Writers as Reflective Practitioners

This week our Faculty Learning Community focused on the Morehead Writing Project met and we talked about our top priority for our writing classrooms and because many of us are also engaged in mentoring instructors and tutors we also talked about our primary goal for those writing instructors and tutors. It was a lively and interesting conversation, but what really struck me is that ultimately all our answers could be boiled down to one simple response: reflective practice.

The concept of reflective practice is to engage in continuous learning. Engaging in reflective practice requires an inherent belief that we are never done learning and growing. Reflective practice requires that we learn from experience rather than teaching or knowledge transfer.

The teacher as reflective practitioner is an important part of our work with the National Writing Project. We encourage the teachers we work with to continually reflect on what is happening in their classrooms to think about what is working and what is not as well as why. It is that reflection upon the why that is key to this practice of growth and development.

In recent years I have incorporated reflective practice into my work with writers as well as teachers. Writers learn and grow by writing but also by reflecting on their past experience, both challenges and successes. What were their goals? What did they do to achieve those goals? What worked? What did not? Understanding the answers to these questions can help writers adapt their practice to future situations and better position them to make better choices.

My goal is always to make my students into writers, but more important, to make them into self-regulating writers. Reflective practice is essential to this transformation into self-regulating writer. With reflection, with a recognition and practice of continually reflecting on the lessons offered by each experience, writers can continue to learn and grow long after they leave the writing classroom and hopefully throughout the rest of their lives. That is my goal for my students and I am continually refining my pedagogical strategies to achieve this goal.

This blog is my own struggle to be a reflective practitioner. I hope that others benefit from my posts, but ultimately I know I am the primary beneficiary as I record my achievements, defeats, struggles, and progress. Do you engage in reflective practice? Do your students?

Are you spending enough time thinking about writing?

My students don’t spend enough time thinking about writing – and probably yours don’t either. I understand why. After all, they have lots of other things on their mind. And to be honest, I sometimes don’t think about writing as much as I should and this is my field of interest, my passion, and the driving force behind my paycheck.

As a writer who spends a lot of time with other writers, I also know that too much thinking about writing can be a bad thing – a dangerous thing. It often leads to the two primary dangers facing writers (well the two leading dangers after avoiding the siren call of Words With Friends) -- spending so much time thinking about what to write or how to write it you actually forget to write. Either rabbit hole can lead to madness and put an immediate end to productivity.

 The truth is that for most of our students too much thinking is not a problem. I want to blame our current education system for this lack of thinking. After all, our obsession with assessment and interminable pushing to teach to the test has created a monstrous education system which offers very little time for simple thinking and reflection. Even worse, there are only penalties and no rewards for encouraging thought and inquiry in the typical K-12 setting. But that is another blog post. I must confess that even though I grew up in a kinder, gentler era of education where there was time and energy devoted to reading, writing, and creativity, and my teachers were not worried about how test scores would impact their job, I did not spend a lot of time thinking about the art and craft of writing. And I KNEW that I wanted to be a writer, so I can only imagine that my classmates spent even less time on it.

I believe that this is a problem, this lack of thinking about writing, we should worry about as writing teachers. Many of my peers want to spend a great deal of time obsessing about the two dangers I mentioned above – the what and the how of writing. In fact, that is what my students obsess about the most as well (hmmm, perhaps there is a relationship there). We spend meetings debating whether to assign a persuasive essay or an analytical essay and, of course, students’ punctuation choices often provoke hilarity, but is that where we should be spending our time and our students’ time?

I don’t want to dismiss the importance of grammatical knowledge or genre awareness, but I believe we will not solve the challenges of either without helping our student writers develop a deeper awareness of writing. Writing is not WHAT we write and it is much more than following formatting, grammar, and spelling rules. We need to help our students think like writers before they can become writers. This concern is one of the primary motivations behind the “writing about writing” movement in composition studies. In WAW-based classes, students read theory and research about writing studies, think and discuss their reading, and then write about these ideas as well as study writing on their own.

While I have moved my own teaching away from a WAW-focus, I still focus a great deal of class time and energy on reflection and discussion about writing because I believe that writers do obsess about what and how as well as why. Writers write but they also think about writing -- and, in particular, they think about their writing. I want my students to become writers and I believe an essential part of that transformation must involve learning to think like a writer which means we must think about writing and how writers think and behave. I do this by leading weekly class discussions on these issues and requiring students spend reflective time each week on these issues as well. Not only do I hope to use these tools to transform my students into writers, but this process also helps me spend more time thinking about writing. Win-Win. Do you spend enough time thinking about writing? Do you spend enough time encouraging your students to think about writing?

