Chapter 5: Speaking with Your Mouth Shut

Chapter 5 is basically divided into two sections. The first outlines how an educator can engage and impact their learners through writing. This involves an approach that deviates from the traditional practice of offering technical feedback on the quality of a student's work and emphasizes a meaningful and enduring interaction between educator and learning through consistent and continuous writing practices. Finkel demonstrates this by including personalized letters to his students when he grades their assignments. The purpose is to not merely evaluate the quality of the student's work but to interact and respond to the actual ideas without directly interfering with their group discussions or independent activities.

The second section deals with the development and facilitation of a community of writers. This essentially involves the implementation of practices and activities that engage an entire group of learners into a written dialogue. The fundamental notion behind the success of this strategy is a shift in the very relationship that students have with their writing. Rather than regard writing as an opportunity to demonstrate the rote knowledge that a student has acquired around a topic, the goal is to promote writing as a means of generating inquiry. This is an endeavor that should be perpetuated by one's peers and should fundamentally change the audience to which a student writes.

This brings me to my questions for this chapter - what is your experience with how students (yourself included) regard the act of writing? How would you, as an educator, go about changing a student's fundamental attitudes on writing?