✏️ 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#11-20)
How do you teach writing? Check out my list of twenty suggestions!
Teach Writing Tomorrow addresses major myths and misconceptions about teaching writing. It will move from attitudes to actions and mindset to methods, showing how any teacher, regardless of their own perceived ability or creativity, can teach writing tomorrow.
Introduction (Recap)
In prior posts, I presented working blurbs from my talk “Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!” as well as next steps with “20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow.” This post will continue where the last left off.
Note: If you’ve missed any other posts in this series, check them out below!
The List (#11-20)
11. Embrace tests as learning opportunities.
What matters after reading a book: knowing every fact or relating facts? If you already use reading comprehension sheets, why bother asking the same questions again and again? Sure, not every student will know every fact, but that doesn’t mean they’re negligent or deviant. It means they are human. Instead, students should wrestle with the readings, using tests themselves as learning opportunities. (This means chances to write, discuss, and revise.)
For readings, the baby literature paper stands as the ideal. Basic knowledge should be means to ends. Literary analysis either looks at parts of literature (How did the author analyze…?) or connects literature as part (How does this story connect with…?) Ask them to analyze a character in-depth. Ask them to interpret symbols. Ask them to argue something. Ask them to connect similar stories.
When rhetorical mode confines so-called argumentative writing to opinion pieces only, we miss value opportunities with literature. Literary devices aren’t just vocabulary terms for matching or facts for multiple choice. They involve thinking skills.
And before I forget, allow choice within essay tests. Rehearse several prompts but steer students by difficulty. Adjust the length and structure depending on the student and the question. If a better student chooses an easy question, interpret the rubric harder. If a developing student choose a harder question, interpret the rubric easier. Either way, rehearse certain arguments, let the kids make mistakes, and encourage revisions to better skills.
12. Write collaboratively with students.
Imagine a Math class without practice examples. You discuss the concept a few times and kids have one shot at solving the skill. You talk about Math but you only do Math maybe once a term, if that. Would anyone be surprised when they grow up thinking Math is too hard?
When exploring ideas or thought patterns, write collaboratively with students. As a class. And don’t just work from the same answer key asking the same questions regardless of input: Embrace many possible correct answers and the wonderful quirky idiosyncrasies. Make mistakes together. Own mistakes together. In short, learn together.
Students can’t learn about polished writing until they’ve seen you polish it. If they don’t see you model the process, both good, bad, and in between, then they won’t learn it either.
13. Students write for other students. (Or Students read student writing.)
James Moffett observed a curious phenomena when students write for each other: They up their game. There’s a major difference psychologically when students write for their teacher versus their peers. Reading similar voices provides an accessibility unlike reading unattainable, polished works by adults. When students write for each other, the waters rise.
Students writing for students also brings another advancement: Community. Students reading students means students discussing students. Just like looking at art, where conversations of good and bad naturally follow, students discussing students has an ax sharpening ax effect. Dialogue simply provides the go between. That said, when just the teacher reads, then nothing talks except the red pen.
14. Add regular peer review.
A room of twenty students has how many graders? That’s right: Twenty-one. If twenty students each catch twenty mistakes, grading becomes easier. If twenty students catch two mistakes each, grading becomes even easier. Counting mistakes doesn’t mean punitive marks, but things pointed to. And perhaps eyes trained to spot mistakes.
And no, peer review isn’t perfect. Students will become distracted. Conversations will be focused then fade into irrelevancy. But before getting too serious, ask whether all adult conversations always stay focused. No?
Peer review needn’t be complex. The most simple versions involve trading papers for one or two hyper specific, countable things. More complicated versions include progressing through checklists. But most importantly, peer review should involve students hearing their writing in another’s voice. That alone, their voice with another sound, another speed, another cadence, will reveal mistakes like turning on a flashlight. Try it.
15. Add regular writing conferences.
Dialogue improves writing, not circling mistakes. While student-to-student dialogue helps with easy mistakes, writing conferences help with the bigger picture. These conferences aren't half-hour things: The logistics just don't gel. Instead, embrace the power of five minute conferences. If paired with pre-typed feedback, five minute conferences yield drastic results!
How do these work? I'm positive many correct answers exist. I've always preferred these questions: 1. According to the rubric, what grade should this receive? 2. What did you do well? 3. What do you need to improve on? When pairing spoken feedback with written feedback, the written feedback becomes a working to-do list.
16. Teach using text structures.
Each year I tell my students the following: I have few truly bad writers in my class. Instead, I have many inexperienced organizers. And that can be taught! When you consider our chaotic, swirling inner monologues, any logical organization feels truly astounding. Regarding text structure, my elevator pitch goes like this:
Depending who you ask, there are a half dozen interconnected, interrelated text structures. No single pattern comes first. They organize and generate information, useful for composition as well as comprehension, mixing and matching to form more complex structures. Once you understand the simple, zoom out. The microscopic becomes the macroscopic. Small patterns become big patterns.
