I was having a conversation about grammar with one of my coworkers in the Paralegal program a few weeks ago, and as we were rolling around ideas about how to effectively teach sentence-level concepts, it occurred to me that my sabbatical research may have less to do with specific teaching strategies for grammar and more about how to teach students to think. After all, my first blog post spoke to the difficulty of teaching the concepts in just sixteen weeks. If that's true, then perhaps this should be more about the bigger picture: teaching students how to find and fix their errors when they come up, not teaching students how to avoid errors altogether (which feels like an insurmountable task, especially with a class of 22 students).
Novel idea, eh? What's interesting about it is that it absolves me from a certain amount of guilt that stems from feeling like I'm not a "good" teacher of these grammar concepts. If I'm teaching students how to think critically about their own writing, they become responsible for their own learning.
On the other hand, it also makes me think that I might have been barking up the wrong tree. Have I compounded my research? Perhaps. I can't ignore this new idea about critical thinking, nor would I want to. I won't abandon my initial idea of how to teach grammar, though, either, because I still think there's value in that research and also because, frankly, it's more interesting to me. My new goal? Wedding the two ideas.
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