The Ideas of Teaching Writing
1. Use the shared events of
students' lives to inspire writing.
Debbie Rotkow,
a co-director of the
Coastal
Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of
her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith's
words, is "natural and purposeful."
When a child
comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can
inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training wheels for the
first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write about. A new
baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student's father were the
playful or serious inspirations for student writing.
Says Rotkow:
"Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we wrote,
talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought, and how
we thought about it. We became a community."
2. Establish an email dialogue
between students from different schools who are reading the same book.
When high
school teacher Karen Murar and college instructor Elaine Ware,
teacher-consultants with the
Western
Pennsylvania Writing Project, discovered students were scheduled to
read the August Wilson play
Fences at the same time, they set up email
communication between students to allow some "teacherless talk" about
the text.
Rather than
typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent conversation
between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did not occur until
students had completed all email correspondence. Though teachers were not
involved in student online dialogues, the conversations evidenced the same
reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion, including predication,
clarification, interpretation, and others.
3. Use writing to improve
relations among students.
Diane Waff,
co-director of the
Philadelphia
Writing Project, taught in an urban school where boys outnumbered
girls four to one in her classroom. The situation left girls feeling
overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their "voices faded into the background,
overpowered by more aggressive male voices."
Determined not
to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face the problem
head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their journals.
She then introduced literature that considered relationships between the sexes,
focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote in response
to works as diverse as de Maupassant's "The Necklace" and Dean
Myers's Motown and DiDi.
In the
beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female responses.
According to Waff, "Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex, money,
and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment." But as the students
continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice
that they had similar ideas on many issues. "By confronting these
gender-based problems directly," says Waff, "the effect was to
improve the lives of individual students and the social well-being of the wider
school community."
4. Help student writers draw rich
chunks of writing from endless sprawl.
Jan Matsuoka, a
teacher-consultant with the
Bay Area
Writing Project (California), describes a revision conference she
held with a third grade English language learner named Sandee, who had written
about a recent trip to Los Angeles.
"I told
her I wanted her story to have more focus," writes Matsuoka. "I could
tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her
trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of
her drawings-a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother."
"Focus, I
told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with your
grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip."
"'Oh, I
get it,' Sandee smiled, 'like just one cartoon, not a whole bunch.'"
Sandee's next
draft was more deep than broad.
5. Work with words relevant to
students' lives to help them build vocabulary.
In her high
school classroom, she uses a form of the children's ABC book as a
community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find
an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the
word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they
make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus.
One student
describes her personality as sometimes 'caustic,' illustrating the word with a
photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains that she
understands the hurt her 'burning' sarcastic remarks can generate.
6. Help students analyze text by
asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.
John Levine, a
teacher-consultant with the
Bay Area
Writing Project (California), helps his college freshmen integrate
the ideas of several writers into a single analytical essay by asking them to
create a dialogue among those writers.
He tells his
students, for instance, "imagine you are the moderator of a panel
discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three
writers and construct a dialogue among the four 'voices' (the three essayists
plus you)."
Levine tells
students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The essay follows
from this preparation.
7. Spotlight language and use group
brainstorming to help students create poetry.
The following
is a group poem created by second grade students of Michelle Fleer, a
teacher-consultant with the
Dakota
Writing Project (South Dakota).
Underwater
Crabs crawl patiently along the ocean floor
searching for prey.
Fish soundlessly weave their way through
slippery seaweed
Whales whisper to others as they slide
through the salty water.
And silent waves wash into a dark cave
where an octopus is sleeping.
Fleer helped
her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her
students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language
related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and
adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the
phrases to produce the poem itself.
As a group,
students put together words in ways Fleer didn't believe many of them could
have done if they were working on their own, and after creating several group
poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone.
8. Ask students to reflect on and
write about their writing.
Douglas James
Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the
Denver
Writing Project, makes use of what he calls "metawriting"
in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as
a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose.
Joyce explains
one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that
occurs frequently in a student's work and points out each instance in which the
error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing
and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of
that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available.
"I want
the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a
thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any
debate that may surround the particular usage."
9. Ease into writing workshops by
presenting yourself as a model.
