Writing to Learn in the Content Areas

Chapter Eight

Writing is a skill that is beneficial in so many ways.  My previous teachers expected for us to already know how to write and never really had a whole bunch of training on it until college.  The journal writing is something I really believe in to assist writing skills and help reflect on what was learned.  This chapter brings up some very good tools to assist in writing to learn.  Using technology to improve writing is a great idea for students now.  They can use email as communication which may seem fun but increases their writing skills.  Writing to learn is a way for students to be able to think more critically about the subject and reflect back on ideas.  I recently just used one of these strategies in another class.  It was the GIST, and I’m not quite sure what I think about it.  My teacher said to only do 50 words to summarize the whole chapter.  It was extremely difficult!  Putting all the important facts into only 50 words is quite difficult and makes you really judge what you are writing.  I had to write down everything I thought was important then cut it down to plain and simple sentences.  The hardest part was then typing it to be exactly 50, she said no more and no less.  After doing it as an assignment I don’t think I would make my students do this.  It does get the student to figure out what is important but having such a small amount is makes it too difficult.  I do like the learning logs like the ones we do in this class.  They get me to think about what we read and helps me connected to myself after the reading process.  I would like to include something to this nature in my future classes to get them to be able to reflect and relate to reading.