Making Writing Instruction Authentic

By Author: FIRELEAVES
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From the Secondary Section
Early in the fall of 2007, one of my students asked whether she could pass around a petition during class protesting the "moment of silence." The Illinois legislature had recently passed a law requiring all schools to observe a moment of silence at the start of each school day. A number of students who heard the conversation started expressing their views and asking questions about the moment of silence.

I seized this opportunity since my senior writing class had recently begun a unit on writing argument. The class meets in a computer lab, so I set students to work searching for answers to their questions. They found a number of Omega Replica Watches newspaper articles and news broadcasts. They found quotes from legislators about the purpose of the law, some suggesting, for example, that it would be a good way to get students quiet and ready to learn.

I gave students the assignment to write either a letter to the editor of a local newspaper or a letter to a state legislator or the governor arguing their viewpoint on this ...
... issue. This assignment proved to be a good way to help students learn some important processes. They used the Internet to find the names and addresses of legislators. Some students realized they needed to examine letters to the editor to analyze how they are written. Before writing, students needed to figure out how much their audience would know about the issue, and those writing to legislators needed to know how they had voted. In researching the moment-of-silence law, they discovered differences between news sources and blogs and the need to evaluate the credibility and validity of sources.

When one student argued that the moment of silence was too short to accomplish its purpose of giving students time to reflect on their lives, I suggested that she gather some data about its length. For one week, she timed the moment of silence each day. (The average length was around 12 seconds.) Students also counted the number of students talking, doing homework, or surfing the Internet during the moment of silence. One student had spent the previous year in a school in the South that also observed a moment of silence each day. She described how the students and teachers there approached it much more seriously and reverently.

Most students were eager to write about the issue and had interesting perspectives and supporting evidence. A few students complained at first that they didn't have anything to write because they didn't care one way or another about the moment of silence. As I talked with one student, he said that there were "a lot bigger problems in schools and the world than having a moment of silence." I suggested that he had just stated a position that he could write about: What issues in schools are more important for legislators, students, and teachers to be talking about? About half of the students in the class ended up supporting the new law, and about half were against it. This situation provided a great opportunity for students to learn effective strategies for writing an argument: taking a position, analyzing their audience, finding specific supporting evidence for their claims, analyzing the evidence, and anticipating and addressing counterarguments.

Of course, this situation was a "teachable moment" that happened serendipitously. Such opportunities don't always arise. By second semester, when I taught the course again, students were weary of the moment-of-silence issue, and I Omega Replica could tell there would not be much enthusiasm for writing about it. Sometimes an issue arises about which students as a group feel strongly. But that doesn't always happen. A teacher certainly can't count on it to happen at just the right time. What can we do to generate the engagement and learning that result from writing about authentic issues and addressing real audiences?