I used to dread teaching writing. In my early years as an elementary teacher, I just didn't have the tools or training to teach the subject. As a writing teacher, I focused on isolated teaching points like "add detail" that made sense by themselves but didn't lead to excellent student writing. A few students with rich background knowledge to draw from managed to progress as writers, but most of my students floundered. Even if they had ideas about what to write, they didn't know how to capture them on paper.
After my school adopted the Common Core State Standards, I attended teacher professional development sessions with expert writing educators from the Vermont Writing Collaborative and Student Achievement Partners. As I worked with them, I realized I needed to relearn not only what I knew about writing instruction, but also what I thought about the process of writing. I discovered that all students can learn to write successfully if we teachers do two things: plan effectively and teach writing explicitly.
Planning with the End Product in Mind
Let's start with planning. For years, I wrote detailed lesson plans for a collection of teaching points—for example, telling students to add detail or show action. However, I made a critical mistake: planning for what I thought students needed without thoroughly analyzing the end product—their writing pieces. In addition to looking at student work, teachers can anticipate the end product by drafting a sample response to a writing task before actually assigning it to students. This is known as "test driving." Once I started doing this, I realized a surprising number of my writing prompts sounded good in theory but didn't work out in practice.
For example, when other teachers and I planned a 2nd grade unit on the American West for a nonprofit curriculum we helped develop, we thought this question would make a great end-of-unit assessment: "What challenges did pioneers or Native Americans face in the early American West?" When we tried to write about this topic ourselves, however, we realized that students could easily answer it by drawing evidence from only one text.
For the summative assessment, we wanted them to synthesize information from multiple texts. So we tried again with this question: "How is one legendary person similar to and different from real-life pioneers?" Students could choose John Henry or Johnny Appleseed. This time, our test drive proved the task would push students to express deep thinking using evidence from multiple texts.
Test driving is only the first step in effective planning. Next, you have to study your sample response to understand the many elements students must coordinate in a successful piece of writing. When we did this with our new assessment for the American West unit, we discovered another red flag: comparing and contrasting within one task was an extremely complex challenge for 2nd graders.
So, we went back to the task and revised it once more, this time focusing on contrast by asking: "How is one legendary person different from real-life pioneers?" When we analyzed the sample response and compared it to students' prior knowledge, we realized students needed explicit instruction to master the skills this task required: grouping evidence into key points, linking ideas with conjunctions, introducing relevant context, using topic-specific words, and more. Now we knew what we had to teach. Next, we had to decide how to teach these concepts.
Examine, Experiment, Execute, and Excel
Through the process of creating many unsuccessful writing lessons, I've learned that students do not absorb writing skills through osmosis. Most children thrive with explicit instruction in writing skills, as long as those skills are embedded in a meaningful context and work together to form a coherent whole. To prepare students for the American West end-of-unit assessment, my colleagues and I planned a series of lessons around each new writing technique.
Over multiple lessons, we gradually release responsibility as students examine, experiment, execute, and finally excel with a particular skill. Students go through these stages to learn each essential writing skill, such as grouping evidence into key points and using topic-specific words.
In the first lesson on topic-specific words, we ask students to examine the word choices in exemplary writing. They reread sections of an informational text, The Buffalo Are Back, and then find examples of precise content vocabulary, such as battle and grasses. Students discuss how less specific word choices, such as fight and plants, would affect the writing. In the next lesson, students experiment with using their own topic-specific words. We assign a simple task, often less than a full paragraph, so that students can focus on their word selection. They read several sentences about the American West and then revise them using topic-specific words. For example, the sentence "Workers taught people how to make the land healthy again" might become "Government workers taught farmers how to make the prairie healthy again."
Once students have practiced using topic-specific words, they are able to apply that skill in their own writing. We assign students an informative paragraph about the American West to read and revise, giving students the chance to execute topic-specific words along with their other writing abilities. They plan and draft a piece that includes a topic statement, multiple pieces of evidence, and a conclusion.
We remind them to insert topic-specific words, highlighting classroom resources such as the word wall and vocabulary journals. In a final lesson, they excel at understanding how to use topic-specific words by exchanging feedback with peers, focusing on which words are effective in their paragraphs and which need improvement. Though this lesson focuses on one specific skill, you can use the same model to teach many other foundational writing concepts.
Now, I actually look forward to teaching writing. I'm confident when assigning writing tasks because I've test-driven them myself and know what skills and knowledge students need to succeed. Students can become strong writers. As teachers, we can create explicit plans to get them there.
