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Narrator: If you'd like to know what it really takes to teach children to write well, Joan Sedita would be a great person to ask. She served as a teacher, literacy coach, school leader, and now as the founder of Keys to Literacy, which is dedicated to outstanding professional development. Teaching writing can be hard, she says, but we can help all students become better writers if we use explicit evidence-based practices. In this program, Ms. Sedita explains what every educator should know about teaching writing.
Joan Sedita: The ability to write is as essential as the ability to read, and together the foundation of all learning. Only about a quarter of grade eight students can write proficiently, and these problems start in the elementary grades. I see too many students who struggle to write a solid sentence or who have difficulty organizing their writing. So many students have wonderful things they want to say, but they become frustrated and they give up because they don't have the skills needed to express their thoughts in writing. The need for writing instruction and opportunities to write throughout the school day in all subjects requires all teachers to play a role in growing the writing abilities of students. But teaching is hard. Teaching writing is hard. I've worked with a lot of teachers who are not sure about the best way to teach it, and that's what I'm going to talk with you about today. What skills do students need to become proficient writers and what is the best way to teach them?
Let's begin with an overview of the Writing Rope. This is a framework I developed for identifying all the needed skills that students need to write proficiently. The Writing Rope organizes these many skills into five major components, and all of these components must be woven together. So as students begin to write, they need to be proficient in many, many skills as organized in the rope. It's a little bit like learning to play soccer. Right? So if students are beginning the game and they're taught a whole bunch of specific skills — how to dribble, how to pass, right? How to position themselves on the field. You work on these skills separately, sometimes combined, but ultimately, in order to play the game, the student has to be proficient in all these underlying skills, but then be able to integrate them, and that's what writing is all about. Now, for some students, some of these skills come naturally or with just a little bit of instruction.
Other students need a lot more coaching. The Writing Rope is organized into five major strands. If we begin with the most basic, transcription, that involves being able to spell and either handwriting or keyboarding. Basically the skills students need in order to literally get the words down on the page. These are very basic foundational skills, and most students need these skills to be automatic. If students are not proficient, if they're not fluent in these skills and the ability to just get the words down on the page, what's going to happen is that's going to be a drag on their ability to focus on the composing part of writing.
Let's talk a little bit about early kindergarten to grade two writing. What does it really look like? In these earliest grades we can't expect young ones to be writing multiple paragraphs. Students begin in ... even before they come to school just by scribbling random marks. They don't know the alphabetic system yet, but they know somehow that these things on the page represent words. They then start drawing and through their illustrations, share what they have to say combined with dictating about those drawings. So they use the drawing as a springboard. They're saying what they have to say, their ideas, their thoughts, and at this point, someone else can be writing the words down. But very quickly they begin to move into at least labeling their pictures. And this is where that invented spelling, their attempts at spelling a word come into play. So if they have the word hat, and they might not know for sure how to spell that vowel sound, /ă/, you might see them write an 'h', a 't' at the end, and some random vowel, maybe an 'i', maybe an 'e', maybe an 'a', but at least they're representing the sounds.
And as they learn their phonics and that gets up to speed, they'll gradually be able to spell words better. So labeling the first, their first drawings is really the first step in being able to literally write, and it's about that transcription skill of getting the words out on the page. The next step after adding labels to their drawing, so maybe they have a drawing, they write the word dog, sun up in the sky. The next thing we tend to do is have them combine words into phrases or eventually sentences. That's the whole independent stage. So we move from drawings to labels to lists of things. Maybe a list of things that are in the imaginary grocery list that we're putting together. Or the list of friends we're going to invite to our party. And then they go to phrases and then they go to full sentences.
