Brainstorming and Accumulating Inspiration for

¶ … brainstorming and accumulating inspiration for one's topic. Writing requires one to dedicate an allotted amount of time to hashing out a written discourse on the topic at hand, preferably free from interruption. Revising involves critically analyzing the document and noting what sort of changes can improve it. Editing generally focuses less on substantial structural issues, and more on grammar and syntax. The five basic assumptions that guide the National Writing Project's work revolve about the importance assigned to teaching writing. One is that writing teachers are agents of reform.

Another is that writing should actually be taught to students at every grade level. Additionally, one of the precepts is that knowledge of writing can come from a plethora of sources including from writing experience, research and theory, as well as analysis of practice. This organization also believes that there is no best method for teaching writing, and that teachers who teach writing well can assist other teachers to do so.

Admit slips and exit slips are methodologies advocated by writing teachers, some of whom are in the National Writing Project. Exit slips are brief, five-minute summaries of a particular lesson or subject that what taught in a course of instruction for a day. These are used to help pedagogues determine how much students genuinely understood about a lesson. These are also valuable means of feedback for improving a teacher's lesson planning and implementation in the future.

Admit slips function in much the same way that exit slips do, except they are required of students at the beginning of a lesson and may be about homework or some prior lesson learned.

The three most essential stages for planning a Questioning the Author activity -- which encourages active reading and facilitates student engagement with the text by attempting to decipher the author's intention in disseminating the information he provides -- are preparing for the implementation of the activity, facilitating discussion, and creating questions that can assist in the facilitation of discussion. These steps involve assessing what students should ideally extract from the text and addressing any potential difficulties, while developing questions that aid in this process.

One should also partition the text into discreet units of learning/understanding. There are a few key steps to preparing for a Socratic seminar. The first is for an instructor to read or select a text that will be assigned to the seminar participants. This text should be thought provoking and worthy of discussion. Next the text is assigned to students, who will read it prior to the seminar.

The instructor will then devise an essential/opening questions that will be answered, and separate students into an inner and outer circle in which they are paired up with "coaches" who will helps them work through the questioning and answering process. The dialogue then begins. Texts examined from a critical discourse analysis perspective can involve a number of related, respective lenses. This includes examining texts at the micro level, in which verbal interaction, language and communication are examined in relation to the social order.

The inherent power manifestations that such an examination yields are part of a macro level analysis of a particular text. Closely related to this perspective is the notion that one can read texts in terms of the power they delineate among certain social groups and orders. Finally, another critical discourse lens involves analysis of the context and its surrounding social structure. There are a number of principles that are import for the proper facilitation of classroom discussion.

One of the most eminent of these is for an instructor to actually listen and pay attention to student input. Although most teachers have agendas or specific didactic information that they are looking to impart in such discussions, it is important to let such a discussion take its course and see what other benefits it may yield. It is also helpful for pedagogues to clarify what students mean, so that there is no ambiguity and to help students express their thoughts.

Lastly, it is key to facilitate a balanced classroom discussion and involve as many participants as possible. Four principles of cooperative education.