Glorianne
Bradshaw, a teacher-consultant with the
Red River
Valley Writing Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of
experiences from her own life when teaching her first-graders how to write.
For example, on
an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring cookie batter
while on vacation. She writes the phrase 'made cookies' under the sketch. Then
she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She writes the words
who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she
and the students construct the sentence, "I made cookies in the kitchen in
the morning."
Next, each
student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer vacation activity
and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for Bradshaw's drawing.
Then she asks them, "Tell me more. Do the cookies have chocolate chips?
Does the pizza have pepperoni?" These facts lead to other sentences.
Rather than
taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure gives students
a helpful format for creativity.
10. Get students to focus on
their writing by holding off on grading.
Stephanie
Wilder found that the grades she gave her high school students were getting in
the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying. Other students
relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged their own work.
"I decided
to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained a selection of
student work, were complete," Wilder says. She continued to comment on
papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her for conferences.
But she waited to grade the papers.
It took a while
for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of a grade,
and there was some grumbling from students who had always received excellent
grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their work,
students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.
11. Use casual talk about
students' lives to generate writing.
Erin (Pirnot)
Ciccone, teacher-consultant with the
Pennsylvania
Writing and Literature Project, found a way to make more productive
the "Monday morning gab fest" she used as a warm-up with her fifth
grade students. She conceived of "Headline News." As students entered
the classroom on Monday mornings, they wrote personal headlines about their
weekends and posted them on the bulletin board. A headline might read "Fifth-Grader
Stranded at Movie Theatre" or "Girl Takes on Responsibility as
Mother's Helper."
After the
headlines had been posted, students had a chance to guess the stories behind
them. The writers then told the stories behind their headlines. As each student
had only three minutes to talk, they needed to make decisions about what was
important and to clarify details as they proceeded. They began to rely on
suspense and "purposeful ambiguity" to hold listeners' interest.
On Tuesday,
students committed their stories to writing. Because of the "Headline
News" experience, Ciccone's students have been able to generate writing
that is focused, detailed, and well ordered.
12.
Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.
Patricia A.
Slagle, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the
Louisville
Writing Project (Kentucky),
understands the difference between writing for a hypothetical purpose and
writing to an audience for real purpose. She illustrates the difference by
contrasting two assignments.
She began with:
"Imagine you are the drama critic for your local newspaper. Write a review
of an imaginary production of the play we have just finished studying in
class." This prompt asks students to assume the contrived role of a
professional writer and drama critic. They must adapt to a voice that is not
theirs and pretend to have knowledge they do not have.
Slagle
developed a more effective alternative: "Write a letter to the director of
your local theater company in which you present arguments for producing the
play that we have just finished studying in class." This prompt, Slagle
says, allows the writer her own voice, building into her argument concrete
references to personal experience. "Of course," adds Slagle,
"this prompt would constitute authentic writing only for those students
who, in fact, would like to see the play produced."
13. Practice
and play with revision techniques.
Mark
Farrington, college instructor and teacher-consultant with the
Northern
Virginia Writing Project, believes teaching revision sometimes means
practicing techniques of revision. An exercise like 'find a place other than
the first sentence where this essay might begin' is valuable because it shows
student writers the possibilities that exist in writing.
For
Farrington's students, practice can sometime turn to play with directions to:
- add five colors
- add four action verbs
- add one metaphor
- add five sensory details.
In his college
fiction writing class, Farrington asks students to choose a spot in the story
where the main character does something that is crucial to the rest of the
story. At that moment, Farrington says, they must make the character do the
exact opposite.
"Playing
at revision can lead to insightful surprises," Farrington says. "When
they come, revision doesn't seem such hard work anymore."
14.
Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.
Bernadette
Lambert, teacher-consultant with the
Kennesaw
Mountain Writing Project (Georgia), wondered what would happen if
she had her sixth-grade students pair with an adult family member to read a
book. She asked the students about the kinds of books they wanted to read
(mysteries, adventure, ghost stories) and the adults about the kinds of books
they wanted to read with the young people (character-building values,
multiculturalism, no ghost stories). Using these suggestions for direction,
Lambert developed a list of 30 books. From this list, each student-adult pair
chose one. They committed themselves to read and discuss the book and write
separate reviews.
