Paradigm Shift

My teacher education involved little of learning how to teach writing. Most of what I learned on the subject was from my mentor during that impressionable first year, when classroom management and other stressors sometimes overpower the will to step out of the box and create inventive lesson plans. As a “newbie,” I generally didn’t ask questions and took the advice of my mentor not to “reinvent the wheel.” I often used what she gave me or what was left in my classroom files from previous teachers, despite the state of the graying manila folders in which these handouts were contained or the crumbling overheads on which tedious notes were composed. As I read Hairston’s “The Winds of Change,” I began to recall the feelings I had as a new teacher, “exhausting (myself) trying to teach writing from an outmoded model.” I can easily recall the terror of the impending research paper due date and the dread and exhaustion that overwhelmed me when thinking about all of the unnecessary commas, fragments, misplaced apostrophes, and so on.

In the district in which I taught, all students in the same class, whether it was junior English or freshman biology, were required to take the same finals. This was despite the fact that different teachers with different styles and philosophies were teaching the classes. This certainly did not breed an air of individuality, and I felt that my mentor was quite conventional in her thinking, and she generally seemed more aligned with the traditional paradigm to which Hairston refers, emphasizing product over process, the linear progression from prewriting to writing to rewriting. There was little to no talk about intervening during the writing process, and it seemed there was a tipping of the scales towards the value of correcting mechanics in student writing over the value of helping develop content in student writing. I felt more pressure to be sure students completed all three of the required essays, than to take the time necessary to facilitate students to produce just one that was truly exceptional. This leads me to something that I thought hit the mark in the Lynn reading, that “the extent to which classroom teachers have been aware of a revolution” may be exaggerated and that we don’t know “how many teachers…continue to teach writing by doing worksheets, learning grammar rules,” etc.

As the new teacher fears started to subside, an inherent sense of wrongness in the way we were teaching writing began to nag at me, and over the next two years, I did finally begin to assert myself and get some of the final exam questions changed to reflect what I felt was important. However, I still regret that I didn’t have the chance (or take the risk) to step even further out of the traditional writing instruction comfort zone that was thrust upon me. When I realized that Hairston wrote the article nearly three decades ago, I started to feel embarrassed and cheated that I wasn’t more aware of this revolution in teaching writing.

Even ten years after the article was published, during my high school years, I don’t recall much instruction at all on the process of writing. We were given a topic about which to write, we handed in the paper on its due date (on most occasions), and a week later the proofread paper was returned with a mark scrawled across the top in red ink. In comparison, as a teacher I did experiment with some aspects of process writing, from different methods of prewriting, like free writing and clustering, to peer conferencing and keeping journals. So, I do have to assert that some strides have been made in the shift to the new paradigm; however, although Hairston hints at the slowness of the shift, I think it may be even more snail-like than she imagined.

However, I am still inspired about the future and motivated by the zeal with which Hairston discusses the Revolution, as well as excited by the possibilities that exist within Lynn’s chapter on invention. One of the most challenging aspects of teaching writing is helping students to use their imagination, to help them ignore the nagging self-consciousness that compels them to say, “I don’t know what to write,” and help them uncover that they actually do have something to say.