“Central to our beliefs about how to help students become successful writers is our understanding that a teacher of writing must be a teacher who writes”
(Dorfman and Capelli, 2017).
Everyday we enter our classrooms expecting our students to give us their best effort, and in return we promise to give them ours. What does our best effort truly look like though? Is making sure all students’ needs are addressed enough? Is creating a welcoming and accepting classroom community enough? Is providing a plethora of meaningful learning opportunities enough? Yes, all of these things are important, and all of these things help students succeed, but without our full participation cannot fully reach their goal. I’m a firm believer that I shouldn’t ask my students to do anything that I wouldn’t be willing to do alongside them. As a teacher, it’s my job to show students that even I, an adult, still have room to learn and grow. By working alongside my students I am showing them what it means to be a lifelong learner and what it means to never stop trying to improve. Reading and writing are inherently connected, so we can assume that improving student writing can lead to improving student reading. One of the major joys of reading is the ability to share stories. That same joy can be found in writing as well.
Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6 by Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli supports the idea of using “exemplars”, or mentor texts, as models for student writing. Dorfman and Cappelli also explore the idea of “the teacher as a writer” as a way to provide explicit instruction and guidance for students and their writing. Dorfman and Cappelli express the notion that “when we write ourselves, it helps us engage in the same struggles as our young writers” (2017). We can’t expect to help our students problem solve if we can’t relate to and understand their experience as writers. It would be extremely difficult to teach our students to write without having the experience of writing ourselves. Dorfman and Cappelli also suggest that writing as teachers will help us develop guidelines and expectations for our students’ writing. It’s been proven time and time again and through multiple lenses that in order to grow and improve you have to put in the time and effort.
For the sake of transparency and vulnerability I’m going to share a few excerpts from writer’s notebook. Dorfman and Cappelli say, “writing for ourselves and for our students will help improve our own confidence, competence, and self-esteem” (2017). It is with their advice that I am willing to start sharing my own writing.
Dorfman, L.R. and Cappelli, R. (2017). Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6. Stenhouse Publishers. Portland, Maine.
I think that your post really shows you plan to embody what we have been reading as a teacher! Not to mention, your blog is really well put together and the writing is really well done, I may have to use your blog as a bit of a mentor text for my blog! I appreciate that you shared some of your writings through your post, I can tell which ones you gained inspiration from which readings that we have done for class. Thank you for your blog post!