Most of the
students, says Lambert, were proud to share a piece of writing done by their
adult reading buddy. Several admitted that they had never before had this level
of intellectual conversation with an adult family member.
15.
Teach "tension" to move students beyond fluency.
Suzanne
Linebarger, a co-director of the
Northern
California Writing Project, recognized that one element lacking from
many of her students' stories was tension. One day, in front of the class, she
demonstrated tension with a rubber band. Looped over her finger, the rubber
band merely dangled. "However," she told the students, "when I
stretch it out and point it (not at a student), the rubber band suddenly
becomes more interesting. It's the tension, the potential energy, that rivets
your attention. It's the same in writing."
Linebarger
revised a generic writing prompt to add an element of tension. The initial
prompt read, "Think of a friend who is special to you. Write about
something your friend has done for you, you have done for your friend, or you
have done together."
Linebarger
didn't want responses that settled for "my best friend was really good to
me," so "during the rewrite session we talked about how hard it is to
stay friends when met with a challenge. Students talked about times they had
let their friends down or times their friends had let them down, and how they
had managed to stay friends in spite of their problems. In other words, we
talked about some tense situations that found their way into their writing."
16.
Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.
Ray Skjelbred,
middle school teacher at Marin Country Day School, wants his seventh grade
students to listen to language. He wants to begin to train their ears by asking
them to make lists of wonderful sounding words. "This is strictly a
listening game," says Skjelbred. "They shouldn't write lunch
just because they're hungry." When the collective list is assembled,
Skjelbred asks students to make sentences from some of the words they've
collected. They may use their own words, borrow from other contributors, add
other words as necessary, and change word forms.
Among the words
on one student's list: tumble, detergent, sift, bubble, syllable, creep,
erupt, and volcano. The student writes:
- A man loads his laundry into the tumbling
washer, the detergent sifting through the bubbling water.
- The syllables creep through her teeth.
- The fog erupts like a volcano in the dust.
"Unexpected
words can go together, creating amazing images," says Skjelbred.
17.
Require written response to peers' writing.
Kathleen
O'Shaughnessy, co-director of the
National
Writing Project of Acadiana (Louisiana), asks her middle school
students to respond to each others' writing on Post-it Notes. Students attach
their comments to a piece of writing under consideration.
"I've
found that when I require a written response on a Post-it instead of merely
allowing students to respond verbally, the responders take their duties more
seriously and, with practice, the quality of their remarks improves."
One student
wrote:
While I was reading your piece, I felt like
I was riding a roller coaster. It started out kinda slow, but you could tell
there was something exciting coming up. But then it moved real fast and stopped
all of a sudden. I almost needed to read it again the way you ride a roller
coaster over again because it goes too fast.
Says
O'Shaughnessy, "This response is certainly more useful to the writer than
the usual 'I think you could, like, add some more details, you know?' that I
often overheard in response meetings."
18.
Make writing reflection tangible.
Anna Collins
Trest, director of the
South
Mississippi Writing Project, finds she can lead upper elementary
school students to better understand the concept of "reflection" if
she anchors the discussion in the concrete and helps students establish
categories for their reflective responses.
She decided to
use mirrors to teach the reflective process. Each student had one. As the
students gazed at their own reflections, she asked this question: "What
can you think about while looking in the mirror at your own reflection?"
As they answered, she categorized each response:
I think I'm a queen - pretending/imagining
I look at my cavities - examining/observing
I think I'm having a bad hair day - forming opinions
What will I look like when I am old? - questioning
My hair is parted in the middle - describing
I'm thinking about when I broke my nose - remembering
I think I look better than my brother - comparing
Everything on my face looks sad today - expressing emotion.
Trest talked
with students about the categories and invited them to give personal examples
of each. Then she asked them to look in the mirrors again, reflect on their
images, and write.
"Elementary
students are literal in their thinking," Trest says, "but that
doesn't mean they can't be creative."
19.
Make grammar instruction dynamic.
Philip Ireland,
teacher-consultant with the
San Marcos
Writing Project (California), believes in active learning. One of
his strategies has been to take his seventh-graders on a "preposition
walk" around the school campus. Walking in pairs, they tell each other
what they are doing:
I'm stepping off the grass.
I'm talking to my friend.