Writing Studio & Breaking Boundaries

I am creating a writing studio as part of the work of my National Writing Project site at Morehead State University and I am very excited about this work and its potential for impacting both the teaching and learning of writing at MSU on many levels.

Why a writing studio and not a writing center or writing lab? Studios have a long tradition as a place for artists or musicians to work. A studio is a place of creation and collaboration and synergy. I want to create a program that fosters the kind of discussion and energy and growth you might see in a studio.

A writing studio focuses on the writer and not the writing by providing a cognitive apprenticeship in a community of practice (see Lerner’s The Idea of a Writing Laboratory) where learning takes place through guided practice. The guidance takes the form of group discussion focused on cognitive and metacognitive issues rather than physical skills and process. The idea is that through observation, coaching, and independent practice, students develop as successful learners and acquire the reflective and self-regulating tools required to be a successful writer.

In Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces, Grego and Thompson describe a writing studio as a reflective space where writers communicate about generating and developing ideas as well as refine approaches, processes, and attitudes about writing. Greg and Thompson point out this is generative learning that builds understanding through work and experience. Sessions are focused on the production of student work and the processes student engage in to produce it.

Too often the teaching of writing is a closed system that focuses on errors and students ignorance of rules and conventions, but a studio allows us to explore together the rhetorical situation. As Greg and Thompson note: studio presents a different way of “being” with student writers and this different way of being excited me as a teacher and as a teacher of teachers. While this type of cooperative inquiry is reminiscent of Elbow’s work and the way that I teach writing myself, it takes the writing workshop and peer review approaches used by many (including myself) to another level that I believe can plan in important role in the development of metarhetorical awareness. I am interested in the idea of focusing discussion not just on student writing but instead using it as the rhetorical context.

As I study and research in preparation for embarking on this project in August, I am excited by the potential for MSU and the Morehead Writing Project as well as how this work will impact me as a teacher of writing. However, I am still struggling with the implications of this work for me as a technical communicator and taking the writing studio model far beyond the basic writing and composition classrooms that are its traditional home. Grego and Thompson describe the writing studio as a place to explore and negotiate the institutional spaces/places that influence our lives and our writing and as a rhetorician this is something we should continue to address as communications professionals. I expect I will be writing a lot more about this in the weeks to come but I would really appreciate others’ thoughts on the implications of writing studio for technical communication students and professionals.

My State of the Semester Address

That sounds much more grand as it is more of rumination or reflection than formal pronouncement but oh well it is Friday. I’m tired and I’m not operating at full brain capacity. It has been a busy busy week with lots of projects bubbling and percolating. But I vowed that I would blog today and this seemed like a topic I could handle at my current level of functioning.

Actually, I am very excited about the state of my semester and very happy with (most) of my students. I did not make any major changes to the overall plan for my Writing II class but I did change some procedures/methods/practices in hopes of improving usability and the overall user experience for me and my students. I thought this might be a good time (the end of the second week) to review some of those changes and what has happened so far for my own reference. I know from past experience that I don’t always remember these details when it comes time to plan for the next semester. By December I know that August will seem like only a hazy memory of sunshine and heat.

As I have blogged about before, I consider classroom community important and so was determined to work much harder on developing it this semester. There are a number of educational benefits but it also makes my experience so much better too. One of the disadvantages of teaching online (and there are many) is that you often don’t get to know your students well and, even worse, many of your interactions with individual students are negative (grading, nagging, reprimanding etc.). You also do not get to witness (many) light bulb moments (when students make a key discovery or significant revelation) which is one of the great rewards for all the negative aspects of teaching.

I decided to work on community in a couple of very deliberate ways this semester. First, I mandated a certain level of Twitter activity that was purely social in nature. It really helps me get to know my students and understand what they are all about. I think this type of interaction helps replace some of the chatter and banter that would take place before class begins or during breaks in a traditional classroom. I find that students are using Twitter to ask for help and clarification which I am happy to give but it is wonderful to see other students respond as well so the interaction doesn’t just become a version of online office hours.

Second, I created reading groups based on major and intended profession and interests (each student is in three reading groups). I hope that creating smaller groups within the larger community will make students feel less isolated and I hope that the bonds of the group will be greater due to their shared interests. This is a change in the way I handled the reading assignments last semester. Last semester that assignment was not a success and I’m hopeful that this semester will go better. Too soon to say with this but the assignment of readings was a bit smoother/easier although still time consuming. Still seeking a way to deal with the logistics.

