Newsweek Why Johnny Can't Read Write Citation
We need to rethink our model of the writing process if nosotros want students to become chief writers.
When I (Steve Benjamin) received my first college writing assignment — to compose a 3-folio paper analyzing key themes in The Cracking Gatsby and supporting my analysis with quotes from the book — I felt overwhelmed. In high school, we had never written anything longer than a paragraph or two. I could diagram sentences with the best of them, but what did I know about identifying a theme, offering my own interpretation, and bankroll it up with excerpts from the text? And then I remembered my Aunt Elaine, merely three years older and a senior English major at the same college, and went to her for aid.
We sat together in the library, and she showed me how to identify a workable theme, typhoon an opening paragraph, and select a few quotes that would back up my thinking. And then she said, "Write two pages by tomorrow night, and I'll review your work and give you some feedback."
I replied, "But my paper isn't due until —"
She cut me off. "You've got to begin early so y'all will take lots of time to remember and rewrite if yous desire to be a good writer, Steve."
She met with me on ii or three more than occasions, and we discussed and rewrote, cut, added, and polished. I got an A on that kickoff newspaper. (Well, Elaine and I got an A.) I've forgotten most everything about The Great Gatsby , just, thank you to Aunt Elaine, I learned enduring skills and attitudes that made me a amend writer.
Of course, I was neither the get-go nor the last college student to be caught unprepared past a adequately simple writing consignment. When we (Michael Wagner and I) examine the land of writing instruction in Grand-12 education today, nosotros are dismayed to see how few teachers provide the kind of scaffolding that Aunt Elaine offered. Some teachers may give students excellent prompts to become them started, make time for them to write in class, and fifty-fifty note a few comments in the margins of their starting time draft, earlier grading a required second typhoon. But these kinds of support are hardly sufficient.
Writing problems — and solutions
Generations of G-12 educators accept described writing education as a loftier priority, and generations of critics have warned, as a memorable 1975 Newsweek headline put it, that "Johnny can't write" (Sheils, 1975). And notwithstanding, generations of students accept connected to perform poorly on writing assessments (ACT, 2018; National Heart for Instruction Statistics, 2012) and have struggled to produce the kinds of writing expected of them in higher and the workforce (Bernoff, 2016). Clearly, it has been easier to betoken out the problem than identify a solution.
In contempo years, however, the field of writing instruction has profoundly strengthened its evidence base. Not only have researchers confirmed that the chapters to write well plays a central role in higher and career readiness (Conley, 2003; National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2018), but they have identified a number of highly effective practices, such as allocating ample amounts of time for writing projects, guiding students through multiple cycles of drafting, reviewing feedback, and revising, and setting clear and high expectations for student work. Further, recent studies show that when writing educational activity is integrated into science, social studies, mathematics, and other classes, students tend to deepen their learning — and become more proficient readers — in those subject areas (Graham & Hebert, 2010; Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020).
Broadly speaking, the research suggests that if Thou-12 educators truly desire to assist students improve their writing, they should treat them as, in consequence, apprentices to the craft of avant-garde literacy. That'due south not a new idea, of course. Apprenticeships have been widely implemented in career and technical education for decades (Back-scratch, 2018), and the concept of "cognitive apprenticeships" has long circulated amidst experts in reading and mathematics instruction (Collins, Chocolate-brown, & Holum, 1991; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Schoenbach & Greenleaf, 2017). Nevertheless, when it comes to writing instruction, few schools have followed through on the practices that an effective apprenticeship requires.
In a cognitive apprenticeship, teachers model how to do a task, narrating their thinking at every step, and students repeat the procedure, explaining their actions as they go. Remember, for example, of Elaine and Steve working side by side on Steve'south paper: Elaine showed Steve what she would do while writing, and then he followed forth, calculation his own ideas. If this sort of frequent exercise, reflection, and coaching were the norm, students would have to spend much more than time on their writing, exist taught a much more than intensive writing process, and work toward much higher expectations than we see in many classrooms. Farther, they would need to have many more opportunities to write in multiple genres and in a range of subject areas.
