Phone Monday through Friday 8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
1-800-933-ASCD (2723)
Address 1703 North Beauregard St. Alexandria, VA 22311-1714
Complete Customer Service Details
April 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 7 Learning to Write, Writing to Learn Pages 38-42
Mike Miller
Giving student writers a choice of genre can unleash their creativity in academic papers and test responses.
I was pouring coffee in the break room when I overheard two colleagues talking about one of my students. Iman was bright and insightful in class, they said, but her writing was uncharacteristically bland.
A week later, as I was reading my students' responses to our English department's diagnostic, the teachers' remarks came back to me. We had given each 11th grade student a sample prompt from our state's end-of-course writing test. I'd kept my instructions for responding to a minimum, curious to see what they'd come up with, but all of my students wrote conventional essays—except for Iman, who wrote a two-act screenplay. Its voice, focus, specificity, and depth were exceptional, and it provided a nuanced, implicit answer to the prompt. I asked Iman if she had ever been that experimental before in a class assignment. "Not since middle school," she shrugged, and I began to suspect that my colleagues had only read Iman's conventional essays and papers, which was why they hadn't seen her best writing.
Join the education organization for all educators.
Get full access, plus expert resources and solutions to support whole child education.
Subscribe to Educational Leadership magazine and save up to 51% OFF the cover price.
Explore timely content from ASCD.