Another frustration for me has been trying to get my students to become more reflective writers as I believe this is a crucial step to becoming self-regulating writers. In the past only a few writers reached any depth of introspection and so I knew I needed to do something different. This semester I tweaked my reflection/metawriting assignment so we begin with a literacy narrative which then becomes a work-in-progress to incorporate the reflections and metawriting that I previously required. However, in order to feed this reflection I have required journals posts (and now that Morehead State has upgraded BlackBoard we can do that right in our course shell), Twitter posts, and discussions about these issues. So far I have seen much more evidence of introspection and critical thinking and am pleased with this promising start to the semester. I have tried to provide more scaffolding for this than I have in the past and think those efforts are successful but then this is the beginning of the semester. Have to wait and see if it holds up. However, getting them to think about their writing is an important first step so I’m happy to see if happening.

A final change is more procedural than anything. I have always believed in full disclosure and thought it important to give students the complete assignment as we began work on it. I still think honesty and full disclosure are the best policy but I also know that students frequently feel overwhelmed and frightened by large, complex assignments (OK, they freak out about them, in my experience). So this semester I have delayed giving assignments and began with giving students simple tasks that can be done in very short amounts of time. After most of the tasks associated with an assignment have already been completed, then I will give students the actual assignment. I have only done this with one assignment so far (although I’m going to have to deliver a second assignment fairly soon) and students have told me (when I asked) that they much prefer the list of tasks that guide them through the assignment. Again, the upgraded version of BlackBoard has helped me out with this as I have been using the Task list function to keep us on track – even if it is a tad clunky.

And so I feel pretty good about the changes I’ve made for this semester. They have improved my experience and early reports seem to be that they have improved the student experience as well.

Reflections on the dissertation process

I just completed the final draft of my dissertation and as a teacher who promotes reflection, I should practice what I preach for my own benefit and hopefully others as well. While I will never write another dissertation, it is likely that long-term research projects and writing books based on those projects is in my academic future. I know that a dissertation is not a book and vice versa but enough parallels exist that I should record the lessons I learned from this experience.

Writing a dissertation is exciting and exhilarating and fun – at times. There are also times when it is hard physical and mental labor that leaves you drained and twitchy. Writing a dissertation is a mixture of discovery and drudgery. Even though I received a great deal of advice, I was still unprepared for the process. I don’t know that you can ever be truly prepared. You can receive training and preparation and advice, but in the end you need to get your head in a certain place and no one can control that except you. But enough of the zen and more of the practical.

If I had to sum up the most important lesson that I wish I understood going in one word that would be: recursive. I was told repeatedly that a dissertation is a recursive document but until I understood that writing the dissertation is also recursive I still struggled. It is not a linear experience but rather a tightening spiral with your final dissertation message as the epicenter. I am sure that if I had realized this sooner in my process then the writing and revision of my dissertation would have been much less painful. Think of preparing your reading list and preproposal and taking your qualifying exams as a large loop that then gradually loops inward as you plan your research and craft your proposal. The collection and analysis of your data creates another inward loop until finally you reach the central point, lesson, or finding of your work – your take-away message. After you have worked through your results and analysis and worked out that take-away it is much easier to go back and work through the other chapters. Maybe doing so would save you some of the wheel-spinning and revision that I had to do by thinking too linear.

A more practical (rather than conceptual) piece of advice that I cannot stress enough (and a primary reason I was able to get through this process in a timely fashion) is that timing is everything. Give yourself time. Dissertation writing, in my experience, requires large chunks of prime time, but of course, mileage may vary according to the driver. I needed large chunks of time to read-think-process-write. During course work I frequently had large projects/papers but nothing on this scale and I learned early on that the work habits and practices that moved me through course work would not work for dissertation work. Writing a dissertation is different from writing a paper or article. In my opinion it is better to carve out one or two large time blocks a week than five smaller time blocks a week because I found that in small time block it took me too long to get to the place I needed to get (by reading, thinking etc.) to be productive. Mileage may vary for those who have chunks of time during the day to productively think (runners, for example, or commuters) without distraction, but as family and work demands fill all my waking hours the only time I could really focus was during the dedicated blocks of dissertation time. I aimed for three or four large time blocks a week. Sometimes I got them and some weeks I couldn’t. Fortunately, my family was supportive of this endeavor and I was able to adjust my work schedule to accommodate dissertation time. Finally, as I mentioned early on you should strive for locating those chunks of time for your prime time. When are you most alert, focused, and at your best (mentally and physically)? For me this is morning. As I teach primarily online (at least that is what I requested during this process) I was able to perform most of my teaching functions in the afternoon and evening and could then dedicate my mornings to dissertation work.

