What do I know

I have now read three articles about the teaching of writing. I have also discussed with my group some other articles. I have learned that When you assign children to write you can put them in groups. They can talk with each other about their writing and ask each other for help. They can assign roles to themselves and to the other members in their group. This helps children in their writing process. I have also learned that when students can write about a personal experience rather than a topic given to them by the teacher, they write much better. Students want to write about an experience. Students enjoy writing about topics that they are familiar with and know a lot about. Personally, I would much rather write about a personal experience than a random topic that a teacher assigns that I am not interested in. I am knowledgeable about the topic if I can relate to it. I think that students write better when they can relate to the topic. Another important thing that I have learned is that you cannot teach all students the same. Some students will need that extra effort to get them into writing. English language learners, for example, usually have horrible experiences with writing. They have been taught that literacy only occurs within the classroom and that is all that they can write about. If you take those students and just have them talk about their lives or their experiences they become interested. Once they have talk about those experiences then you can ask them to write it down on paper. Most of those students just want to tell you their story. They want to tell you that they think that making money out in the field is more important to them than writing about useless information that they will not need in their future.
I have learned that everybody is different. Different styles of teaching will cause different styles of writing. All in all, letting the students write about their own life experiences seems to be the most rewarding.