Since I began teaching, I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of “art” teacher: the moniker for my content area, the English Language Arts, has always settled on the “Arts” part, with the English and Language being modifiers, defining the specific kind of Art we were to study and practice.
To me, writing is at the center of that practice. Early in my career I read Kelly Gallagher’s Teaching Adolescent Writers, in which he claims students should “read like a writer and write like a reader.” His claim was a catalyst for my development as a teacher: in my high school English-Language Arts class, we write about what we read, but we also write the kinds of things we read, we write to learn and express ourselves, and we read so we may become better writers.
As any English teacher knows, teaching writing is challenging. Many have tried to simplify the process by offering graphic organizers and fill-in-the-blank templates, hoping to teach the structure and content of writing – but if you’ve ever read the outcome of such templates, the writing is rarely fluid or interesting or meaningful to the student. It often becomes a kind of mad-lib response; we may as well use scantrons instead.
This is not to say that sentence frames and starters can’t be useful, or that we shouldn’t teach transitions and paragraphing, but that real writing looks like the kinds of things we read.
I want to share what I’ve found to be key elements of my writing instruction. I believe these elements really move developing writers forward:
- Authenticity
- Genre
- Choice
- Practice
- Transfer
- Audience Feedback
- Conferencing
- Honesty & Compassion
Authenticity
Students need writing situations and assignments that reflect writing found outside of the high school classroom. This allows me to use mentor texts as models and to teach how different writers use different structures and different tools for different situations. In addition, authenticity of the writer, in the form of choice and voice and style, should be built into many writing assignments, particularly those that are end-products in nature. Students need outlets to create in real and authentic ways, and when they have authentic assignments they are able to create amazing work.
Genre
Like authenticity, developing genre awareness is key to developing writers who can function outside of the high school English Language Arts classroom. You might have already guessed I stand wholly outside of the “five-paragraph essay” devotees; that structure is rare outside of 6-12 grade schooling. Teach students to look at genre, everything from poetry to op-ed essays, from short stories to magazine feature articles, from memes to blogs to websites and all forms of digital expression. What are the conventions? What are acceptable variations? What choices do the writer’s employ? I help students look at genres in other content areas too, by suggesting that students question and consider the kind of texts that exist beyond the textbook in science, math, and history. When the occasion warrants, I allow students to create texts that would be found in different content areas.
Choice
When students have options–not too many, but a few–they are better able to demonstrate what they really know. This also goes to the first two points, genre and authenticity, in that students need to have a way to navigate and demonstrate the connections they have made between curricular content and their own world–their experience, their observations, their thinking.
Practice
It’s hard for me to choose which of these is most important, but I cannot emphasize enough the need for practice. Students must be allowed to practice without penalty. This means I do not grade practice. Practice should not count…perhaps at all… in any numeric grading system (unless it’s just credit, but then that’s a whole other topic – see going gradeless). Practice should be deliberate. Practice should involve the goals and skills that teachers are trying to help students develop. Students should focus on particular elements, not trying to improve the whole thing. Consider how we get better at anything: I don’t improve my running by being a better runner – what does that mean, anyway? I improve my running by paying attention to my posture, or by practicing maintaining my cadence. I could say a lot more about practice (and maybe I will in another post), but practice should be deliberate and free and preferably followed by feedback and/or reflection. Seeing other students’ practice is incredibly powerful as well; particularly when learning a new form or skill, observing how others attempted the same task (with varied success) helps students to learn even more about their own work.
Transfer
Another key to practice is transfer. I used to expect transfer to happen automatically then found myself disappointed when students reverted to some previous practice I thought they’d resolved. Thus, it became important to facilitate and directly instruct transfer. This might come in the form of goal setting, where I have students look at previous work, establish a goal for the new assignment, and focus on that goal while composing. After, students reflect on their progress and my feedback refers to that goal specifically. I teach students to see themselves as growing writers who recognize their own development. These acts of deliberate transfer are incredibly empowering for students.
Audience feedback
Effective feedback is timely and specific. It also helps if that feedback comes from more than one source. I considered breaking this into 2 sections – Audience and Feedback – because in some ways each aspect has its own nuance. But really, students need a sense of audience. Who is reading my work? And more importantly, how effectively am I communicating with that audience? In order to develop that sense of audience, the audience needs to give feedback. I work with students to give peer feedback, training them not only what to look for but how to provide helpful and honest comments.“Good work” is not particularly helpful feedback. When the audience is more than the teacher, there is greater accountability for the writing and greater significance for the writer. In any case, all feedback should be couched in terms of what the reader needs from the writer, what the reader understood, thought, and wanted to know.
Conferencing
Personalized instruction, in the form of student-teacher conferencing, goes 300% farther than annotation or other written feedback. Taking just 2-5 minutes to talk with a student about the student’s writing allows for a conversation that is much more nuanced, much more meaningful. Of course, there are right ways and wrong ways to conference: the student must be holding the pen and making the choices; the teacher must be genuinely curious about what the writer was trying to say and reflect what the teacher heard so the student can develop the sense of audience and power of the written word. Questions work better than stated observations (When you say X, did you mean Y? Or I wanted to know more about how this works; what is an example of this idea in action?). Recommendations stated as invitations also support students better than commands: Consider ways to break this idea down, maybe into shorter paragraphs by playing with the sentences – how does breaking the paragraph here differ from breaking it there? Or, consider ways to connect your ideas together (transitional phrases or statements or reflections of main claim, depending on what the writer needs for greater cohesion). Recording feedback (where you speak your feedback and they listen to the recording) can move them a little more than written feedback.
Honesty and Compassion
Honesty in feedback is absolutely necessary. I do students no favors by inflating my assessment to soothe the difficult path. That said, my honesty is and must be compassionate and constructive. I earnestly seek to understand what the writer is attempting to say and do; when I approach students in this way, by honestly valuing what they bring to any task and honoring their perspective, I create the optimal conditions for growth and development.
These are what I might consider the tenets of my writing instruction. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, your additions, your questions, and your challenges.