The progression that moves from drawings to labels to phrases, and eventually sentences really varies among children. You might have kindergartners, some of whom by November of the first year of their schooling, are able to write a full sentence. And you might have students in kindergarten at the end of the year who still can only label their pictures. In this first example, we have a kindergartner who's drawn two people and has labeled their names. Might be a brother, might be a sister. In the next example, while it's not fully developed into a sentence, the student is trying to write "how to ride a bike" along with a picture of a child riding a bike. Now, it's hard to figure out the words because there's a lot of invented spelling going on here, but there's a real difference between labeling, just using names, to attempting a whole phrase or sentence. The final example we have is a kindergartner who's able to write a full sentence. "The frog eggs hatched in the pond when it was spring."
Let's talk about the writing craft strand in the Writing Rope. And there are several things that fall under this component. The first is vocabulary. And we know that vocabulary is essential in order to comprehend when reading. But vocabulary is also essential in order to compose. If students have something they want to say but they can't find the words to say it, then that's going to affect their writing. And so word choice as it relates to vocabulary is an important part of the writing craft strand. Another part of the writing craft strand has to do with task, audience, and purpose. And all proficient writers keep these things in mind when they're writing. They have to because it should be influencing decisions that we have to make about what structures should we use? What tone should we use? And so many of our students need to be taught to be aware of task, audience, and purpose.
They don't think about it, they just write the same way, regardless who the audience is. We know that if students are writing to what they perceive as a real audience, an authentic audience, they're going to be more engaged in their writing. It's the difference between, for example, the teacher giving an assignment that just says, simply write a composition about ... or write an essay about ... versus write a letter as if you were this historic character. Or let's write this reaction to something that happened in the narrative story from the perspective of one of the characters to another character. Writer's craft is also sometimes described as writer's moves. It's anything that a writer does on purpose to make the writing look or sound a certain way. Writers are making decisions, or they should be, about tone, voice, word choice, thinking about an authentic audience, and also the organization of a piece.
And these writer's moves are things that don't come naturally to a lot of students. We need to teach them to our students. What are some of the things that fall under writing craft? It's a writer's unique style, or the emotion that comes across. It's the personality that they put into their writing. Sometimes people describe it as writing from the heart, making the reader feel emotion. And we achieve that through the language that we use to describe the action or the setting that we use, or even the dialogue. It's sometimes referred to as using colorful or descriptive language, and also making sure that kids are using precise words. And this is why vocabulary development also supports writing. Writing craft also includes literary devices. A really basic one is dialogue. So even young students can use dialogue. Maybe they have a drawing and they're having two of their characters talk to each other using little word bubbles.
But there are other, more advanced literary devices, things like using flashback or hyperbole or making an allusion. But there is one type of literary device that students can begin using in the elementary grades, and that has to do with figurative language. So for example, saying that the lawnmower sounded like a buzzing bee. These are things that we can introduce in the elementary grades. One of the things I like to share with teachers as we're talking about the writer's craft strand of the Writing Rope, is the use of mentor models. We know that when we're trying to teach someone a skill, a strategy, and certainly a technique, right, that if we show them models of what the use of that skill or technique looks like, they're going to learn it faster because they're going to be able to emulate it. And so if I am trying to show students how they can use dialogue between two characters, I might bring several samples from published texts that show two characters talking to one another. We would analyze that with our students and then the students would try it in their own writing. Or if I'm trying to teach my students how to use transition words to make a connection, let's say we're doing a series of events, so might do first, next, finally. So I'd have my students seeing several mentor examples where those transitions are used, we analyze them together, and then the students try it in their own writing. So the use of mentor models can be very powerful.
Another key strand in the Writing Rope has to do with text structure. But really what is text structure? It refers to how a piece of text is built. Very often students look at a completed piece of writing and they look at it and say, I could never write like that. But when we explain to them that it's really like building a piece of text one step at a time, and that's what we want to try to teach our students. Let's talk a little bit about the three main types of texts and what those structures are like. The first is narrative. And really narrative is all about telling a story and the story could be real or imagined. It's usually a series of events in order, and therefore the text structure is often organized into a before, during, and after kind of flow, which drives the order of the events in the story.
