As educators, it is critical that we are always examining different theories and evaluating our own teaching methods. We need to take in multiple perspectives and multiple theories in order to find what's best for our students. The theories that we examined support the idea that there isn't a prescribed method to teach writing. 

Sociocultural theory

Sociocultural theory seems to boil down to giving students many different types of opportunities to develop their writing. It is important to recognize and respect each student's voice, their perspective, and their own personal backgrounds. Students need to be exposed to professional authors as well as their peer's writing and writers from different background in order to broaden their horizons.

Multiliteracies

Multiliteracy is about all of the different cultures, backgrounds, and languages as well as the different modes that we use to communicate through. Language and communication should be available to everyone and multiliteracy embraces that idea. 

Critical Literacies 

Critical literacies is about being engaged in the world. Critical literacies requires taking a critical look at the world through reading and responding to it. "Meaning is made through interactions." We don't ignore the didactic literacy, but instead teach it through a critical lens. 

Cognitive perspectives

Cognitive perspectives looks at how writers write. As teachers we must understand the process that our students take and how it differs from our own. Younger students are not able to focus soley on the higher order thinking because they are still working hard at transcription because it does not just come automatically. Students need to be provided with appropriate feedback and scaffolds in order to help them grow as writers and reach that point of higher order skills. Students need to be able to have meaningful writing tasks to help them grow in motivation and confidence. 

Comparing and Contrasting

These theories all work towards helping teachers better help students become writers. Critical literacies and cognitive perspectives differ a bit from the others. Critical literacies requires looking at current issues and events and engaging in them to create conversations and bring about change. The cognitive perspectives focuses on how the writer writes and not necessarily about what they write. 

Frameworks that align

I feel like my class currently aligns with the cognitive perspective. I understand that my writers are at different places and they have different needs. I still have students who don't always write their letters the correct way and have to look at the alphabet which distracts them from writing the story. I utilize multipleliteracies to a point. We have different writing projects where they are able to pick their medium. We also did a socioculturalwriting project where studrents were able to pick a holiday that they were familiar with to research and write about. We were able to learn about Ramadan and Diwali as well other holidays. They were then able to share with each other to help us learn about different holidays 

Expanding my teaching

In the future, I hope to implent all of these better in the future. I think some of my students would really benefit from being given more opportunities to express themselves in different multimodal projects. I would also like to expand our use of different cultures to help us learn and expand our view and give each student their own voice. I wold also like to make better use of mentor texts to help my students see how authors have different voices and help them develop their own.