"Students
soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases. I walk
among my students prompting answers," Ireland explains.
"I'm
crawling under the tennis net," Amanda proclaims from her hands and
knees. "The prepositional phrase is under the net."
"The
preposition?" I ask.
20. Ask
students to experiment with sentence length.
Kim Stafford,
director of the
Oregon
Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College, wants his students to
discard old notions that sentences should be a certain length. He explains to
his students that a writer's command of long and short sentences makes for a
"more pliable" writing repertoire. He describes the exercise he uses
to help students experiment with sentence length.
"I invite
writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page - and no fair
cheating with a semicolon. Just use 'and' when you have to, or a dash, or make
a list, and keep it going." After years of being told not to, they take
pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.
"Then we
shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the upper left
to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be longer
than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb."
Stafford
compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the second to
a drum. "Writers need both," he says. "Rivers have long rhythms.
Drums roll."
21.
Help students ask questions about their writing.
Joni Chancer,
teacher-consultant of the
South Coast
Writing Project (California), has paid a lot of attention to the
type of questions she wants her upper elementary students to consider as they
re-examine their writing, reflecting on pieces they may make part of their
portfolios. Here are some of the questions:
Why did I write this piece?
Where did I get my ideas?
Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why?
What parts did I rework? What were my revisions?
Did I try something new?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
What elements of writer's craft enhanced my story?
What might I change?
Did something I read influence my writing?
What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn?
Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it?
Expand it? Toss it? File it?
Chancer
cautions that these questions should not be considered a "reflection
checklist," rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently
when writers tell the story of a particular piece.
22. Challenge students to find
active verbs.
Nancy Lilly,
co-director of the
Greater New
Orleans Writing Project, wanted her fourth and fifth grade students
to breathe life into their nonfiction writing. She thought the student who
wrote this paragraph could do better:
The jaguar
is the biggest and strongest cat in the rainforest. The jaguar's jaw is strong
enough to crush a turtle's shell. Jaguars also have very powerful legs for
leaping from branch to branch to chase prey.
Building on an
idea from Stephanie Harvey (Nonfiction Matters, Stenhouse, 1998) Lilly
introduced the concept of "nouns as stuff" and verbs as "what
stuff does."
In a
brainstorming session related to the students' study of the rain forest, the
class supplied the following assistance to the writer:
Stuff/Nouns :
What Stuff Does/Verbs
jaguar : leaps, pounces
jaguar's : legs pump
jaguar's : teeth crush
jaguar's : mouth devours
This was just
the help the writer needed to create the following revised paragraph:
As the sun
disappears from the heart of the forest, the jaguar leaps through the
underbrush, pumping its powerful legs. It spies a gharial gliding down the
river. The jungle cat pounces, crushing the turtle with his teeth, devouring
the reptile with pleasure.
23.
Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final
grade.
For a final
exam, Sarah Lorenz, a teacher-consultant with the
Eastern
Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a
written argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work
they have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have
learned in the writing class.
"The key
to convincing me," says Lorenz, "is the use of detail. They can't
simply say they have improved as writers-they have to give examples and even
quote their own writing...They can't just say something was helpful- they have
to tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or
how they applied this learning to everyday life."
24.
Ground writing in social issues important to students.
Jean Hicks,
director, and Tim Johnson, a co-director, both of the
Louisville
Writing Project (Kentucky), have developed a way to help high school
students create brief, effective dramas about issues in their lives. The class,
working in groups, decides on a theme such as jealousy, sibling rivalry,
competition, or teen drinking. Each group develops a scene illustrating an
aspect of this chosen theme.
Considering the
theme of sibling rivalry, for instance, students identify possible scenes with
topics such as "I Had It First" (competing for family resources) and
"Calling in the Troops" (tattling). Students then set up the
circumstances and characters.
Hicks and
Johnson give each of the "characters" a different color packet of
Post-it Notes. Each student develops and posts dialogue for his or her
character. As the scene emerges, Post-its can be added, moved, and deleted.
They remind students of the conventions of drama such as conflict and
resolution. Scenes, when acted out, are limited to 10 minutes.
"It's not
so much about the genre or the product as it is about creating a culture that
supports the thinking and learning of writers," write Hicks and Johnson.