We also can think about narrative text structure as having, meeting certain literary elements. So thinking through what are the setting or settings? Who are the characters? What's the problem and solution that needs to be solved? So when it comes to narrative writing, we want to teach students about the order of events, but also those literary elements. When it comes to informational writing, this is different. The goal of informational writing is to examine or to share information. And so often what we have to write about for informational writing can be organized by topics and subtopics. We can chunk the information into sections and then right down to paragraphs. So it's not unusual for informational text to be organized by chapters and then sections and then subsections within that. And this is where headings become very important. Just think about your classic science or social studies textbook.
Finally, we have opinion/argument, and I say opinion/argument because younger children up through about grade five are not quite ready to do formal argumenting with their writing. And so very often their opinion pieces will be focused around the basic elements of opinion writing, which include stating your position or your claim, and then providing reasons that support that position, and then backing your reasons up with evidence. Those are the three basic elements. Now, let's talk a little bit about paragraph and what that is. It's unique, it's a, it's a text structure that we don't use in spoken language. We don't speak in paragraphs. And so the idea, the concept of a paragraph might be foreign to children, especially younger children. Oftentimes I see older struggling readers and writers who still don't even understand what a paragraph is. If you look at their writing, they just write and write and write and write, and they just never pause, right?
It's not organized or chunked. Or sometimes I'll see students who every once in a while they'll indent because they think they're supposed to, but they don't really know why or when to indent. And so this all comes down to this basic structure called the paragraph. When we write, we have a topic we're writing about, and we then have different things to say about that topic. So for example, I might be writing about pirates and maybe the first kind of pirate I want to write about is Buccaneer pirates. And so I'll focus my main idea for that paragraph on Buccaneers. But then I might move on and talk about something else with pirates. Maybe all the pirates that lived in the Caribbean during a certain era of time. We're still writing about pirates. That's the topic. But we've shifted main ideas and now we're talking about pirates in the Caribbean.
And so we need to create a new paragraph, but a lot of our students still don't get the concept of what a main idea is and what supporting details are. And so when we teach students this structure and to understand what is in a paragraph, it supports their reading because they can pause and look at a new paragraph and say, "gee, what was that main idea? What was the gist of that paragraph? What's the most important detail that supports that gist?" And then they can move on to the next paragraph. And all of this plays a role in taking notes as well, because if students can do that pause and say, "Hmm, this was the big idea. I was reading about Buccaneer pirates." They can put that in their notes and then add details to their notes that support that. Likewise, when they're writing, they want to be organizing what they have to say in that way.
Another thing we want to teach about paragraphs is something called the topic sentence. What ... what is that main idea about? And if you are a good organized, structured writer, you'll let the reader know by giving them a topic sentence at the start of the paragraph that lets them know what this paragraph is about. Let's delve into patterns of organization a little bit more. There are five major patterns. The first is description or explanation. And what is the purpose of that? Well, the purpose is to state a main idea and give information about it, explain it or describe it. If we think about transitions for description and explanation, those transition words are going to be things like also, in addition, another. The second kind of pattern of organizations is a sequence or a chronology, and that's about presenting things in order. Think about the transition words that go with this — first, next, third, last, finally.
The third pattern is cause and effect. So something happened and it made this happen as a result. The fourth kind of pattern of organization is comparing and contrasting. This is where we show two or more things, how they're alike and how they're different. And so some transitions for that might be things like, similarly, on the other hand, in contrast. The final kind of pattern of organization is problem and solution. And this is where something went wrong, but how might it be fixed? And this is a pattern of organization you often see in narrative, right? Where stories have a problem that have to be solved. One of the things we can do in the classroom to help students be aware, not only when they're reading, but also when they're writing, is to have bulletin boards, graphic organizers, anchor charts in the classroom that list the five patterns of organization.
And along with it, some of the transition words that are connected to those patterns. Let's delve a little bit more into transitions. These can be words or phrases. They're sometimes referred to as linking words and they're worth their weight in gold. And for some students, those words come naturally. Others they need to be taught how to use words like however and on the other hand. If transitions are part of a student's lexicon and they come naturally, it's going to make their writing flow better. And very often they'll include them in their first draft. But for our students that aren't used to transitions very often, adding transitions at the revision stage of their writing is essential. Explicitly teaching students about transitions — how to use them and how to recognize them — supports both reading comprehension and writing. When students are reading and they come across a transition, it's like a ... a signal.