Fourth dimension for practice and feedback
Whatever the field, apprentices who strive to primary their arts and crafts must be given adequate opportunity to practice. All the same, near students, in most schools, spend very lilliputian time writing (Gilbert & Graham, 2010). This is not a contempo problem: In 2003, the National Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools, and Colleges observed that, "Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom. Of the iii 'Rs,' writing is clearly the most neglected" (p. 3). Nosotros've seen no signs that the state of affairs has improved since then. For instance, the Institute of Teaching Sciences recommends 30-60 minutes of writing daily for elementary students (Graham et al., 2012), but few classrooms arroyo these optimal levels. Numerous times, teachers have told u.s.a. something along the lines of, "I would love to teach writing more than often, but I just can't find the time in my day/week."
But as valuable equally it would be to spend more time on writing instruction, that fourth dimension must too be used well. Typically, instructional plans are "a mile wide and an inch deep": Students meet a myriad of writing prompts throughout the school yr, with, at best, just ane or two loops of feedback and limited revision for each prompt. It would exist far more effective for apprentice writers to spend more time revising, reviewing the teacher's feedback, and then revising again and once again. Not only does such a cycle permit for the kind of determinative assessment that has been linked to gains in student operation in multiple disciplines (Hattie, 2009), but researchers notation that "revision is one of the key differences between good and inexpert writers. Expert writers revise. Start and nonclerical writers don't revise much. Or at all" (McLeod, Hart-Davidson, & Grabill, north.d.).
Whatever the field, apprentices who strive to chief their craft must be given adequate opportunity to practice. Even so, well-nigh students, in most schools, spend very lilliputian fourth dimension writing.
In virtually cases, feedback should come up primarily from the teacher. While evidence suggests that information technology can be helpful for adolescents to provide feedback on their peers' writing (Graham & Perin, 2007), teachers cannot necessarily rely on their students to play this role. National assessments show that between ii-thirds and 3-fourths of students are themselves unskilled writers, and they may not be able to provide instructive feedback across elementary grammar, spelling, and other surface-level issues. Peers are likely to provide useful support but when they are accomplished writers themselves, and when they have been taught some strategies for giving helpful criticism (Price et al., 2016).
However, teacher feedback should emphasize substantive comments and suggestions, rather than merely bespeak out where the pupil has made errors or scrawl the occasional " Awk " or " Run-on sentence " in the margin. For the most part, students have no thought how to translate such cursory comments or fix the errors that the teacher has highlighted. Feedback tends to exist much more than helpful when it poses important questions for students to consider, suggests how they might reorganize or expand on what they've written, and aims at "meeting students where they are equally writers, with the terminate goal of driving substantive revision" (Hicks, 2017, p. 10).
No doubt, some teachers volition need professional development on how to provide effective feedback. When reviewing student writing, many teachers presume their chief task is to catch errors in grammar and mechanics. Thus, they pay little attending to all sorts of other features — such as the amount of detail students include, their use of transitions, their use of repetitive or varying sentence structures, the way in which they quote and paraphrase evidence, and their use of descriptive language — that might aid students become more compelling writers who are able to communicate more powerfully with readers. Sometimes, to be sure, students might do good from comments about a grammatical mistake they've repeatedly fabricated. By and big, however, information technology would be far more than helpful to provide them with feedback that has to do with mode, organization, the arguments they've fabricated, or the responses they want to provoke in their readers.
Oft, in professional person development that focuses on writing instruction, groups of teachers will review samples of student work and discuss what would be the about important feedback to provide the given writer. In doing and then, those teachers who struggle with their own writing tend to learn, in a nonthreatening surroundings, how they can improve not only their students' writing, simply besides their own.
Of course, non every piece of writing should be the target of revision and further development, but students should be encouraged to engage in this procedure at least once a calendar month (Schmoker, 2007). In the finish, students and teachers must believe that working on their piece of work , intensively, is more than important than churning out dozens of lightly revised (if revised at all) pieces throughout the school yr. In effect, writing didactics should shift from mass production to a small-batch approach, with the aim of creating fewer, better crafted pieces.
