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On Kimberly Steele’s teaching model of writing using timeline An essay by … (Dated 21 August, 2008)

Assisting students with writing process has always been a real challenge to most teachers. And a proper writing schedule represents a proven instructional technique to help students to self-developed writing skills with organizational elements of writing in high-school. In this paper, I will discuss, from a critical point of view, the Kimberly Steele model of writing teaching using timeline and instructional details. Written communication skills are a vital part to almost all aspects of life, especially education. Its role is so important that a great number of schools and universities across the world have writing tasks as part of their student evaluation and examination procedures for language competency. These students are required to go through a writing assessment at various grade levels for assessment purposes of the writing skills and teaching efficiency. Therefore, teachers constantly strive to ensure intellectual growth and assignments in alignment to the cognitive maturity of their students through a number of teaching methods and approaches. And Kimberly Steele’s model is one of their solutions in terms of student creativity and self-regulated development in writing communication skills. Several surveys show that university-level students at, with their sophisticated organizational skills, prefer to know well in advance when their deadlines are as these older students. But for high-school students, due to their limitation in cognitive and psychological characteristics, need of greater guidance in dealing writing process. Instead of being a source of fear and anxiety as many might thing of, a firm deadline proves to be helpful to procrastinators, who often find negative impacts on their ability to complete writing assignments and effectively meet course deadlines (Callaghan, 2004). This instructional approach will get students with procrastination started earlier on their on work, and saving their time for drafting and refining their work. Some the researchers found that individuals might have unrealistic writing expectations over their writing task (i.e. thinking that it shall be easy to handle or deal with). Teachers can use a detailed timeline as a learning milestone that addresses issues related to writing procrastination and frustration. It is vital that the timeline must be detailed and specific enough to ensure adequate guidance and time requirements for each activity. A good writing schedule will involve approximate amounts of time needed to effectively complete the paper. It will also provide students with a sense of personal discipline as well as practical writing experiences, a basis preparation to move on to more sophisticated methods of text production. Kimberly Steele’s detailed timeline method of teaching students open a new way for her students to become more effective and successful writers by dividing the writing assignments up into smaller stages so that they do not become overwhelmed. It proves to be supportive to perfectionists, who “keep writing the same first sentence again and again, trying to get it right” (Gocsik, 2004), by giving them a timeframe to complete each phase of their papers. Because of its dynamic nature, the writing process always requires writers will go back and forth between steps to revise their work. By including adequate time into students’ daily work on editing and revising, this method would help students to control their emotional concerns that overwhelmed their intentions to get their tasks done on schedule. Besides, as the preparation phase is a key element in laying a solid ground for the actual writing process, this working timeline encourages students to focus on their paper and select appropriate information sources to support their ideas. Because of its stress on time commitment, students will have to quickly identify the purpose of the assignment, and skip all journal or articles that lack conciseness and visual appeal, which might be a source of verbiage problem. Those who tend to be verbose will come up with an excessive amount of words, but every extra word produces nothing but confusion in the mind of the reader. A rigid timeline for working would help them stay away from this typical pitfall, and concentrate more on logical thinking and organizational structuring their writing. The double brainstorming sessions at the beginning of the writing schedule are also helpful to students with first-hand experiences on the subjects they are about to deal with in their assignment. It’s important to put all grammatical issues behind at these very first steps, leaving the students with their ideas and ways of thinking, rather than the instructional involvement of the teacher, which might lead to typical, passive learning situations in Vietnam. Students should be challenged to use their metacognition skills to learn about the writing process (i.e. planning and revising) and devote time to comparing good and poorly written work to gain insights into the nature of quality narratives (Brynes, 2001). Later steps promote a deeper understanding of the working material as it requires their time to create and arrange piece of information into their sentences, which would reflect distinct aspects of critical thinking, and thus, ensure a better text output. The time-based approach offered by Kimberly Steele also leaves pretty much space for revision and editing checking. Student writers can benefit from these editing session to enhance their writing skills, followed by a basic writing plan to help them effectively edit their work. The advantage lies beneath the group work, the instructional assistance and time requirements. “These rewrites need a clear and firm deadline to avoid the scenario of having to read about Colonial American when the course and your energies have marched onward toward the Civil War.” (Macomber, 1999). However, it is important that the recommended timeline must include certain degrees of flexibility, to insure that adequate time is allocated for students to have extra attention to different aspects of the writing process. It is not linear process, because individual student writers will need to add or delete content or revise sentences. Therefore, the timeline should be outlined as much flexible as possible in terms of time, with clear direction how to work when they come to revised and changed sections. As followers of developmental writing suggested, children should write independently at an early age and that writing should be for purpose rather than prescribed (Browne, 1996). Kimberly Steele model suits pretty well in promoting this interactive approach to students at high-school grades, particularly with individuals. Although her work has been criticized for creating an air of fears and anxieties inside the writing class, and somehow counter-productive to earlier stages of writing process, yet it has a very strong influence among the teachers and educators. Using timeline in writing class, in fact, would encourage students to devote more attention to organizing their ideas and make thoughtful decisions about their choices of words to communicate their ideas. In additional, the time-limited working sessions in writing class can play a vital role as part of a comprehensive set of instructional strategies, which aims at improving the quality of student practical writings and foster critical thinking skills with a commitment of time. It does help the students to handle writing assignments successfully on their own, and to develop a sense of self-organization for their future projects other than writing. REFERENCES Sawers, N. (2000). Ten steps to help you write better essays & term papers. Edmonton, Canada: The NS Group. Muirhead, B. (2005). Using Outlines to Improve Student Writing Skills. Source link: http://www.itdl.org/Journal/feb_06/article05.htm

Danielson, L. M. (2000). The improvement of student writing: What research says. Journal of School Improvement, 1 (1). Source link: https://icsac.org/jsi/2000v1i1/improvement

Gocsik, K. (2004). Teaching the Writing Process. Source link: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/faculty/pedagogies/process.shtml

Macomber, M. (1999). Writing and Belonging to the College Community: A Direct Connection. Writing Across the Curriculum, Vol 10, 42, 47-48

Byrnes, J. P. (2001). Cognitive development and learning in instructional contexts (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Alyn & Bacon.