From “Assigning” to Teaching — How research can reshape writing instruction
I once had a student who loved rhinos. After all, what's not to love? During ‘free choice’ writing sessions (the opportunity for students to engage and communicate across genres of their choice), this student continued to write about rhinos in several formats. There was the narrative on rhinos, the persuasive, the poem – both Acrostic and Haiku.
What's not to love about Rhinos?
His writing was engaging, passionate, showed an awareness of purpose and audience, but what niggled at me was that I wasn’t teaching him anything.
Actually, what I found was that my competent writers avoided authorial risks. They wrote texts where the topic was the focus, while writers who found writing challenging, continued to find it so. The struggle to engage was confronting.
Giving students time to write about things they care about seemed like a good course of action. Wouldn’t it make sense that time, unhindered by correction and interruption, would build fluency? The data from my classroom suggested otherwise: Streams of consciousness unpunctuated and uncapitalised, plenty of sentence fragments, and several lines of ‘and then…and then’.
In these writing sessions, mechanics and conventions fell away, common errors were embedded and it became difficult for me to attend to the needs of every student. This began my journey to teaching scaffolded writing techniques (whilst considering when to avoid student choice (Christodoulou 2020).
… declining enjoyment in writing was linked to the barriers that students faced.
In a 2018 report from the National Literacy Trust in the UK surveying over 9000 8-11 year olds, the researchers found that declining enjoyment in writing was linked to the barriers that students faced—namely thinking of ideas, and struggles with spelling and punctuation.
At Templestowe Heights PS we were invested in improving our writing data, launching into a whole school survey similar to the NLTUK to ascertain, from students, what writing skills they learned from our teaching and whether or not they believed they were ‘good’ at writing, or even liked it.
We wanted to know what our students thought about writing. We were surprised by the results.
Our finding was that predominantly, students from Foundation to Year 4 enjoyed writing. The lowest motivation came from Year 5 & 6, where:
- 1 in 10 students did not enjoy writing.
(In Year 5/6, this equated to approximately half a class.)
The next survey question asked students if they considered themselves good writers - the data shifted to an average of:
- 1 in 5 students who identified that they do not consider themselves good writers
(This was equivalent to a whole class in every year level)
So, how can we think about data like this? 20% of students feeling ill-equipped to write well is a significant proportion.
To shift the student data, skills would need to come before enjoyment.
We could say the data shows that engagement matters; however, without the tools of the trade, writing—with high cognitive demands—is not going to be enjoyable. I could identify with the phenomenon described by Judith Hochman of teachers ‘assigning writing’ without teaching it. To shift the student data, skills would need to come before enjoyment.
Enter Cognitive Load Theory. Of all the things I understand to be high impact, this is perhaps the theory I would share with educators above all else. My fault in the writing classroom was in not making the abstract, concrete for the students – writing is an intangible and deeply cognitive expression. I needed to tie writing to something concrete, using modelled processes, exemplars and explicit steps that reduce working memory demands – also clearly advocated in the cognitive research linked to Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.
Natalie Wexler, co-author of The Writing Revolution, suggests that it is hard to become fluent or develop a voice if you’re overwhelmed by the mechanics of writing.
It turns out that research does not simply transfer into the classroom. Our teaching of writing is a great example of using knowledge from the Science of Learning to inform planning and instruction for the better. The process of writing places a heavy burden on working memory. Natalie Wexler, co-author of The Writing Revolution, suggests that it is hard to become fluent or develop a voice if you’re overwhelmed by the mechanics of writing. So, a key starting point to improving writing instruction is understanding the mechanisms behind the core of our writing: the sentence!
Evaluating our practice and scaling it back to a sentence-level focus required time to collect and interrogate data, and utilise conversations with teachers and students. The difference between simply teaching something because you have always done it this way and embedding something new into teacher belief, requires us to be vulnerable, open and inquiring.
From interrogating the research literature, and engaging in research-to-classroom trial and error, a crucial missing part of writing instruction was the explicit preparation of students to define and construct a sentence. This has sculpted our ongoing journey from instruction to assessment to feedback.
What is your journey in the writing classroom?
We encourage you to join in the discussion on this page.
Following these regular blog posts, we encourage you to join in the discussion below. A key goal of Think Forward Educators’ Writing Network is opening a conversation about writing in the classroom, using research, trialled techniques, assessment and data collection.
We are excited to connect with you in our Inaugural Writing Network Connect session!
Our first Writing Network Connect discussion will be held on Tuesday July 20 at 7:45pm Melbourne Time.
We hope to see you there!
Discussion Questions
What have you found is/is not working in your classroom?
What do you feel ill-equipped to deliver instruction on, and what approach would you like to evaluate?
What research have you found, and how could you trial this in your classroom?