A reimagined writing procedure
The move toward multiple revision cycles for a single work reveals the problem with the writing process equally currently taught in many schools. Posters displaying five- or half-dozen-pace examples of this procedure can be establish in almost every classroom that we enter. A quick online search reveals that, although there is variability, well-nigh visual depictions of the writing process evidence a serial of singled-out steps that begin with brainstorming or prewriting activities and then move on to outlining, developing the starting time typhoon, revising, and editing or polishing, and finally to publishing. The work is understood to motion in a more or less linear and anticipated fashion from start to stop.
The writing process shouldn't be viewed as rigid and linear; information technology can work in different ways for dissimilar people.
This model has remained the norm in Yard-12 classrooms even though experts have pointed out for decades that linear models of writing — those that separate the activities into discrete steps — may direct attending abroad from revision (see, for case, Sommers, 1980). And we know that revision is central to better writing results. As explained higher up, receiving feedback, thinking most that feedback, and revising stand for the most powerful elements of whatsoever writing procedure model, and if employed properly within a master/apprenticeship framework, will result in dramatic growth in student writing ability and confidence. Unfortunately, however, this part of the model is largely underemphasized or overlooked entirely. In many classrooms we have observed, students produce new pieces of writing each mean solar day rather than building on and enhancing preexisting piece of work.
Because the existing writing process models fall short, we offer an orientation (Figure 1) that is more than representative of how accomplished writing actually develops. This model suggests that a pupil may begin with any function of the process and move back and forth among the activities as needed. For example, one student might express an interest in voting rights and determine to gather information before beginning to write, merely another student might choose to begin writing straightaway, drawing on extensive prior knowledge and feel before engaging in additional research. Notwithstanding another educatee might choose to edit and further develop an about-forgotten poem that she has discovered in her writing journal, one that will require some expert advice from her teacher before she can overcome a stumbling block. In short, the writing process shouldn't be viewed equally rigid and linear; information technology can work in different ways for dissimilar people.
No doubt, this reimagined writing process volition require many teachers to let go of an approach that has been office of their classroom repertoire for years, possibly decades, and that's never piece of cake to exercise. Further, teachers may also worry nigh the time and attempt involved in requiring students to experience multiple cycles of feedback and revision. However, this recommendation does not necessarily imply additional piece of work. If teachers assign fewer prompts each calendar month, while allocating more time for feedback and revision on selected pieces of writing, then students will have more than opportunities to think, communicate, revise, and improve their writing, without increasing anyone's overall workload.
Fewer writing prompts will also mean fewer completed writing projects and fewer grades, which may require school leaders and parents to rethink some expectations, too, especially the supposition that a form should exist affixed to everything students produce. Rather, in an apprenticeship model, initial drafts and revisions must be treated every bit opportunities for teachers to behave ungraded, formative cess, perhaps showing students how their current typhoon measures up against a clear rubric. In fact, many researchers would fence that writing pedagogy is exceptionally well-suited to standards-based assessment, in which the instructor focuses (for virtually of the procedure of drafting and revising) on students' progress toward specific goals, rather than constantly trying to figure out what alphabetic character grade they deserve. After all, what does a letter of the alphabet form tell anyone well-nigh a writer's capabilities and need for improvement?
Expectations for principal writers
Students are less likely to become capable and confident writers in a culture of depression expectations. Yet, low expectations for writing remain prevalent, particularly in the primary grades, where many teachers concord narrow beliefs about the number of words or pages students can write, the vocabulary that they tin can employ, and the genres that are developmentally appropriate for them. Such assumptions oftentimes bear on teachers' choices about how much fourth dimension to devote to writing, how much and what blazon of feedback to give students, and the kinds of writing they emphasize (usually an overemphasis on narrative and too picayune attending to statement).
A number of times, while visiting classrooms, we have asked permission to work with kindergarten and 1st-grade students whose "completed" papers contained an analogy and just i or two sentences. When we asked about their illustrations, the children brought upwardly many more than ideas than they had included in their writing. For these students, information technology seemed, a picture show was worth a thou words. We encourage teachers to flip that rule and help develop in students the belief that a grand words are worth a picture.
