Fellow Lea Gabay gave a presentation entitled “Writing Practices and Assessment in Limited-resources Classrooms” at a seminar in Saint-Louis, Senegal. In the presentation, she discussed the challenges that teachers face when teaching writing and offered some useful pedagogical practices such as the product-versus-process approach, scaffolding, and peer review. Gabay provided a step-by-step lesson plan that prepared participants for a dialogue-writing assignment.
During the activity, participants learned language for brainstorming in groups and were then given a checklist to use when evaluating their peers’ dialogues. This lesson served as a road map for teaching writing and ultimately showed teachers the importance of observing their students and adapting teaching practices based on students’ language level and stage of development. The participants seemed very motivated to see a different kind of teaching approach to writing.