These are the Ten Design Principles
- Create topics that invite inventive thinking
- Select topics that have a purpose
- Make sure your topics are meaningful within your students' experience
- Design topics to elicit specific, immediate responses from your students, not vague abstract ones
- If you use a hypothetical situation, make sure it's within your students' grasp
- Use specific terms (such as define, illustrate, persuade, compare, contrast, analyze, evaluate, or invent) as precises indicators of your thinking and writing expectations
- Use creative formats for at least some of your assignments (Such as a letter to the mayor expressing concerns with the city's parks, or a report on nutrition written by a martian)
- Think of CRAFT when designing your assignments
- Whenever possible, give students a choice of writing assignments
- Define the criteria you'll use to evaluate student writing
When I began writing my response for this reading of Chapter 6 Strong I couldn't help but keep coming back to these ideas of CRAFT and the Ten Design Principles. What they echoed to me was a guideline in as to how to begin rehearsing lesson plans and unit objectives for the future (and otherwise revisiting and revising my lesson plans of yesteryear).
I believe that the reasons why we teach students are to help them 1) Gain an appreciation in the study from which you hail, 2) Develop a keen insight into what mechanisms helped to assemble and disassemble a certain aspect/concept in said study, 3) Internalize the skills they developed from their studies so that they may utilize them in higher level learning, and 4) Engage themselves with an in-class exercise which mirrors real-world events and scenarios which they may someday encounter. The fifth point here is merely a personal affect on the educators part and that is to have fun with the students. I am willing to wager that students are better at reading, internalizing, reciprocating, and developing their cogitative skills within any area of studies when they are having fun. Monotonous and meticulous work will help students develop their memorization abilities, but it will hardly engage nor develop their creative, analytic, scrupulous, and otherwise spontaneous ingenuity.
Coming out of this reading I have begun thinking that, as a future educator, it is vital to better learn my own area of study. That isn't to say that I do not already know and understand what my readings of my study are, but that I should consider many more points of views. The good and the bad. By accumulating these several layers of PoV I will be better equipped in creating accommodative work and lesson plans for my students. Furthermore, by learning about and understanding both the good and the bad (or the right and the wrong) PoV of a reading in my area of studies I can help my students progress from their stance. That is, opposed to having them in stasis. Needless to say, C + RAFT will become a vital part of my teaching style and methodology.
Bill, this reading made me think of what we learned in Collins' class about creating writing assignments. Even though we did not directly use this "CRAFT" model, we incorporated all of its parts. I think that this system would be incredibly successful when getting students to write and care about writing.
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