Abstract
Like other kinds of work with a strong intellectual-reflective component, teaching is complex action. The wide range of skills and types of decisionmaking involved in this complex, high-level work classifies teachers as professionals not simply laborers As I have noted in research carried out with K-12 teachers in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, teachers have to manage a wide range of competing priorities in their work Like other teachers, writing teachers must handle a set of contrasting aims in classroom teaching, balancing the course-level and whole-class curriculum concerns of structure and predictability against the activity-level and individual-level concerns of teaching-learning process, creative response, and adaptation to circumstances and to the needs and interests of individual students. The teacher's balancing act is complicated by the need to factor in requirements and constraints imposed by administrators and governing bodies as to class size, workload, curriculum and texts, testing, grading, and record-keeping, and it is exacerbated by the extra time needed to handle the added burdens. It is further exacerbated by differences in what can be planned for in advance and what cannot and by differences in the teacher's goals, preferences, and ideals, on the one hand, and the reality of the teaching situation, on the other. Writing teachers' best-laid plans are often laid aside because of the constraints of their teaching situation, such as too-large class size or students whose linguistic or writing skills require remediation.
- Journal
- Writing and Pedagogy
- Published
- 2011-06-29
- DOI
- 10.1558/wap.v3i1.1
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- Open Access
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