25.
Encourage the "framing device" as an aid to cohesion in writing.
Romana
Hillebrand, a teacher-consultant with the
Northwest
Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find
a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a
fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window
frame surrounds a glass pane.
Hillebrand
provides this example:
A student in
her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between humans and plants,
beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, 'Ring around the rosy, a
pocket full of posies...' She explained the rhymes as originating with the
practice of masking the stench of death with flowers during the Black Plague.
The student finished the paper with the sentence, "Without plants, life on
Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes we all fall down."
Hillebrand
concludes that linking the introduction and the conclusion helps unify a paper
and satisfy the reader.
26. Use
real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.
Suzanne Cherry,
director of the
Swamp Fox
Writing Project (South Carolina), has her own way of dramatizing the
comma splice error. She brings to class two pieces of wire, the last inch of
each exposed. She tells her college students "We need to join these pieces
of wire together right now if we are to be able to watch our favorite TV show.
What can we do? We could use some tape, but that would probably be a mistake as
the puppy could easily eat through the connection. By splicing the wires in
this way, we are creating a fire hazard."
A better
connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those
electrical connectors that look like pen caps.
"Now,"
Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), "let's turn
these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma, the
equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma splice
error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical
connector? Think conjunction - and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of
these show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device
for taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not."
"I've been
teaching writing for many years," Cherry says. "And I now realize the
more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to 'real world' experience,
the more successful we will be."
27.
Think like a football coach.
In addition to
his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with the
Third Coast
Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years coaching football. While
doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing the former. Here is some
of what he found out:
The writing
teacher can't stay on the sidelines. "When I modeled for my players,
they knew what I wanted them to do." The same involvement, he says, is
required to successfully teach writing.
Like the
coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than focus
on the negative. Statements such as "Wow, that was a killer
block," or "That paragraph was tight" will turn
"butterball" ninth-grade boys into varsity linemen and insecure
adolescents into aspiring poets.
The writing
teacher should apply the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. Holt explains
for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best used with
care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class, a
student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms such
as a chinquapin or haiku.
Practice and
routine are important both for football players and for writing students,
but football players and writers also need the "adrenaline rush" of
the big game and the final draft.
28.
Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.
High school
teacher Jon Appleby noticed that when yearbooks fell into students' hands
"my curriculum got dropped in a heartbeat for spirited words scribbled
over photos." Appleby wondered, "How can I make my classroom as
fascinating and consuming as the yearbook?"
Here are some
ideas that yearbook writing inspired:
Take pictures,
put them on the bulletin boards, and have students write captions for them.
Then design small descriptive writing assignments using the photographs of
events such as the prom and homecoming. Afterwards, ask students to choose
quotes from things they have read that represent what they feel and think and
put them on the walls.
Check in about
students' lives. Recognize achievements and individuals the way that yearbook
writers direct attention to each other. Ask students to write down memories and
simply, joyfully share them. As yearbook writing usually does, insist on a
sense of tomorrow.
29. Use
home language on the road to Standard English.
Eileen Kennedy,
special education teacher at Medger Evers College, works with native speakers
of Caribbean Creole who are preparing to teach in New York City. Sometimes she
encourages these students to draft writing in their native Creole. The
additional challenge becomes to re-draft this writing, rendered in patois, into
Standard English.
She finds that
narratives involving immigrant Caribbean natives in unfamiliar situations -
buying a refrigerator, for instance - lead to inspired writing. In addition,
some students expressed their thoughts more proficiently in Standard English
after drafting in their vernaculars.
30.
Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.
Jim Wilcox,
teacher-consultant with the
Oklahoma
Writing Project, requires his college students to volunteer at a
local facility that serves the community, any place from the Special Olympics
to a burn unit. Over the course of their tenure with the organization, students
write in a number of genres: an objective report that describes the appearance
and activity of the facility, a personal interview/profile, an evaluation essay
that requires students to set up criteria by which to assess this kind of
organization, an investigative report that includes information from a second
source, and a letter to the editor of a campus newspaper or other publication.
Wilcox says,
"Besides improving their researching skills, students learn that their
community is indeed full of problems and frustrations. They also learn that
their own talents and time are valuable assets in solving some of the world's
problems - one life at a time."