I’d love to hear about others’ experiences to see if their recommendations and advice compare or differ.

Fostering Agency and Writing Self-Efficacy: The Making of a Writer

Note: This is the most current version of my dissertation abstract. Dissertation successfully defended May 25.

Writing is an essential professional skill as well as important life skill. The goal of writing instruction is to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to successfully meet future writing challenges. However, despite years of writing instruction, many writers struggle to transfer skills and knowledge from one context to another. One reason for this struggle is that even after years of instruction most people are highly apprehensive about writing and do not consider themselves writers. In order to overcome the problem of transfer, we must improve our understanding about writing apprehension and the role it plays in the transformation to writer. Writing research and theory has brought us to the current understanding that writing is a set of complex skills that is contextually situated and socially influenced, and yet most writing instruction focuses on general, basic skills. As a result, instruction does little to lessen writing apprehension and foster the transformation to writer. This mixed methods study focused on the transformation into writers of 17 teachers attending a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute and addressed the impact of immersion in this learning community on writing apprehension. This research spanned a year and studied the writing apprehension of the participants before, during, and after their transformation by focusing on the role that agency and self-efficacy played in the transformation to writer.

NWP’s mission is to improve the teaching of writing, and central to that goal is the belief that teachers who write are better writing teachers. This makes the transformation of teacher into writer the primary purpose of the NWP Summer Institute. The Summer Institute is organized as a learning community focused on professional development, research, and leadership as well as writing. Most of the 17 women involved in this learning community experienced a decrease in writing apprehension while undergoing the transformation to writer and maintained that confidence level during the following year. The writers’ reflection journals reveal that as apprehension decreases evidence of self-regulating activity, such as goal setting and metawriting, increases as does agency and self-efficacy. These findings contribute to our understanding of the transformation to writer and how this transformation connects with writing apprehension as well as how this transformation can be fostered in a learning community which attends to agency and writing self-efficacy.

Fostering Agency and Writing Self-Efficacy: The Making of a Writer

Rhetoric, the practice and study of human communication, has existed for millennia and is one of the oldest academic subjects. The study of writing is one of the most universally required subjects from kindergarten through college. Writing research and theory has brought us to the current understanding that writing is a complex set of skills that is contextually situated and socially influenced. Extensive theory and research has focused on the acquisition and teaching of these skills and yet there is much we do not know about the transformation to writer. We do know that writing apprehension hinders this transformation and writing self-efficacy helps it. This mixed methods study focused on the transformation of 17 teachers attending a National Writing Project Summer Institute into writers and addressed the following questions. First, what is the impact of immersion on writing apprehension. Second, how does immersion influence the sources of writing self-efficacy which include mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasions, and physical/emotional state. Third, what other aspects of immersion influence writing apprehension and writing self-efficacy. This study spanned more than a year and includes recording the writing apprehension of the participants before, during, and after their transformation and studying writing reflection journals kept by the participants for the sources of writing self-efficacy and other aspects of writing apprehension and writing self-efficacy.

NWP’s mission is to improve the teaching of writing and central to that goal is the belief that teachers who write are better writing teachers. This makes the transformation of teacher into writer the primary purpose of the NWP Summer Institute. The majority of the teachers immersed in the Summer Institute this research addresses experienced a long-term decrease in writing apprehension. Most significantly, writing apprehension levels remained stable during the year following the Summer Institute. While study of the participants’ references to the sources of writing self-efficacy indicated that mastery experience and their physical/emotional state were the strongest influences, this information did not offer insight into the question of why some participants experienced a greater decrease in writing apprehension than others. Instead, it was participants’ references to goal-setting and discussion of plans to achieve those goals that differentiated between the two groups. My research contributes to our understanding of the process of becoming a writer and the roles of agency and writing self-efficacy in that transformation.

References Handout

PowerPoint Slides

The Evolution of My Writing Workshop

I intended to blog about my philosophy of grading re Prof Hacker but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Isn't grading painful enough without thinking about it when I don't have to do so? Then another Prof Hacker post about grading (grading contracts that is) made me think again about how I manage grading. My philosophy of teaching is focused on fostering the growth of the writer and so I really do not like to dwell on the product of writing as I see it as a means to an end (the growth and development of the writer) rather than the end in itself. However, the workshop process that has evolved in my classroom is something that I could write about – and in fact have been asked to write about – and so here it is.