It's like a little clue. It's like someone in the road with a sign saying, "We're about to change directions." And cueing students to be aware of those transitions and know what they mean is going to support their reading comprehension. On the other hand, in their writing, we want to encourage students to pause at the end of every couple of sentences, every one or two paragraphs, and add a transition to either connect one paragraph to the next or to signal that pattern of organization. Now, teachers can provide a scaffold to students to help them with transitions. A simple list of words organized by category. For example, these are words that you could use that would support a sequence of events, or these are words that you might use if you were comparing and contrasting things. And then having a short list of choices next to each of those types of transitions can be really helpful to students. Teachers can have posters of this in the classroom. They could hand out lists of transition words that students keep in front of them or keep in their notebooks to draw on whenever they're writing. So I can't overemphasize the value of these little words and phrases and how they can improve the writing of our students.
Another essential strand in the Writing Rope is the syntax strand. What is syntax? It's the system and arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses that make up a sentence In any language. Syntax is often aligned with what's called the "grammar of language." Now, what is syntactic awareness? Well, that's the ability of anyone to pick up on what those rules are. And when hearing a sentence or reading a sentence, or when writing a sentence to be able to recognize that maybe the words are out of order. Now how do we develop syntactic awareness? We start learning that very early way before we go to school. It's by listening to people talk. It's by ... when we're younger, having someone read aloud to us. We develop that sense of cadence. What makes a sentence? That a sentence needs two parts. It needs a, who is doing what? That's the basics of a sentence.
But a lot of our older students struggle with writing and they still can't write a complete sentence. So what we want to do when we're teaching sentence structure is, number one, make sure they understand what a solid sentence looks like. That it has to have those two parts. But sentence instruction goes much beyond that. We also have to teach students how to handle longer, complex sentences. You know it's okay for a second grader to write a sentence that has five words, six words, but as you move up through the grades, you need to be able to write much longer sentences. You need to be able to combine independent with dependent clauses and to add phrases. The ability to be able to write a good sentence, combine a few good sentences into one solid paragraph. They are the building blocks. And if you cannot write a good quality sentence or an organized paragraph, your writing is going to suffer.
A very simple activity we can do with students to help them elaborate their sentences is what I call using the "'w' words," — who, what, when, where, why, and how. These are words that when students give us a basic simple sentence by asking one or two of these questions, it enables them to add more. If you just say to students, make your sentences longer, they don't know where to begin. But this is a scaffold. So for example, if we start with a very basic sentence — "The Pilgrims arrived." — and if we say who, what, where, when, and why? Now that's an awful lot at once, but I'm going to read back to you the sentence that can be used if we answer all five. The pilgrims arrived by ship at Plymouth Rock in 1620 to live in a new land. Now, you wouldn't necessarily, especially with the younger children, give them all of those 'w' words at once. You might start with just where and when or why. But eventually, as they get better at elaborating their sentences, you can bring in more 'w' words.
Narrator: Now let's see how sentence elaboration works in a classroom.
Maria Bailey: We've got some fabulous, fabulous ideas here.
Narrator: Today, literacy support teacher Maria Bailey is helping second graders in Toledo, Ohio add more detail to their sentences — a skill often called sentence expansion.
Maria Bailey: So boys and girls, we have been working on writing sentences and making them better and more interesting, right? So some of the sentences that we thought we need to have some help with were sentences like, "I like mom." "I like dad." "It is fun." "Let's play." What is wrong with sentences like that?
Student 1: They don't share enough detail.
Maria Bailey: There's no details. Who is fun? What is fun? Tell me more.
Narrator: By learning how to add more detail, students aren't just making their sentences more interesting, they're also building their understanding of sentence structure. Ms. Bailey models how to use simple question words like when, where, and why to add more detail to their sentences.
