Writing instruction: It’s time for change
Why Prioritize Writing?
Learning to write affords many benefits, in education, work, and life. Teaching handwriting helps to secure letter knowledge in long term memory; teaching spelling enhances decoding skill; and writing about what one reads improves memory and comprehension. More profoundly, writing has long been acknowledged as a tool for thinking, involving the articulation of reasoned arguments, and providing opportunities for creativity and self-expression.
Given the importance of learning to write, low rates of achievement are cause for concern. Teachers, it’s time to re-evaluate current teaching approaches, and look to the research to identify methods that will better serve our students.
The ongoing influence of Process Writing:
Donald Graves’ Process Writing approach was influential during the 1970s and 1980s, despite a lack of empirical evidence to support it. While the term Process Writing has now fallen out of favour with classroom teachers, research suggests that some of Graves’ methods are still widely-used. In what follows I’ll present five such methods - common in many classrooms - which limit student progress in writing. For each of these methods, I’ll present an evidence-based alternative. This suite of small changes could positively transform student achievement in your school.
Change #1: Swap out personal recounts for more interesting topics.
Graves told teachers that personal experiences were the best inspiration for writing, and yet this kind of writing encourages an unsophisticated ‘recall and write’ process, and often results in a boring story. Instead, set tasks which relate to the big wide world: Reports about dinosaurs, volcanoes, apex predators, or the solar system; Narratives set under the sea, in a dark forest, or amongst ancient ruins. Plan these tasks carefully. For non fiction topics, integrate writing with other curriculum areas so that students work with the knowledge before writing about it. For narratives, prepare your model carefully and consider the challenges your students will face as they come to write their own.
Change #2: Instead of a free flow drafting process, teach your students to read and check every sentence as they write.
Graves told us that writing was a staged process: plan, then draft, then edit, then publish - with the first draft happening in a ‘free flow’ way. In contrast to this, empirical researchers have described the writing process as a ‘juggling act’: Skilled writers plan or modify their planning, even as they come to write their final paragraph. They re-read and revise throughout the drafting process - from the very first sentence. This continual checking and refining results in greater self-awareness, which leads to higher quality writing - for both surface and deeper features. So, instead of encouraging free flow drafting, we must teach students to think of a sentence, write it, and check it immediately, asking: Does it sound the way I want it to sound? Does it have a capital letter at the beginning and a full stop at the end?
Change #3: Prioritize technical skills in the early years, and teach them explicitly, every day.
Theorists such as Graves de-emphasised the importance of teaching handwriting and spelling, telling teachers to instead prioritize the expressive aspects of writing. However, numerous empirical studies have shown that if technical skills are not mastered, they will occupy all of a student’s working memory and make it impossible for them to focus on anything else (including the ideas they wish to express). So teachers - teach handwriting and spelling every day. Teach them explicitly and closely monitor your students as they practice. This will have massive pay offs for writing achievement and motivation, and will support reading development too.
Change #4: Instead of invented spelling, use co-constructed spelling.
In many classrooms, when students ask how to spell a word, they are told to listen to the sounds and write what they think. And while it’s true that listening to sounds is a good starting point for spelling, what happens if a student doesn’t have the knowledge to record those sounds? At best, this leads to the recording of an incorrect approximation. At worst, it’s a killer for motivation, as students sit anxiously, reluctant to make a mistake. A much better option is to use co-constructed spelling: When students ask you how to spell a word, support them to segment the word into sounds and prompt them to apply the knowledge for the sound-letter correspondences they have, then show them the rest of the word.
Change #5: Instead of crossing out, teach students to use erasers to make tidy corrections as they write.
Graves told us to have students cross out errors instead of erasing, supposedly to keep up the first draft ‘flow’. However, skilled writing is not free flow writing - checking and correcting are important writing skills. Unfortunately, crossing out makes checking difficult as the page becomes cluttered, messy, and difficult to read. This practice can also be a problem for motivation as many children want a tidy page and feel self conscious sharing writing with all their errors still visible. So teachers, it’s time to bring back the eraser. Keep one in your pocket for the first few months of the year and give students their own when they are ready.
Make these changes and love teaching writing.
Process Writing practices are so pervasive that they are often taken for granted, with teachers and leaders failing to consider other options. But rates of student achievement are at an all-time low, and many students are reluctant to write at all. Have a go with these suggested changes and watch you students thrive. Teaching writing will feel exciting, and writing lessons will become a highlight of every school day.