Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for The Atlantic, Kristina Rizga explains the importance of developing writing skills in children and the different ways educators approach this subject.

· Why is it important for students to develop writing skills? What is the best way to approach teaching how to write? How do students develop their voices in writing?

· Here are a few ways to help teachers teach writing. 

“I want to say something important about writing,” Pirette McKamey told 25 seniors in her English class at San Francisco’s Mission High School one fall afternoon in 2012. It’s incredibly hard, and always incomplete, she explained. “I’ve reread some of my essays 20 times and I still go, ‘I can’t believe I made this mistake or that mistake.’”

“I’m going to read a powerful essay as a model today,” said McKamey, who frequently shares her students’ work at the beginning of class as a way to showcase examples of effective and creative approaches to writing. She appreciated the student’s paper for “the heft of its content,” she told the class. “It also feels real. It was written with real engagement and honesty.”

In his essay, one of McKamey’s students wrote about his life ambitions, including his desire to become a musician. He compared his goals with those of two other individuals, chosen from the many real and fictional people the students had studied earlier that year in a five-week-long unit titled “Quests.” The vision behind this unit was rooted in McKamey’s observation that as teenagers approach adulthood, they want to examine how people from different eras and cultures have defined values such as success, goodness, and courage.

After McKamey finished reading the essay, students discussed what made it work—and which approaches they could employ in their own writing. As the discussion winded down, McKamey passed out a grammar worksheet.

Today, there is a growing consensus that students need strong writing skills to succeed in the workplace and to fully participate in society, but educators passionately disagree on the best ways to teach those skills. Some call forgreater focus on the fundamentals of grammar: building vocabulary, identifying parts of speech, and mastering punctuation. Others believe that students need more opportunities to develop their writerly voice through creative expression and work that allows them to make connections between great literature and their personal lives.

Read the full article about writing by Kristina Rizga at The Atlantic.