writing needs to be presented to students as a journey in which we explore, experiment, make mistakes, evaluate, and share. In this journey I hope that we will all learn more about ourselves and value what we can learn from each other. .