Reflecting on Purpose and Potential
I appreciated this opportunity to think about the essential skills I will focus on in writing instruction this year. The more I thought about the skills that I want my students to develop, the more I returned to the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. These eight habits — curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition — have been the goal of my classroom for many years now. And the more I played with listing concrete skills in my Venn diagram, the more I came back to the more abstract habits that I hope to instill.
When I set about working on the second circle, I found myself treating the first circle like a checklist and using the second to search Writable for confirmation that it can help me to teach the skills and habits I prioritize. I think that it can, but under the same stipulations that I discussed in my first post: beside the teacher, not in place of the teacher. Writable can do some things that I hadn’t included in my list: check spelling and grammar for students and offered suggestions, detect plagiarism, and provide a bank of ready-to-use assignments, but in the main description, Writable says is features are for assessment, practice, and feedback. These are not the skills I want to teach students, but they provide the means by which we can achieve the skills. That was my ah-ha moment — thus, the bitmoji of me with a lightbulb in the middle (either that or I failed at the Venn diagram. 😜 )
In any case, I am more certain that tools are just that — instruments that we can use to fit our purposes but that we can also fashion and reshape to fit our needs. After all, who hasn’t used a screwdriver to pry something loose or to pound in a tack? I’m going to continue to think of our writing assistance tools in that way and remind myself that these tools have tremendous potential to help me to achieve the purposes of my writing program.
