Coby’s Reflection to Graves Chapter 18-20

“What do I do with…?” is the question many teachers ask. In chapters eighteen to twenty of his book, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, Donald Graves talks about how to help students improve in their spelling, catch up when they are behind, and reach their potential when they are not doing so. His ideas come from the observation of elementary age children in the writing process.

What do you do with children who cannot spell? In chapter eighteen Graves has an interesting idea to improve spelling. He suggests allowing the students to sound out the words and write with “invented spelling” while the teacher corrects the spelling of only five or six high frequency words. The students are also to receive spelling assessments at the beginning and end of a semester and to help them see their own improvements. Graves brings up cases that showcase common spelling problems such as perfectionism, apathy, conservative safety, and learned helplessness and talks about ways in which the solutions he gave could be used to help these students.

How do you help a child catch up? Graves has some suggestions about this topic in his nineteenth chapter. He first talks about the fact that a lot of the problems of children falling drastically behind are due to the fact that they develop a sense of hopelessness early on in their writing careers. For such a problem Graves suggests starting by pointing out to those students, in conference, what they are doing right. From there the teacher has to decide how he or she is going to get this child to start writing his or her thoughts down on paper. The teacher can use methods such as discussions, drawing, provide extra information sources, allow the child to write in a different format than what the assignment calls for, and/or choose experienced writers to conference with this student.

What if a child is not meeting his or her potential? Graves dives into this topic in chapter twenty. He first attributes this problem to the fact that many writer believe that they cannot write. Graves goes over cases that involve students who do not see writing as important, work unless their spelling is perfect, draft, and have a voice in his or her piece. For each case Graves says the key is to make the children see how important and helpful writing can be. Some of the solutions to the earlier mentioned respectively problems are giving the student a lot of audiences (teacher and peers), working on inventive spelling, getting more information and details into a piece, and encouraging some personally anecdotes.

These methods gone over by Graves are great methods but I have learned that they can only be done if the teacher is willing to do them wholeheartedly. These methods take time to payout and if a teacher is not willing to invest that time or gets discouraged if there is not a sudden improve and changes his or her mind then these methods will not work to their fullest. Some teachers are too complacent or afraid to try these methods. To win big one must bet big.