I have always set up my writing classes around some version of a writing workshop. For me, a writing workshop classroom means focusing on the writer and the writing rather than the teacher and the lecture. I believe writers learn and grow when they are actively engaged in writing and participate in a feedback loop that supports revision and fosters self-regulation. I believe the timely administration of a mini-lesson is far more effective than a lecture. But this post is about grading or feedback – not teaching. And so, back to my writing workshop. What does it look like? My writing workshop incorporates drafting and revision as well as a feedback loop. It uses reflection and self-regulation as well as working toward a final portfolio or some other final project.

These elements have remained constant but not static as they have evolved over the course of a decade of teaching writing. Back when I taught modes my students wrote five rough drafts and then after receiving feedback revised four essays and then after more feedback completed three final drafts for a portfolio. Today my students collaborate on a number of small projects before drafting papers that go through workshop before submission for a final grade and more feedback then they use those pieces as part of a larger final project (a blog).

My feedback process has also evolved over time. During my first years of teaching I graded even rough drafts but as I was teaching as many as five sections of writing (with a total of 125 students) at a time that was an incredible burden. Plus, I found that it actually interfered with the revision process as some students would take the attitude that the paper was “good enough” and did not always realize that the grade assigned to a rough draft did not translate into the same grade for a final draft. Around the same time I began teaching writing online and so I moved my workshop into a discussion board. Students posted their drafts in the discussion board and received feedback from me as well as their peers. I really loved this model as it allowed me to focus on helping students improve their writing – and not on grading. I also discovered that the transparency of sharing writing and feedback in this way fostered conversations with and among students about writing that would not have occurred under my old workshop model. I also learned that making the entire workshop process visible in this way made these conversations a resource for all students. I became so enamored of the online writing workshop that I began to use it even with my face-to-face classes.

Then I initiated a collaborative grading research project with two of my colleagues that involved the use of rubrics and I soon found that my blissful workshop model could not seamlessly integrate the use of rubrics. It took a semester to work out how to use rubrics in a way that still offered substantive feedback that supported revision. After the research project was over I asked my students about continuing the use of rubrics (secretly hoping I could abandon them) but students overwhelming responded that they liked the rubrics and found them useful when drafting as well as revising. And so rubrics continue to play an important role in my writing workshop as well as of course my grading.

I have always believed that reflection plays an important part in the growth and development of a writer and that belief has been reinforced by my experience as a teacher, a writer, and a researcher. In fact, my most recent research project reinforced this to an extent that surprised me. At various points during my teaching career I have used writing journals as well as portfolio reflections. I have required that students write a “grade note” when submitted papers that explains how their work meets or exceeds the criteria for a particular grade. My current writing workshop asks students to reflect on their process for each writing assignment and then to metawrite at the end of the semester about their growth and development as a writer. In addition, my students are required to Tweet thoughts about writing which may or may not be further developed in their writing reflections and metawriting.

I hope my writing workshop helps my students grow and develop as writers but my research on that is still pending. You know that pesky dissertation has taken a lot of my time.

Spring 2011 3X3

As a reflective practitioner (clear demonstration of my NWP affiliation) Natalie Houston's suggestion on ProfHacker to reflect on the past semester as I prepare for the new one fell on fertile ground. I agree it is important to look at what worked and didn't in the past to make sure that my experience informs my future practice.

What Worked Well

Focusing on Writing About Writing with my Writing II students. As I used the more traditional approach for my Writing I class I didn't want to simply mimic that for Writing II. What I chose to do was have my students focus on writing about writing in their intended profession. This made the work more interesting and more meaningful. While a few students did not enjoy it, the majority reported learning a lot about their future profession.

Using a variety of different types of reading including a book required by my department plus readings from the web that I suggested and peer-reviewed journal articles my students located in the journals of their intended profession. This allowed us to have both breadth and depth of coverage and have conversations about the different kinds of text available and how to determine which is appropriate for the task at hand.

Using Twitter and Blogger to develop audience awareness and increase communication channels. In general, I was pretty happy with my use of Blogger but our use of Twitter kind of petered out in the second half of the semester so I will need to work on that a bit.

What Didn't

The way I worked out assignments for our class annotated bibliography. It was messy and time consuming and dragged on far too long.

Not giving more specific Twitter assignments throughout the semester.

