EDUCATORS STRESS THE WRITE STUFF

CONFAB: INSTRUCTORS ENCOURAGE EMPHASIS
ON WRITING WITHIN ALL FIELDS.

Thursday, October 15, 1998

By Alessandra Djurklou
Long Beach Press Telegram

More than 450 educators gathered Wednesday at the CSU Long Beach Student Union for the Third Annual Seamless Education Conference to discuss how to teach a difficult yet vital skill -- writing.

``We learn to write by writing,'' said keynote speaker Carol Holder, director of the Writing in the Disciplines program at Cal Poly Pomona. ``What else helps is how we as teachers respond to student writing and how we frame writing assignments. All this affects students.''

Knowing how to write well, Holder and other participants stressed, is essential in every field. Therefore, teachers need to make sure students learn how to write, regardless of whether they become engineers, businessmen or college professors.

``Writing is a very powerful instrument of learning in all disciplines,'' Holder said.

However, teachers may not always know how to teach writing, so they must be taught to do so. And because many fields of study have their own jargon, students need to learn how to tailor their writing to a specific audience.

The focus on writing skills is the latest, most difficult step in ensuring a seamless education, said Dee Abrahamse, chair of the Seamless Education Initiative. The initiative began five years ago, when educators decided something had to be done to address the lack of continuity in public education.

Too often, students would go from middle to high school without the skills they needed to succeed, according to speakers at the conference. The gaps would widen further when they got to college. The solution to this problem, Abrahamse and others realized, was improving communication between teachers at all levels about what students needed.

For the past two years, elementary school, middle school, high school, community college and college instructors have gathered to hammer out ways of achieving a seamless curriculum.

Since the first conference was held in 1996, several programs have been developed, including having prospective teachers at CSULB spend time mentoring students in the Long Beach Unified School District. Another program allows LBUSD high school students to take college-level courses.

After presentations from Holder and other speakers, including CSULB President Robert Maxson, teachers broke off into small workshops to discuss techniques they could use to teach writing.

Holder also suggested more short-writing assignments in nearly every subject. The conference was sponsored by the National Education Association and The Boeing Co.