Post 202: How do teachers use writing to know their students better?

Post 202: How do teachers use writing to get to know their students better?

Teachers can use dialogue journals, art, talk, whole language approach and many other writing methods to get to know students.

I remember I had students talk while they wrote. I got to know my student as she spoke her Chinese and I translated and wrote down what she said in English.   This is the Bilingual Education approach where the student used her L1 in writing until her L2 was developed enough for content areas.

As I let my student talk as she learned to write, I found out a lot about my student's background, interests, family life, emotions, and friends. I found out she came from China on a music scholarship and that she came from a poor family. She was a talented violinist but her parents were too poor to send her to music school. When she won the US musical scholarship, her parents sent her on the first plane to America to go to music school as an international student. I learned from my talks with her that she was homesick and she missed her parents a lot. She felt lost in a country in which she did not know the language. She showed me the last photos of her parents at the airport as they were saying goodbye to her from China.  She was only13 years old. By using talk with writing, I learned a lot from my student and she created a trusting bond with me.  She loved being able to talk Chinese to me while she learned her English at the same time. As her English improved, she started speaking to me more and more in English until by the end of her first year, she was speaking to me entirely in English and not Chinese anymore.

I have used dialogue journals with my 9th grade American Literature class. We read the Wizard of Oz together and I was amazed at the art, poetry, my students were capable of in their dialogue journals. I had students create alternate endings for the Wizard of Oz. I had students rewrite The Wizard of Oz with a more  ethnic flair such as if the Wizard of Oz took place in Japan, or Korea, or if the Wizard of Oz had all Hispanic characters. They also modernized The Wizard of Oz to reflect what they were going through. The lost Dorothy became a metaphor for their teenage angst of feeling lost and not being certain what they wanted to become when they grew up. The Wizard became a metaphor for fake people or anybody who had hurt them as they grew up. I learned a lot about my students both emotionally and culturally from the dialogue journals I used in my class.

For my online writing classes, I would have my students watch Youtube movies about the literature piece we were reading or have them do web quests of finding interviews on Youtube of the author of the novel and have the students reflect upon the relationship of the author's life, historical events, Youtube interview on what we were reading in class. I loved to teach my online students to study both the historical and the biographical approach of the author as it related to what they read. I had students talk about what they learned in the DQ forums. Sometimes I cheated and used literature questions I took from Sparknotes online to ask students literature questions about the novel we were reading. When you are online, it is all writing since students have to write in the forums. Listening to my students talk helps me get to know students online and face to face.