(Not to be confused with “writing with pencils” lol)
In her blog post today, Rebecca Albers talks about the benefits of teachers’ writing when students write. I would like to second that point firmly. I try to write about half the time or more with my English classes, and I usually subject my work to their scrutiny when I do.
As Albers points out, there’s more of a sense of “shared work” when we work with students; there is also a willingness to expose our own work to their criticism as they expose theirs to ours. There’s also a sense of what someone else can do under the same conditions as they. I think the last reason is analogous, if not exactly the same, to why we should model learning for students when we can: that is, we should show them how we approach a problem when we don’t know the answer in advance. While too much “not knowing the answer” can lead to student doubts of our competence, too little can give students, especially weaker or less interested ones, the impression that all wisdom has already been received/distilled, and if they don’t see it as easily as it’s presented, they’re “not good enough.” It is also, in a longer-term perspective, more valuable to know how to approach solving different kinds of problems than it is to have memorized algorithms for specific ones (unless your work is of the assembly-line fashion).