Week 3

Best Practices of Writing Instruction

By: Steve Graham, Charles A. MacArthur, Micheal Hebert
Chapters 3 & 4

The text this week was mainly about how to teach students to become motivated as
writers. It also talks about how important is to teach the students to become motivated to work
on literature.
Like most of the readings that we have done, these chapters were entirely about
teaching writing to young students. These chapters give a lot of examples of things that I’ve
never thought about and they really gave me some perspective. The main thing that stuck out to
me was when they were talking about how the motivation to write gets less and less each
grade. I liked how they talked about this because I used to love writing, but once it started
turning into essays and research papers, I began to hate it.
One example of something I would use to teach writing is from chapter 3, which is what
the book says about collaborative writing. I defiantly need to work on this more before I start to
teach writing. The second example I would use is from chapter 4, when the authors talk about
how important narratives are to students. When I was younger I loved writing personal
narratives mostly because I liked to tell people stories, but it was also the most fun for me to
write because I would never have writer's block and I could just write without even thinking. My
last example is when the book stated that showing and not telling is very important to teach
students. I was always extremely bad at this, and I still am, but I want to make sure my students
really understand this. I will definitely use examples from other writers to show what showing
and not telling really is, and how to properly do it.