Primary Professional Experience 1: Planning for Writing Assessment 1 Guide

In this unit, students have been exploring their own writer identity and how this may apply to their teaching of writing.

Task Instructions:

Choose three excerpts from your writer journal reflections, which highlight how your thinking about teaching writing (i.e. your writer identity) has been formed. With reference to the unit readings, analyse your three journal excerpts to identify factors that have supported or hindered your writer identity. Your analysis should fully explain each factor in detail and make links to current literature.

Using the knowledge that you have gained from your own writing experiences articulate how your future teaching philosophy for writing has been influenced. Consider how you will apply your knowledge to motivate and inspire students from diverse backgrounds to become effective writers. Provide links to the theories of writing and current teaching pedagogy.

Students are to discuss the following in their response:

1. What is writer identity and reflect on their own writer identity.
2. Theories of writing: Cognitive; Socio-Cognitive; Genre theory
3. Approaches/models of teaching writing: Skills approach, Process Approach; Four resources model of writing (they dont need to discuss all in their responses)
4. Transcriptional & compositional elements of writing.

Students select 3 of the following journal tasks to reflect on:

• Task 1: Writing River : Students to draw a river and annotate the journey.
• Task 2: Observation of a familiar object.
• Task 3: Observation of a natural place. Reflect on the processes, skills, feelings etc.
• Task 4: Childrens story
• Topic 5: Write about any topic of your choice through the structure of an informational text. Reflect upon that experience.

Students have been given the following instructions/structure touse as a guide, however, as long as students include the key points listed above, discuss their journal entries and their future teaching philosophy, the overall structure of the essay is up to them:

Introduction

• Provide a brief overview of what you will write about in this essay.
• What are the three journal entries you will be writing about?
• What will you be analyzing your journal entries against (pedagogical approach to writing; writing theory; elements of writing)

Body

• What is writers identity and why is it important to know in teaching? How does this link to your identity as a teacher of writing?
• Explain your journal entry and how it links to your writer identity. You can use first person. How are the theory/ies of writing reflected in your entry? For instance, did you take a cognitive approach to writing the observational task (cognitive)? Did you draw from the ideas provided by the group to form your response (socio-cognitive)? Did you look at examples/model texts (genre theory)? When you touch on a theory, explain what it is and support with some references and examples.
• Now do this for another 2 entries.
• THEN Consider and explain if/how any compositional/transcriptional elements of writing have developed/hindered your writer identity. Explain what compositional and transcriptional elements of writing are (with references) in this response.
• Explain how you can motivate, engage, inspire diverse learners, consider writing theory, pedagogical approaches, and how to teach compositional/transcriptional elements of writing.

Conclusion

• Recap key points

Important Notes

• Length: 2000-2500 words (+/- 10% not including reference list or title page
• Student can write in first person
• Journal entries not compulsory, can be included in an Appendix
• Students must include unit readings. I have told students that references may not be needed in the last section of the body.