Maria Bailey: Okay? So these are question words that we use when we are writing a sentence and how we might answer or add more details using one of those question words.
Narrator: In this lesson, students will work on expanding sentences by answering the question why. With some help from the word because.
Maria Bailey: Because ... our word because is going to answer our why. Why is something happening? Why. Why is that happening? The dog was barking because ... why? Okay, that's our why. So let's start with, "The dog was barking because ..." So let's start.
Narrator: "Turn and talks" are a key part of Ms. Bailey's lesson, giving students the opportunity to safely share ideas while practicing their new sentence elaboration skills.
Student 1: The dog was barking because the dog was hungry.
Maria Bailey: Alright, so let's chat. I just like a quick share out. Quick share out and then we'll, we'll pick one. We'll start right here. Go ahead. Josiah, your group. What'd you say?
Josiah: The dog was barking because ... because it saw another dog.
Maria Bailey: Because he saw another dog. I like that. That would make a dog bark. Absolutely. Ian?
Ian: The dog was barking because it ... she ... it seen a squirrel.
Maria Bailey: Oh, it's saw a squirrel. Okay, I kinda like that because that would make my dogs bark. Thumbs up if that would make a dog bark. Does that make sense to us? Yeah, I think so too.
Joan Sedita: Now you might say, well, that's fine for younger children, but what about students in fourth, fifth, sixth grade, or beyond? I'm going to show you how this can work even at the upper level. Let's say the core of what I want a sentence to be about is the U.S. Constitution. If I ask these simple questions, what, when, how, and who, I can end up with a sentence that reads as follows: "Ratified In 1788, the U.S. Constitution establishes a separation of powers by creating three branches of government represented by the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court that respond to the actions of the other branches in a system of checks and balances." Now, if you were to ask a student, "can you write me one long sentence about the U.S. Constitution?" they might not be able to do it. But this example that I'm sharing with you was from an eighth grade classroom where the students one by one were asked each of these words and gradually expanded their sentence
to end up with what I just read you. One of the things that's been supported by research for many decades is something called sentence combining. With sentence combining you give students two sentences or more, you start off with short sentences and you ask them to combine them. And what sentence combining pushes students to do is to practice manipulating and rearranging words in sentences until they come up with something that sounds right to their ear. Sentence combining was actually developed in the 1960s and has been researched ever since. And one of the consistent findings is that doing sentence combining activities with students grows their syntactic awareness and their understanding of grammar. It's more effective than traditional grammar instruction. And by that I mean the typical labeling parts of speech because it's connected to the student's writing. When they do sentence combining, they have to manipulate words and practice writing sentences. Now let me give you a few basic examples. So if I were to say, "The baby turtle swims. The baby turtle dives," how would we combine those into one sentence? We might say, "The baby turtle swims and dives." That's the simplest example I can give you. Here's another one. "There are six turtle eggs. The turtle eggs are white." We might combine it and say, "There are six white turtle eggs."
Narrator: Here's how sentence combining can work in a classroom. Let's watch teacher Heather Adams and her third graders at Oak Street Elementary in Franklin, Massachusetts.
Heather Adams: Mr. Wormwood is mean to Matilda. Matilda plays pranks on Mr. Wormwood. Oh, and which conjunction are you thinking makes sense here?
Owen: So because like it's kind of like cause and effect.
Heather Adams: Right! What's the cause here, Owen?
Owen: Mr. Wormwood is mean to Matilda, so Matilda plays pranks on Mr. Wormwood.
Heather Adams: Yeah, if he wasn't mean, she wouldn't have played those pranks, right? I agree. When we want to show cause and effect, we want to use the connector word, the conjunction, so. If I put that together as one complete sentence, it might sound like this, "Mr. Wormwood is mean to Matilda, so Matilda plays pranks on Mr. Wormwood." I almost want to make another little change. Tell me what you think about this. "Mr. Wormwood is mean to Matilda, so she plays pranks on Mr. Wormwood." Or, "she plays pranks on ..."