Many questions assume text structures: part-whole relationships, time-order, similarities and differences, cause and effect. If students recognize how questions themselves assume text structures, they can answer with the confidence using easy, big picture organization. And before overthinking, consider how simply playing offense or defense in football presumes structuring or ordering the players for a common purpose.
When you consider strategies from generative learning such as Select, Organize, Integrate, picturing and drawing information becomes an invaluable first step. This means once questions are paired with similar text structures, students should draw or picture information before considering traditional or linear prewriting. Thus, drawing might improve writing—but only within a certain framework.
Note: This thought explodes into other areas like traditional-current rhetoric, the rhetoric of invention, dual coding theory, and so on.
17. Teach writing across the mediums.
Expand beyond the essay. The medium isn’t only the message, but thought pattern. If students only think in the cookie-cutter, five paragraph essay format of introduction, body, and conclusion, then everything has that thought pattern. Writing a letter? Ignore the greeting, closing, and signatures: Letters only have the introduction, body, and conclusions. Scripting a play? Plays only have the introduction, body, and conclusions.
When you teach essays only, all thought patterns copy that pattern. The pattern itself becomes blind, indiscriminate, unthinking, and universal. Which isn’t true. Don’t get me wrong: I love when students write essays to analyze literature. But maintaining a mono-diet of essays only means restricting thought patterns. Essays are school things—valuable for teaching thinking, but not everything is an essay, just as not every tool is a hammer.
Before panicking about standardized tests, consider how we learn in contrast. When learning what defines the letter, compare letters against emails. When learning what defines the letter, compare letters against essays. When learning what defines a play, compare against regular prose. Students truly can’t learn what something is until they explore what it isn’t. If you only teach one medium, then maybe you teach nothing at all.
18. Transform writing across mediums.
Once students learn multiple mediums, transform them. Utterly abandoned the dead-end textbook progression of brainstorming, outlining, writing, and revising. Abandon traditional-current rhetoric. Instead, transform emails to essays or monologues to short stories. Transform ideas across text structures, mediums, lengths, and audiences. Each successive transformation should follow dialogue, transforming through community.
James Moffett described writing through the lens of ever increasing audience: Journals mean monologues (by definition a conversation with oneself), letters mean dialogue with a specific person while essays mean dialogue with a wider, disconnected audience. Students miss this. Before writing a pages long essay, consider writing letters firs t. Once students understand dialogue as back and forth through letters, they can understand dialogue as back and forth through essays. And that is just one possibility of many.
19. Make everything connect.
Transforming means drawing new connections. This defies disconnected academic standards, which somehow divorce writing from spelling, writing from grammar, and writing from literature. Building connections doesn't quite mean everything follows a linear trajectory--quite. Instead, connected teaching constantly seeks new possibilities.
Someone once remarked to me that being a teacher must be nice: You can waltz in, prop your feet onto a desk, and just watch videos. Tell the kids to finger paint. Umm, sorry, bud. That said, the disconnected nature of academic standards has the same effect. Today we learn this and tomorrow we learn that. Academic standards render academics itself as finger painting.
And for the record, I find academic standards fundamentally and philosophically broken because they disconnect and distort. Obsessively measuring parts without wholes ensures and enshrines the depths to which they are prevented from connecting. Measuring itself does not promote growth just as rulers do not make things longer.
In short, academic standards promote epistemological misinformation. But I’ll save that rant for another time.
When you teach writing, you teach any possible whole-part relationship from the writing to its constituent part. This means teaching writing means spelling, teaching writing means teaching grammar, and teaching writing means teaching literature. Just change your lens. But if you don’t connect them, if you divorce means from ends, then the separate parts become overwhelming. Sadly, this divorce prevents many from teaching writing in the first place.
20. Add choice to add voice.
I firmly disagree with giving students complete choice in writing. Some tasks need taught uniformly. That said, give choice whenever possible. Practically speaking, choice allows adjusting or scaling difficulty. Beginning and advanced writers can both address the same subjects, but will tackle them from completely different angles. Adjusting length isn't a shallow thing, but refers to adjusting and creating more complex structures.
And as a side note, who wants to grade X of the same essays? And how many of us faced tests that never played to our strengths?
Student choice brings ownership. Even if they're not wild about the reading, exercising ownership breathes second wind. Maybe they’ll be wild about the questions instead. This works best when students disagree with multiple essay prompts and suggest something unique. That uniqueness leads to more creative and divergent thinking.
Next Steps?
What topic comes next? As of this writing, next week I’ll be presenting at AMLE24 in Nashville, TN, the city where I was born. (And moved from.) My workshop “Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!” has already been marked as a highly attended session, which feels crazy. As a guy from a one stoplight town surrounded by cornfields, speaking at a conference with more people than my hometown just blows my mind.
As for the series Teach Writing Tomorrow, after Nashville I’d like to finally write some long form posts which could carve out their own book. I have a time table, but I might spend a better part of November exploring several longer ideas in full. So if I don’t post in the next two weeks, don’t be alarmed.
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I loved this and part 1. (I also started digging into Moffett's book. It's got my gears turning. Thank you!!)