Why is writing so difficult to teach?

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Writing is difficult to teach because first of all, writing might not come easy to teachers. So if I'm out there doing training of groups of teachers and I'll say, "What are you reading this week?" Or, "On a scale of one to 10, how would you describe yourself as a reader?" And then if I flip that and I say, "What are you writing this week ... that isn't something you have to write for work. What are you writing this week?" And nobody raises their hand. And if I say, "And on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate yourself as a writer?" And the number is always much lower. So first of all, writing is hard to teach because it's hard to do for the teachers. The second reason that writing is difficult to teach is that while we have a lot of information out there about effective ways to teach reading, there's not as much in terms of writing.

People recognize that reading is multifaceted. That ever since the national reading panel where they identified sort of the five, big five — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension — that sense that there's a lot of components to reading. When it comes to writing, it's just this sort of amorphous thing, like we're going to teach writing. And so teachers don't even know what it means. If you're going to teach writing, what are the things that you have to teach? So that's the second reason.

I think, third, writing — while reading does this too, you have to integrate multiple skills at the same time — I think writing has an even greater challenge because not only do you have to apply a number of skills and strategies and even techniques, but the demands on executive function, the demands on working memory are much stronger when it comes to writing. That ability to hold on to multiple things that you're trying to get out onto the paper. That ability to focus on the composing part, what you want to say ... at the same time, picking the right words, and then also trying to organize it all. It just the working memory load and the executive function issues are far greater. So that's another thing that makes teaching writing really difficult.