Class reflection - Week 12

This week's class focused on teaching writing and the first activity we did in class was to take a look at a course syllabus designed for a college-level writing class and brainstorm all the principles in teaching writing that we see being displayed. Overall, i think the course fulfills most of the principles, and the instructor is also very clear about what she wants the students' writing products to be like. The text-heavy feature of the assignment instructions, in my opinion, rightly serves the purpose of maximizing the degree of clarity rather than overwhelms the students.

Next came Bekir and Chris presentation. Bekir focused on teaching and learning writing at a global level and brought up very thought-provoking questions for the whole class to discuss. One of the questions that i found interesting was whether to consider writing as a skill or as an art. And i agree that it should be a combination of both. Also, in my opinion to second language learners more emphasis should be placed on the first aspect than on the second one, since it is true that even though many of us can write fluently, it takes more to produce an artful piece of writing. Meanwhile, Chris addressed the issue at a more specific level, particularly he had us deal with some techniques that can be used to teach writing mentioned in the book and come up with specific writing activities.

For the last part of class we did our video tape analysis in groups and i must say this was my favorite part. Kizuna, Lilian and I had a great time watching each other's teaching video and we tried to give as constructive comments to one another as possible. I really valued the class time devoted to this activity, and felt like we were real colleagues who were working together to share experience and help improve each other's teaching performance.