During my first year of teaching, I had a brilliant student named Joshua*. Joshua was a Junior who was wise beyond his years. He loved to talk about books. He loved to debate different topics in class. However, it wasn’t until we read the cult favorite, The Color Purple, during the first nine weeks when I assigned an analysis that I found a secret- he had never been asked to ‘write a complete’ paper. I was stunned, but it made sense why so many of my ‘high performing’ kids were not strong writers- they had had very limited explicit teaching around writing. And instead had been force feed to find the right answer.
I love teaching writing and no surprise, I love to read.
I remember spending hours reading and imagining myself in those pages while sitting in the public library. So, when I had the opportunity to teach high school English/Language Arts in the now-defunct Memphis City Schools, I “jumped” at the chance. However, it did not take long for me to realize that most of my students HATED writing and simply tolerated reading. Instead of being interested in the process, they had been trained to look at the final grade when discussing writing. They did not see a connection between the building blocks of writing and how they would need that skill to make them stronger students.
After painstakingly meeting with students like Joshua*, I realized that not only did students not have the building blocks of writing, but the process of teaching writing was hard for students and teachers.
The Early Years
The first couple of years I taught, I taught writing at a surface level. Meaning, I would give an assignment and use the rubric to tell students what they got wrong. I would teach the common genres of writing, but I did not go deeper. In year three, I began to realize that my students needed extended time learning the building blocks of writing. They needed the context, the mechanics, and the process of receiving feedback and revising their work.
Students were used to being in a compliance mode and just ‘doing’ assignments and hoping for the best when teachers graded them using a rubric or checklist. Many times
This led to a vicious cycle of kids attempting to write to “check off” the completion box, and I was going through the motions of grading just to grade.
I’d bring this up on professional learning, team meeting, and more, and most would attribute this apathy as one of the pain points of teaching high school in a high-needs area.
Each year my student’s classroom data stayed stagnant, and I screamed louder and louder.
The Data Around Writing
The national data was even worse for teaching writing.
Since 2011, NAEP has shown us that the writing skills of fourth and eighth graders have waned. In fourth grade, 20% of students scored at or above the proficient level, while in eighth-grade, 24% scored at or above. In addition, data has shown persistent gaps in writing proficiency levels based on race/ethnicity and income. For example, white and Asian/Pacific Islander students scored higher on average than Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native students. Similarly, students from higher-income households had higher average scores than those from lower-income households.
And this was pre-pandemic.
With the onset of billions of dollars funneled into school districts through CARES funding and the state pushing literacy legislation, it’s critical that schools not spend millions on reading and assume writing will also be addressed. Building students to be strong writers starts with districts examining when students are writing and what they are writing about. Beginning at this point, creating a writing culture starts with de-programming how we’ve been taught to teach writing and starting with what we know works.
What Teachers Observe
In my experience as a high school writing teacher, I spent hours grading papers, giving feedback, and having teacher/student conferences. The conferences were difficult unless it was a topic students felt passionate about or there was some type of reward for their work. Students would make edits based on my feedback and even turn in “pretty” papers but there was something lacking.
When talking with my colleagues, we also discussed the utter exhaustion from trying the process. It seemed like despite the hard work in teaching the content, there was a disconnect between the purpose of why writing was so important. Some colleagues choose not to teach writing- and honestly, I could not blame them. And there were others (mainly Humanities teachers) who lived and died on the sword that we would not give up on writing and would instead find a way.
Year after year, I kept trying new strategies I learned from other teachers or ideas that I had with the belief that one day I would find the ‘magic’ combination. There were a lot of uncomfortable moments, but I learned:
- Students need time to practice writing and teachers need time to teach explicit writing.
- Content literacy is developed through (continued) writing.
- If you’re not going to give meaningful feedback, there’s no point in assigning writing.
- Grades are subjective- especially in grading someone’s thoughts.
A Solution…Maybe?
With that learning in my 20-year journey, I’ve realized that there are some ideas that we must hone in on as educators.
Foundationally, to build students’ content knowledge and writing abilities we cannot teach writing in a vacuum- it has to be paired with texts that push students to have meaningful dialogue. This is not a contrived dialogue but as secondary teachers, pushing in on topics that push students to THINK.
Think about this, if I am going to teach the cult favorite, The Color Purple to eleventh graders, which prompt would encourage more dialogue?
Is Mister the villian in this story? Why or why not?
or
Explain a time when you have forgiven someone even when you did want to.
While both questions can be used in any American Literature class, I would argue that the second one hooks students in the context. When paired with various texts around this theme the dialogue among students would be rich. This could lend itself to students being able to write more confidently about their experiences and helping launch them into writers.
The Building Blocks
But while this is a simple comparison, there are instructional building blocks that support that increased dialogue and explicit strategies for teaching writing instruction and I would start with below:
Dialogue is the foundation of writing.
Kids are natural talkers. They’ll talk your ear off about their favorite musician, sports team, and latest Tik Tok trend. As a secondary teacher, I created a classroom where dialogue is not only encouraged but supported. Many times, we would start the day with students reading short news briefs and responding to them in their journals. Other times, we’d debate a theme in a story- all of these chances for dialogue allow students to develop their content knowledge.
Explicitly teach the process of writing, thus helping students become writers.
Start simple. Kids do not become writers through osmosis. Words build sentences. Sentences build paragraphs. Paragraphs make larger bodies of work. This idea causes us to focus on these building blocks (words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.) in our everyday teaching. Grammar and syntax are important to writers.
Feedback is a gift to students and fellow colleagues.
Students need feedback to be better writers. So while it’s tempting to assign 100 writing assignments within a school year, it’s more important to manage what we have students write about. Then gives students targeted feedback that allows students to reflect on where they want their writing to go.
There are more than three types of writing.
We’ve all been in schools where writing has been taught in a box. Kids learn three genres of writing and stick to them no matter the prompt. Or even worse, kids are taught a rigid format of essay writing that lives and dies with the five-paragraph essay. There are a variety of genres of writing and students need the flexibility to express themselves.
Reading and writing support one another.
If kids are not reading, they will not write, so it’s critical to find texts that jump-start students to start a dialogue in the classroom. While classic texts have a place in any classroom, teachers must bring in literature that acts as a window and mirror to their experiences. If you can get students to debate you about something from The Hate U Give, it’s much easier to have to respond to a writing prompt using the text.
These strategies are not easy and are not something you can do with the ‘snap’ of a finger. These things will likely take teachers years to develop as they refine their own knowledge and adjust this to the knowledge of their students. Writing instruction is literally a marathon, not a sprint. In my next article, I’ll dive deep into these practices that I perfected working in underserved communities.