Allowing too much time and flexibility with early assignments. I was trying to allow for that early semester roster fluctuation but in the end it just caused confusion.

What I'm Changing

I have changed the way I'm assigning reading this semester. I'm still allowing students to make requests but I'm not going to worry so much about the back and forth haggling. They will get a shot to ask and then get what they get. Also, I have compressed the whole timeline for that early reading and annotated bibliography assignment so it doesn't drag on like it did last semester.

I am folding Twitter into the metawriting assignment and will give more prompts and require more posts beyond the reading assignment. Making it part of a grade will give it more importance and linking it to this particular assignment (I hope) will show how/why I value it. In general I was happy with the way I used reflection and metawriting but this could be tweaked a bit more as well to emphasize what specifically I want from my students.

I'm going to try to be more explicit about my goals for my students and teach toward those in a more explicit manner. Last semester I was focused on those goals but perhaps was more implicit than I should have been.

The 3 Lessons I Hope You Take Away

As we near the end of our semester together, I wanted to share with you three lessons that I hope you take away from this class. Clearly my goal for this writing class was to help you become better writers, but if my own work as a writer and as a scholar of writing studies has taught me anything it is that you – and you alone – can make this happen. I cannot make you a better writer and I cannot teach you how to be a better writer, but I can give you experiences that will shape you into a writer. Hopefully I did so this semester.

First, and foremost, I hope that you have become a more reflective writer over the course of this semester. Research, my own and that of other experts, shows that reflecting at a meta level about your writing is the key to your growth and development as a writer. This is why I asked you to reflect after each writing assignment as well as at the end of the semester. Hopefully this reflection will help solidify the lessons you learned this semester and hopefully what I am telling you now will help you realize that continuing this reflection after you leave this class will be useful to you as a developing writer.

An important part of our work this semester has been your immersion into a new discourse community – that of the profession you intend to join after earning your degree. You read professional literature produced in and for this field as well as interviewed professionals in preparation for your own writing. I hope this has not only taught you about the ways your professional peers communicate, but also how they value that communication. In addition, I hope that this process has also taught you how you can develop an understanding of other discourse communities that you encounter throughout your life as a writer.

Finally, although we have not spent a great deal of time specifically talking about genre – the form and structure writing takes – our study of the various discourse communities that you are striving to join has exposed you to the way that the discourse community shapes the genre. While in the future you cannot count on someone giving you an assignment sheet and scoring guide, you should now understand how studying the work of others in this same discourse community attempting similar tasks can inform your writing and teach you the specifics of the genre. Hopefully this study will allow you to generate your own internal checklist for future projects.

While you may have had different goals for your success this semester, ultimately that is what I hope you gained from this class: an understanding of the importance of reflection, an understanding of how to learn about and join a discourse community, and an understanding of how discourse community shapes the genres of writing it produces.

Good luck with your continuing journey to become a better writer and I am so glad we had a chance to work together this semester.

Why Metawriting?

Quite simply that is what I plan to do in the blog -- write about writing.

Really, writing is probably only going to be a part of it as I will certainly be reflecting a great deal of the time about communication in general (as a technical communicator) as well as particular aspects of communication such as writing. In the interests of true accuracy I should have named the blog Metacommunication but I'm not sure I like that as much as I like Metawriting. Have to ponder I suppose...maybe see how things shake out? But enough blather about that.

The question is why metawriting -- why writing about writing? I used to think the main method to become a better writer was simply to write more. As I saw my students write more but not really progress and repeat mistakes, I began to question the old adage that practice makes perfect. This is because writing is more than a skill set or muscle memory -- writing is thinking. Yes, you need to write to become a better writer but that writing must be accompanied by thinking or you will not see the improvement you want. This is quite simply why metawriting is now a requirement in all my writing classes. I think the key to reflectively writing about your writing -- challenges, problems, successes, processes, etc. -- can help any writer at any level.

This blog is intended to focus on writing about writing (or communicating about communicating) in order to better understand writing as a writer, teacher, and researcher. I have worked as a professional writer for decades but I still sometimes struggle with certain writing tasks. I do not think you are ever DONE learning about writing or growing as a writer. Certainly I continued to need metawriting to help me learn and grow as a writer. Now my primary job is teaching writing to other writers as well as working with other teachers of writing to improve the teaching of writing. As a teacher of writing it is even more important that I understand how people learn to write and the problems and challenges involved in that process. Of course, while there is a growing body of research about how people learn to write, there are many questions remaining and that is why I am interested in conducting my own research on the subject as well.