Chapter One: Grounding Our Choices in Beliefs

Reading chapter one of Read Write Teach, I felt as if I had finally found a mentor.  Someone who not only shares my beliefs about reading, writing, teaching and how children learn, but also is able to nudge me forward on my journey as a teacher with her thoughtful and reflective questioning.  So often I found myself writing in the margins, “yes!” or “love this!”.  Linda sets goals to not only help her students grow as readers and writers but to help them actually enjoy both reading and writing.  She wants them to read and write with their hearts as well as their heads.  She shows them the value in being literate, how it allows a person to be in control of their own destiny, to have more choices and opportunities in life.  Linda is a reflective educator who clarifies her thinking by questioning herself, and her students, in order to continue to grow and improve as a teacher.

Throughout the chapter, Linda stresses the importance of getting to know your students as people.  She stresses the importance of forming trusting relationships with students and forming classroom communities in which students feel safe. Linda learns about her students’ interests, strengths and weaknesses through their writing.  She earns their trust by modeling and demonstrating her own processes as a reader and writer.  She shares her readers/writers notebook with her students.  Her students come to understand that she does not expect them to do something she doesn’t do herself.

Linda’s beliefs about writing remind us that student writing needs to be authentic and for real audiences.  Students need to be reading and writing on a continual basis.  Writing is reading and stronger readers become stronger writers.  Writing is social.  Writers need to share their writing and receive feedback that moves them forward in the writing process. Students need to write for real reasons and care about the topics they write about.  Students need choice, time and models in order to grow as writers.

“We want our efforts to mean something by knowing our words affect someone or something.  The writer may be writing to clarifying her own thinking - thus, the writing is for self first, but then, often, when done well, speaks to a larger audience, whether it is intentional or unintentional.”(p.17)

Just reading this chapter inspires me to write, and isn’t that what good writing is supposed to do?

“Words are sacred.  They deserve respect.  If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” (p.5)