Learning goals

There's a school of thought that a good writing teacher is one that shares, openly, the things they've learned in their journey as a writer. I guess you could call me a member of this school because the goals I've come up with focus on a number of things that I've found useful in my career so far:

Play:

1. Students will value experimentation in the creative process
2. Students will recognize opportunities to incorporate play in the writing process using technology
3. Students will know what exercises and interfaces help them create the best work
4. Students will become comfortable in reflecting on their writing process, understanding that it is unique and not permanent.

Information gathering:

1. Students will appreciate the amount of information at their disposal in digital environments
2. Students will understand how to evaluate online resources
3. Students will be able to find, evaluate and use information from a wide array of sources for a variety of rhetorical situations.

Collaboration:

1. Students will value others as valuable resources in the writing process
2. Students will understand how to effectively provide peer response to writing including digitally
3. Students will become members of a digital social learning community where participants use their relevant knowledge to contribute to the creation of new knowledge and where students help each other

Multimodality

1. Students will value non-alphabetic texts
2. Students will be exposed to the variety of communicative tools
3. Students will think critically about their writing task and choose the appropriate tools or technologies to complete that task.

Mine reads more like a list than a matrix, but I used the matrix approach in coming up with this far-from-exhaustive list. I really found it helpful to think about things in that three dimensional way.

Though I was surprised by how often I found myself valuing skills and knowledge more than values and attitudes, which was a little disconcerting since I know very well that dispositions toward a topic or discipline are as important as the skills associated with that discipline - especially if the student is expected to reach that highest level of capability - the rhetorical level.

Ever since I started thinking about teaching and writing, I've had this mantra: I want to help people learn the value of writing as a tool for unpacking and making sense of the world around them. I hope that at some point, I'm sure after much reflection and drafting, I'll be able to create a set of smaller goals that lead to that much loftier one.