Students: Him.
Heather Adams: Him. That's what I was thinking.
Joan Sedita: Now, eventually you can have students combine three sentences, or you could have them combine two longer sentences. If I were to give you an example that has three sentences, it might go something like this. We're still talking about the turtles. We might say, "Turtles have shells. The shells are made of bony plates. The shells get bigger as turtles grow." And so we might combine that to, "Turtles have shells made of bony plates that get bigger as turtles grow." Now the thing about sentence combining is that there's no exact right or wrong way to do it as long as all the major ideas make their way into the final sentence. This is the kind of thing that can be done in any subject. If students, let's say in a middle school science class — fifth, sixth grade — let's say they're walking into the classroom, the teacher can take two basic sentences tied to whatever the students are studying that day, have it on the board. and part of the bell work is to, as quick as you can, combine the two sentences. If a student has multiple teachers. Let's say, again, between fourth and sixth grade, they have five major teachers. If every teacher did a sentence combining activity twice a week, the student would end up doing 10 sentence combining activities. And one of the things we know about its effectiveness is it's better to do short little bursts of sentence combining over periods of time, frequently, than to spend a half hour doing sentence combining once a month.
The final strand is critical thinking, and there are an awful lot of skills and strategies that get wrapped up under this component. Over the years, the stages of the writing process have been developed and revisited. There are different ways of naming the stages, but basically it's thinking and planning before you write, then writing, and then when you're done, making sure you revise your writing. Now those are four terms — think, plan, write, revise — that I developed years ago along with my colleagues to help students, in a simple way, remember those stages. Under the "think" stage this is where students have to identify their audience and their purpose. Who are they writing for and why are they writing it? They also need to brainstorm the topic. If they're creating something from scratch, maybe they're creating their own story. They have to figure out who are the characters, what's setting, what are the events?
If they're writing to learn, meaning they're writing about something that was taught in the classroom, or they're writing about texts that they're reading, or they're responding to a question that the teacher is asking, they need to gather information from their sources. And in order to do that, they need to be able to take notes. Now, the next step is planning. So I've got these great ideas, or I've collected this information from my sources and I've got some notes about it, but what do I do with them? Do I just start writing? And the answer is no. I need to plan my writing. What is my organization going to be? What's my structure? What's the order that I want to present the information? How do I make connections among it? And then we need to have some sort of a planning guide. There's lots of options out there.
There are graphic organizers, there's outlines. The idea is though, that we use a tool to help organize what we have to say. Part of this is deciding, what will be in my introduction? Every good piece of writing has an introduction. It might just be one sentence. It might be a whole paragraph. But it lets the reader know what they're going to be writing about. So what will my introduction look like? We also want to conclude. We want some closure. So what will that be like? But more importantly, how am I going to organize the body of my piece? If it's informational, it's going to be by topics and subtopics. If it's narrative, it's going to be beginning, middle, end, and a series of events. And if it's an opinion or argument piece, it's going to be organized by what my claim is, my position, what are my reasons that support it, what's the evidence I use to support each reason?
And then if I'm writing a more advanced argument, I might also add a counterclaim and a rebuttal. So that's the planning stages. It's not till you sit down and you actually start getting it out on paper, or you start typing it out, that you get to the right stage. A lot of students, especially those that struggle, they skip the first two stages. They just start writing. And what we want to convince our students is that the time they spend doing the planning and the thinking will make the writing go that much easier. And the quality of the writing will be that much better. Now, when we're at the right stage, this is where we apply everything we've learned in the other strands of the rope. How to write good sentences. How to write good paragraphs. How to use transitions. It all comes together in our writing.
We're translating idea ... ideas into sentences and then organizing them into paragraphs. Now the last stage, and this is one that students love to skip, right? And that is revision. So just like thinking and planning are essential before we write, revision is essential after we write. And when we teach writing and revision to students, we like to tell them that you want to go through and revise on two levels. The first time around you're going to focus on the content. Did you say everything you wanted to say? Did you organize it well? That's the most important thing. 'cause that's what you're writing about. You're composing your ideas. On the other hand, we want to go through it a different time, a second time, to do what's traditionally called proofreading, right? So I'm going to check for my spelling. I'm going to check for my punctuation and my capitalization. But those are the stages of the writing process.
