Showing, Not Telling, at a Writing Workshop

HOW DOES A TEACHER OF WRITING ENCOURAGE COLLEAGUES in other disciplines to pay more attention to student writing? And, once encouraged, what specifically can teachers of history, biology, or business do in their classrooms to foster student writing? One approach, of course, is to tell them what they ought to be doing: Look! You should require those history students to keep journals. You can mail out broadsides, write editorials, and deliver seminars on the virtues of across the curriculum. If your colleagues have strong self-concepts and are not scared off by your enthusiasm, some will actually try what you suggest. But telling teachers how to use writing in their classes is very close to telling them that you know a better way to teach their subjects. Very touchy business. A more politic way, it seems to me, is to show other teachers some writing techniques and exercises that work but allow them to pick and choose among them, making up their own minds about what is useful and what not. Showing, not telling, is a principle often taught in freshman English classes; readers can make up their own minds about the narrative's importance. So too is this idea effective at writing across the curriculum workshops. Most teachers in disciplines other than English understand well that writing, like reading and mathematics, cannot be the sole province of teachers in any one discipline. As Dan Fader and James Britton have argued before me, writing is an interdisciplinary learning activity with a place in every classroom. But not all teachers know how to integrate writing instruction easily into their pedagogy, nor are they comfortable teaching it outright. Each teacher is already a professional, practicing writer in his or her own field, yet few have ever been trained to teach writing to others. There is a wealth of knowledge about writing in the pool of teachers who do not teach writing or who think they do not know how to teach writing. Who knows better than the geographer whether or not first person narration is acceptable in professional geography publications? Who knows better than the physics teacher whether or not to use passive construction in laboratory reports? Furthermore, most teachers have a fairly solid grasp, themselves, of the elements of style according to Strunk and White or Turabian; it matters little that they cannot label a particular