The Keys to Content-Area Writing: Short, Frequent, and Shared

Nancy Steineke

In this era of high-stakes testing, our students' writing skills sometimes return disappointing results, whether it be PARCC, Smarter Balanced, ACT, SAT, or other required state tests. According to recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 2011) results, only 27 percent of students perform at or above proficient levels in writing (NCES, 2012). How can that be? Students are writing all the time! They're sneaking their phones out in your class to text, tweet, and post on Instagram or Facebook. Just about every social media platform requires writing, yet little of that desire to write seems to be jumping across the education moat into our classrooms.

Perhaps the problem is in our own work as educators. An overabundance of testing, rubrics, and uncomfortable feedback has taught students that school writing is best completed with as little personal investment as possible. As a result, many of our student writers are members of the "writing wounded" (Vopat, 2009): students who involuntarily groan whenever writing is assigned. The most severely wounded put their heads down and refuse to write. The less outwardly wounded write only to get the job done, expecting (and probably receiving) a low grade that reaffirms their identity as untalented writers who will never get any better.

The good news is that if our practices are part of the problem, that's a part of the problem that's well within our control to fix.

Rethink School Writing Tasks

Taking a piece of writing from idea through revision, editing, and eventually a final draft certainly has its place. However, this process, depending on the grade level, can take weeks. As a result, these assignments offer little sustained writing practice and only a few chances to try out new ideas related to content. However, when students are writing short pieces every day in every class, they can use writing to explore a topic and advance their learning. What might that look like? Here's one example:

Examine your students' background knowledge on a new topic of study by asking them to write about it. Pass out index cards and instruct students to fill only one side with their related thoughts and experiences. Provide a minute to write followed by a minute to discuss their ideas with a nearby partner. Collect the cards and set them aside until the end of the unit. Then, ask students to revisit their original notes and, on the backs of their cards, describe how their thinking has expanded or changed on this issue. The initial card writing gives you an insight into background knowledge, while the final card writing offers students insight into their thinking and learning.

Let Students Write More Than We Can Grade

When students understand that most writing in class is ungraded and meant to promote experimentation, thinking, and discussion, their volume of low-risk writing increases. The more they write, the more confident they become as writers.

Likewise, we teachers can trust unmonitored practice. If we continue to believe that we must collect and grade every piece of student writing, our exhaustion will result in students writing far less. Sure, if necessary, we can award points, checks, or stamps, but these should simply be records of whether the students gave a good-faith effort (full credit) or not (no credit), not grades that attempt to assess the writing (Vopat, 2009).

Make Writing Social

The popularity of social media is no surprise; humans do enjoy writing and sharing that writing when it supports a meaningful conversation within a community. We teachers must get over the entrenched notion that we are our students' primary audience. Take note of the strong social aspect of informal writing on social media. Students get to listen, talk, and learn from each other. Plus, as students get in the habit of writing regularly for an audience of supportive peers, they begin to write more and more with an eye toward voice, creativity, humor, and originality. The bonus? The skills of experimenting with style and writing for a particular effect on an audience will transfer to the habits students apply when writing longer, more polished pieces. Here are two ideas to get you started:

• Offer students an intriguing content-area prompt. For example, if the topic was e-waste, you might ask students to write about the importance of e-devices in their own lives or you might project a photograph of a mountain of discarded, obsolete cell phones. Let students think and write for a minute or two. Then, working with a partner, have each student read aloud what they wrote and discuss their ideas.
• Another very social writing activity is written conversation. Starting in groups of three or four, students silently respond to a content-related prompt, writing for several minutes until most class members have about a third or half a page of writing. Then, within the group, students pass their papers to their right. Now, each student must read the previous writer's thoughts and expand the conversation by exploring ideas and asking questions. After a few minutes of writing, papers are passed again, and the conversation continues to blossom as more and more ideas and responses are added. When the paper returns to the owner after several passes, each student gets to read a very interesting conversation that began with their initial written response. Of course, this written conversation could continue as an out-loud discussion, as well.

Writing every day in every classroom need not be tedious or time intensive to get results. When Jesse Sanchez, principal of Brawley Union High in Imperial County, Calif., implemented a schoolwide writing program, the rise in test scores was significant. After three years, English language arts scores had risen 30.6 percentage points to 64.6 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards on Smarter Balanced tests. Even without a companion initiative, math scores also rose by nearly 17 percentage points to 29.9 percent, perhaps due to the increased amount of reading currently present in the math portions of most tests (Harrington, 2018).

If you want students to be better readers, writers, and thinkers in every content area, then writing every day in every class is key. Be sure to make that informal and spontaneous writing short, frequent, and shared.

References

Harrington, T. (2018, January 4). A focus on writing in every class is key to success in this rural California district. EdSource. Retrieved from https://edsource.org/2018/a-focus-on-writing-in-every-class-is-key-to-success-in-this-rural-california-district/592228

National Center for Education Statistics (2012). The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2011 (NCES 2012–470). Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Vopat, J. (2009). Writing circles: Kids revolutionize workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Nancy Steineke holds a master's degree in education from Northern Illinois University. A public school teacher for more than 30 years, she is now an author, a literacy consultant, and an Illinois Writing Project leader. She has written eight professional books; her latest, coauthored with Harvey Daniels, is Texts and Lessons for Content-Area Writing (2016).

ASCD Express, Vol. 13, No. 16. Copyright 2018 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.