And we want to make students aware of these stages as often as we can because a lot of them, it's not part of their approach to writing. And so sometimes hanging a simple poster of the four stages. Remember — think, plan, write, revise, can be really helpful. The other thing that teachers can do, if you're grading the writing that students do ask to see the pre-writing tools. What outline did you use? What set of notes did you use? What was your planning guide? And place just as much importance on grading those parts of the process as you do the actual finished piece. Now, let's face it, revision is not fun. Adults don't like to revise their writing. And certainly students don't. Once they're done writing that draft, they don't want to see it again. But the fact of the matter is that that's where the fine tuning of your writing happens.
And you know, part of the reason students have difficulty with revision is they don't know how to do it. They don't even know what they're looking for. If we're going to have students self-revise, we need to give them tools to be able to do that. So a very simple checklist that has a few things you want the students to look at. Maybe the first question is, do I have an introductory statement? Have I used transition words? So a couple of very simple things like that in a simple checklist helps guide the students for what they're looking for. You know, we also know that when students can collaborate with their peers, it's motivating. And so if we have students work together to look at one another's writing and give each other feedback, it's a plus. But only if we're going to give them guardrails for how to do that.
You wouldn't just say, look at your neighbor's piece and give them feedback 'cause they wouldn't know how to do that well. But if we give them a tool, like a checklist, it guides them through the process. And one of the things we know from research is that when students learn to give feedback to others, it allows them to have a critical eye in looking at their own work. I want to share some examples to show you the value of pre-planning before writing. This first example is a grade two student using a set of two column notes to plan what's going to go into the writing piece. The topic was working dogs and the student has listed three kinds — hearing dogs, sled dogs, herd dogs. Over on the right next to each type, there are one or two bullets with just a few details for each. When you see the actual piece, you can see each of the three dogs developed into sentences.
So it reads, "There are many kinds of working dogs." That's a topic sentence. Introducing the reader to this paragraph, which is a pretty sophisticated skill for a second grader. The student then goes on to talk about the three types. "Some dogs help people because some people cannot hear. Another working dog is a sled dog. They help people that cannot drive in the winter. Herd dogs help herd sheep for the farmers." One of the things I want to point out is, do you see the transition word in there? Do you hear it? Another kind of dog. So this student is using a topic sentence, planned out three main topics in the paragraph, and actually used a transition word. Another example of how pre-planning can help students write better compositions is a fourth grade example. In this case, the students were writing about different parts of the East Coast of the United States.
The students listed the topics on the left, the Northeast Coastline, Maine, Cape Cod, New Jersey. Then next to each of those topics are several bulleted details. The details are not full-blown sentences, they're just a few words, a few phrases, which is what we want for notes. But then the student takes those notes and develops them into a well structured paragraph, beginning with a topic sentence. "The Northeast Coastline has many cool things to see." Now you'll also notice in the example, this example, of the student is already beginning to revise their work. The paragraph goes on to take each of those topics that was in the left side of the notes and develop them into full sentences. The result is a well-structured paragraph that the student might make better upon revision, but it's pretty solid already and it's very organized. Another important sub skill in the critical thinking strand of the Writing Rope is writing to read, writing to learn.
The Writing to Read Research Guide came out in 2010 authored by Graham and Hebert. One of the main recommendations coming from this research is that when we teach students to do certain kinds of writing tests about what their reading, it supports their comprehension. What were these recommendations? Number one, if we have any kind of a writing test that has students responding to text in writing., It could be a personal reaction. So for example, maybe you were reading a story and something happened to the characters. You might write a reflection about how that made you feel. Or it could be more formal. Maybe analyzing and interpreting a piece of text. Maybe comparing it to another text. So some sort of response to the text. The second recommendation was writing summaries. Now writing summaries not only turn up as something that supports comprehension, but it also turns up in a lot of the research about what improves students' writing over time.