For example, Daniella, a kindergartner, had written the sentence, "When I grow up, I want to live in a skyscraper" and had drawn and colored a lively picture, a cityscape with clouds, birds, an airplane, and a tall skyscraper. I (Steve Benjamin) complimented Daniella on her piece of work and asked if she'd similar me to help her to write a bit more. When she nodded in agreement, I asked, "Why practice you want to live in a skyscraper?"
She thought a bit and told me, "Because I desire to live high in the sky with the clouds."
I said, "That'due south lovely. Can nosotros connect that thought with your first sentence?" Daniella looked at me, and I added, "Then, your sentence will say, 'When I grow upwards, I want to alive in a skyscraper, high in the heaven with the clouds.' " She nodded and began to write, pausing once or twice to seek spelling help. I told her to write the words just as they sounded and that nosotros'd fix the spelling afterward if demand be.
I continued asking Daniella questions nearly her writing and her thinking, and soon, she had transformed one sentence into v. She turned, smiling, to her instructor, and said, "Mrs. Walters! I just wrote a paragraph!"
Mrs. Walters affirmed Daniella'southward piece of work and pointed to a chart on the wall and told me, "We've gear up an cease-of-year goal that students will write four or five sentences about a topic — a paragraph. Daniella is the first to practise so."
Supported by a teacher similar Mrs. Walters who sets challenging goals for her students, who ensures plenty of writing time, who employs testify-based instructional practices, and who provides her students with feedback about their writing, we are confident that Daniella will continue to develop equally a stiff writer.
Writing across genres and disciplines
A reimagined writing plan should besides offering a better balance among genres. Although argument-based writing has grown in importance in contempo years, teachers at the simple level continue to overstress personal narrative writing: In our own piece of work, we've observed that such writing makes up at least one-half to two-thirds of students' written work. At the secondary level, fifty-fifty in many English language arts classrooms, students are non writing a great bargain, and "the numbers are especially low for assignments of three or more pages, the type of writing where students might be expected to appoint with the subject-specific arguments and evidence called for by the Common Core Standards" (Applebee & Langer, 2011, p. 15).
Students should be engaging in more than argument-based writing, and such work should begin early. In the earliest chief grades, every bit a precursor to argument writing, students should begin learning to argue with evidence through, for example, instructor read-alouds in which the class listens and discusses ideas together, using evidence from the text to answer questions and support claims. "Fifty-fifty children as young as preschool age can formulate arguments, giving reasons and considering counterarguments and rebuttals" (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017, p. 38).
Opportunities to write should not be limited to English language arts lessons (Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020). Including writing in other subject field areas will naturally expand the genres in which students write, every bit they larn to write lab reports in the sciences and artist's statements in art classes. Social studies classrooms are specially fertile environments for writing and argument skill development. The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework from the National Quango for the Social Studies (2013) acknowledges that social studies educators should demonstrate a "shared responsibility for literacy learning," including writing (p. 7). The C3 Framework emphasizes the centrality of inquiry, questioning, evaluation, claims, prove, communicating, and critiquing, all of which are crucial to argument writing.
Of course, any endeavour to encourage more than writing across the curriculum will require an investment in professional person evolution. Many teachers outside of English language language arts do non recollect of themselves as strong writers and have not received adequate education in how to help students get constructive writers (Graham, Harris, & Hebert, 2011; Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020).
Writing for the real world
Let's finish pretending that scattershot, one-half-hearted, and formulaic efforts to teach writing will succeed. In reality, learning to write well is a circuitous skill that requires focused instruction and frequent practice. Rather than standing to shortchange the educational activity of writing in our schools — even every bit we bemoan the poor writing skills of our high schoolhouse graduates — let's provide teachers and school leaders with the resources and professional person development they need, and permit'southward operate within a master/apprentice model that requires students to think about their writing, to seek helpful feedback that they can use right now, and to work on their work until students, like Daniella, feel the joy that arises when their personal writing power increases.
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Source: https://kappanonline.org/developing-accomplished-writers-recent-research-benjamin-wagner/
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