As we discussed yesterday, writing is also the glue that helps students become college-ready and skilled for career achievement. Yet is one of the most-ignored aspects of school instruction. As a result, our kids are taught to write poorly and they rarely master it within school.
The solutions start with making writing a key component of academic instruction and improve teacher instruction. The Common Core standards are a good step in the right direction. But writing instruction isn’t easy, mostly because it is also individualistic.
Each student in a writing classroom must have his or her own thoughts and must express them in his or her own words. As such, teaching writing requires a degree of differentiation most teachers are not prepared to offer.
At the primary grades, kids have to develop fluency by writing about things that are familiar to them, things that happen in their lives, and stories they invent. At the upper elementary grades, we must try to split student effort between writing about their lives (to foster expression) and writing about their knowledge (to prepare them for formal writing in the content areas.)
At the upper grades, and especially in content area subjects, kids have to organize their thinking into logical arguments, a basic skill in which most fail to receive adequate amounts of explicit instruction. Forming a coherent written argument is not a trivial task. Kids need many opportunities to develop the skills.
Writing lays out an instructional challenge that we have yet to take up in most of our classrooms. The resources exist in the professional literature of teaching and in a new tradition of writing instruction that has developed over the last 25 years. These ideas, however, have not been embraced at scale.
We see the results of this in the large numbers of kids who lack sufficient writing skill even at the end of their high school careers. We see it also in the struggles of those who can barely make it through any class that requires even slight amounts of writing. Frustrated teachers, for their part, contribute to the problem by assigning less writing and lowering their expectations for quality.
The Write Stuff
Despite the rise of texting and Twitter, people still need to learn to write in real sentences, thoughtful paragraphs, and entire pieces that are clear, correct, and well-structured. We also have to give up on the misguided hope that spelling and grammar checkers will make up for a less-than-optimal writing education.
Writing isn’t just words on a page; it’s the thought that goes into those words as well. It’s not just the thoughts either; it’s the having of them, and the vetting of them, and the organizing of them that makes writing such an important activity for kids.
Kids who are less advantaged, those who don’t have computers at home or parents who are freelance journalists, are especially vulnerable to poor writing instruction. These children lose not only the opportunity to learn to write but also the opportunity to learn to think like writers, an opportunity that is not easily made up for later on in their schooling or in their lives.
Improving writing instruction in our schools requires both structural and cultural changes. Structurally, we need more time for writing and more writing assigned throughout the curriculum. Culturally, writing must reach co-equal status with reading as a vital piece of the literacy puzzle. A fully literate student must be regarded as one who both reads and writes.
Steps to Improving Writing Instruction
To move writing instruction forward, we must consider the following changes to the traditional curriculum:
- Schedule more time for writing in Language Arts. Students should receive at least 45 minutes of writing instruction every day. Ideally, this would continue through eighth grade, a change that would require the scheduling of two Language Arts periods at middle school.
- Assign more shorter pieces of writing. Writing requires the mastery of many sub-skills, some of which appear at different points in the writing process. To learn to write, then, students must produce many complete pieces of writing. To increase the number of pieces kids complete, we can reduce their length. There’s very little a student can learn from writing a 1200-word piece that can’t be learned better by writing three 400-word pieces.
- Require more writing in content area subjects. Kids would develop greater fluency in writing if they wrote more during the day. While essay writing is the staple of the Language Arts department, content area teachers can ask students to produce many short and informal types of writing likes notes, tables, timelines, descriptions, short answer and essay question responses in addition to traditional research reports and other informational writing.
- Assure that pre-service teachers are better writers prior to becoming certified. Teachers at all levels list their own feelings of inadequacy as writers as one of their main reasons for not teaching it. Until we take seriously the competence of teachers in this area, we will make little progress in improving instruction. To teach writing well, teachers need both confidence and competence. They must be confident in their skill and competent in their ability to pass that skill on to others.
- Provide at last one semester-long writing methods class to pre-service teachers. Many new teachers enter the classroom with no formal training in writing instruction at all. While ample resources exist in the professional literature to improve one’s skills, the fact that many teacher training programs offer little or no support for writing sends the message that it isn’t very important.
- Provide more training in writing to in-service teachers. Of all the areas where in-service teachers need additional training, writing is the most critical. Bearing in mind that writing cannot be taught effectively by textbook and that few teachers feel like competent writers themselves, we can imagine that in some classrooms no writing is taught because a teacher may have no way to teach it.
- Integrate reading and writing as much as possible. Writing can be easily and effectively integrated into early reading instruction. Teachers can use published texts as models for student achievement. Perhaps best of all, students can learn the mechanics of writing by studying the books they read, learning the rules of writing from correct examples, and modeling commonly used sentence structures.
- Use more writing in early reading instruction. Writing can be used to help young readers reinforce sound-symbol relationships. Kids can copy words, write the alphabet, take dictation of simple sentences, and demonstrate their level of phonemic awareness by translating sounds into letter patterns.
- Integrate essential elements of writing in Language Arts with writing across the curriculum. It may be unintuitive, but kids don’t automatically transfer skills and strategies learned in Language Arts over to other subjects. But if teachers share practice, and the vocabulary that cues kids to use it, they will. There’s no reason not to leverage Language Arts learning in other subjects. However, it takes coordination across departments, something that many schools aren’t used to.
- Give kids time in Language Arts to work on content area writing. Periodically, especially when they have big writing projects to work on, kids could benefit from having the help of their Language Arts teacher. Content area teachers don’t typically work with their students on style and mechanics. This can lead kids to think that these essential elements of written communication are valued in one class but not in others.
- Introduce students to a wider range of real-world writing forms. Teachers who are unconfident about writing tend to take the most conservative approach possible. For Language Arts teachers teaching writing, this means sticking to traditional academic assignments like character sketches and literary analysis. There’s nothing wrong with that—until kids have to write other things. Kids need explicit instruction in a wide range of forms, both academic and popular.
- Use reading to ground kids in mechanics, then teach it in the context of actual writing. It seems that even our brightest kids have trouble with punctuation, usage, and grammar. But the place to study these things is in real books not rule books. With teacher guidance, kids can see how the rules of punctuation play out on the page. They can mimic the sentence structures of successful authors. They can also improve their grammar.
- Balance self-expression and choice with formal writing that is preparatory to college and career. Throughout a student’s K-12 career, we must strive to strike a balance between writing that is assigned by teachers and writing that is chosen by the writer. The best way to be a writer, and to feel like a writer, is to have some choice over topic, length, organization, style, etc. If we want kids to become independent writers, we have to give them a little independence.
American students—even our very best—have serious challenges with written expression. This isn’t just a writing problem; it’s a thinking problem, too. Writing isn’t just another school subject; it’s a complex process that requires kids to rely on things they’ve learned in many subjects.
Writing is a lot of work, both for kids and teachers. It is, however, well worth the investment. Writing empowers kids in ways that other subjects do not. It’s a way in to the academic world and, for some kids, a way out of lives framed by unfortunate circumstances.
Reading is the core academic skill. But writing encircles at every turn; the two are always intimately related. If kids can read, they can learn just about anything. If they can write, they can share what they’ve learned with just about anyone who needs to know.