So summaries — really essential. The third was teaching students how to write and take notes. Writing notes about what you're reading helps you unpack it, understand it, and put it into long-term memory. And then the fourth recommendation was having students not only answer, but actually generating themselves, questions in writing about what they're reading. Why is it that writing about reading and learning helps? Well, because writing is thinking. When we write, it pushes us to organize what we've just learned, clarify that learning, um, build relationships between what we've learned now and something we might have learned yesterday. Writing push pushes us to extend our thinking and to literally engage with the information. I want you to think about this example. Have you ever written a list before you go grocery shopping? And what happens when you forget the list at home? Does the fact that you wrote everything out help remember, help you remember and remind you what you need to get?
And it's a very simple example, but that's what we mean by writing supports thinking. It fosters coherence between the ideas. And even simple little quick writes. And what are quick writes? Quick writes are little tasks that teachers can give in any grade, in any subject. They take less than five to 10 minutes to do. One example might be the teacher gives students some sentences and they fill in the blanks. Maybe they label items in a drawing from a science class. The idea though, is that students are always writing on a frequent basis. If students do one or two quick writes a week in each of their major subjects, they end up doing eight to 10 quick ... quick writes during the course of a week. And so even these short, simple, quick writes help students think and process information.
Here are a few important takeaways. First, writing matters. Students need writing to learn, to communicate, and to be successful in school, in the workforce, and in their everyday lives. We need students to understand that writing matters. We also need to remind them that while writing is challenging for all of us, even adults, all students can learn to write with the right instruction. Writing should address multiple components, and that's the whole idea of the Writing Rope. That writing isn't just one thing. It's not just spelling or handwriting or answering a question on a prompt. It's a whole host, a constellation of skills and strategies that we can talk about as separate items when we're doing something like the Writing Rope framework. But we have to remember that as students learn each of these skills and strategies, that ultimately they have to put 'em together and integrate them in order to be a proficient writer.
If we come back to a metaphor that I used earlier about teaching someone to learn to play soccer. We talked about the individual skills. You might teach them how to dribble, how to pass. But it's when they play the game that it all comes together. And it's the same with writing. All teachers can and should play a role in teaching writing. The number of students in this country who are below proficient with their writing skills is way too high to leave it to just one period a day in the English or ELA class. Another key element I can't emphasize enough is the importance of explicit systematic instruction when teaching writing. This means following a gradual release of responsibility model — the "I, we, you" — where the teacher introduces a skill or strategy, explains it thoroughly, models it through think aloud, then provides guided practice for students until eventually the students can apply the skill or strategy independently.
Finally, educators need to avoid making assumptions about the skills that their students have. Too often I see the older the student gets, the more the teachers assume that some of the basic foundational skills are there. And we have to remember that at every grade level we need to look at each student as an individual and determine what are their strengths and weaknesses as it relates to every stage of the Writing Rope. You might have an eighth grader who still has trouble spelling, and that's going to take away from their ability to focus on composing. You might have a fourth grader who still can't write good sentences. So we want to make sure that we're looking at all the skills and strategies, but that we're doing it through the lens of what does each individual student need in terms of their core instruction and possibly their intervention instruction. I remember when I first started teaching how difficult it was to teach writing to my students. I wasn't prepared and I made some mistakes along the way. But now, 50 years later, the literacy field has learned so much more about helping students become skilled writers. Teaching writing can still be challenging, but I've seen how students can grow their writing ability when teachers help them learn all skills and strategies for every strand in the Writing Rope and provide guided practice
Narrator: Reading Universe is made possible by generous support from Jim and Donna Barksdale, the Hastings/Quillin Fund, an advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the AFT, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and anonymous donors. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel @RUteaching. Reading Universe is a service of WETA, Washington D.C., the Barksdale Reading Institute, and First Book.
Joan Sedita: This is Reading Universe.
