Teachable Moments

At the beginning of my teaching career, I was very fortunate to work with great colleagues who served as great mentors for me. One professor and I discussed how to incorporate valuable teaching moments.  He referred to it as teaching grammar within context by giving “micro” or “mini” lessons. This term quickly brought back memories of studying the works from Constance Weaver, Teaching Grammar in Context and Jeff Anderson, Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop. Using these tools to stress the awareness of a student’s own writing is so important to become more connected to what one is trying to say.  I feel that students sometimes get lost in the production of their written piece and need to be redirected.

Having taught in the university for five years, I am now in a unique situation where I teach advanced writing and direct a writing center. Being in this position, I am able to see first-hand the simple grammatical mistakes that students make when writing their essays. It is easy for students to transpose words or simply use the wrong word that sounds like the word the student meant to write. It is at this point I try to take advantage of this opportunity and schedule a one-on-one conference with the student. During our conference, I incorporate the rules of tutoring from the writing center into the classroom. The student reads either the whole piece of writing aloud or just a paragraph where the grammatical mistake was written.  Once the student reads his work aloud, most of the time the student will catch his own mistakes.  If the student cannot see where he went wrong, this provides a great teaching moment where we discuss what is important.

I look forward to collaborating with fellow educators during this year’s Transitioning Symposium.

Jeanine Rauch

UM-DeSoto

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.