Edutopia contributor Jennifer Davis Bowman has published an article titled ‘How Teachers Can Use Their Own Writing as Model Texts’.
Modeling is a popular show-and-tell teaching strategy used by teachers across subjects and grade levels. Although it’s sometimes perceived as easy, teachers must be strategic and consider student engagement, individual learning needs, and appropriate scaffolds.
Recently, I’ve used my academic blog as a model for a writing project in one of my college courses. My goal was to reinforce that writing matters to me as a teacher and as an individual, and it was important to me to use non-classroom examples to demonstrate the writing strategies I was teaching. Because of my established classroom relationships and knowledge of my students’ learning needs, they were intrigued with the idea of reviewing my work.
The strategy encourages teachers to practice (or should I say model?) what we preach. I think the strategy will prove useful for high school classrooms—and I want to stress that this requires previously established positive teacher-student relationships.