This has been a big topic in our learning and teaching community here at Carolina Day over the past few weeks:

Students Need An Audience If We Expect Them To Learn How To Write: “Good writing requires attention to form and conventions, but it also requires an awareness of the audience at the other end. Whether you want to inform, inspire, or amuse, writing is about communicating. Yet we fail to impart this essential concept in school. Too much of the written work in our English classrooms (and history, science, and even math classrooms, for that matter) exists in a bubble that doesn’t extend past the school’s walls. And we’re not just talking about the dreaded book report: even complex, thoughtful assignments are divorced from any notion of audience. They’re written for the eyes of the teacher alone, making them feel inauthentic and irrelevant to students.”

The changing (evolving?) roles of essays, blogging, editing, reviewing and organization of thoughts is a conversation that all schools need to engage in this year.