Writing Strategy

 

 How to Get Students Writing Well

(Originally titled “Writing Is Taught, Not Caught”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, Carol Jago (UCLA) remembers as a young English teacher believing in the field-of-dreams approach to writing instruction: Build it, and they will come. “Many years and many red pens later,” she says, “I know better. If we expect students to learn to write, we need to teach them how.” Some pointers:

            • Provide a substantive stimulus. Jago believes in using novels, poetry, nonfiction, artwork, photographs, and data displays to inspire writing. Here’s how she tackled her “Working” unit:

-    Students wrote for a few minutes about how work affects their lives and the lives of those around them.

-    Students turned and talked with a partner about what they wrote.

-    They looked at Vincent van Gogh’s painting, The Potato Eaters, for two solid minutes and then talked in groups about how work affected the people in the scene.

-    She read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” aloud and had students read it silently, choose lines that were particularly striking, and do a quick-write about them.

-    The class discussed the poem’s comparison of Heaney’s work as a poet and his father’s and grandfather’s work.

-    Students heard Heaney reading the poem: www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177017.

-    Students then read Mike Rose’s 2009 article, “Blue Collar Brilliance: Questioning Assumptions About Intelligence, Work, and Social Class” and analyzed how Rose shapes his argument.

“Only after all this reading, thinking, and talking do students begin crafting their own compositions on work,” says Jago. Here’s her prompt: Summarize the key ideas about work found in the readings and analyze and evaluate those claims, explaining why you agree or disagree with them. Use the readings, class discussion, or your own work experiences and/or research to support your analysis.

            • Have students write frequently. “Most students do not write enough to learn to write well,” says Jago – most students don’t do more than two pages of writing a day in all their classes, and most of this is writing to show what they know rather than writing to learn. (She doesn’t consider tweeting, texting, and Facebook the kind of practice students need to build college-ready skills.) “The only way for a school to ensure that students have enough varied opportunities to write is to make writing an expectation in every class across the curriculum,” she says – in social studies, science, art, etc.

• Give students meaningful feedback. The elephant in the room, of course, is the burden of grading all that writing – but the burden is often self-inflicted. “Too many writing teachers currently confuse their role with that of a copy editor,” says Jago, “correcting every error, turning passive voice to active, and revising long passages of garbled prose… Instead, it’s more helpful to focus on a single aspect of the student paper that needs improvement.” Teachers also need to wade in and transform sloppy thinking into clear thinking.

• Teach the features of good writing. We need to help students become critical readers of their own writing, she says – which means being self-critical and knowing what good writing looks like: not some cookbook formula, but organized, well-developed, audience-aware, and free of mechanical and grammatical errors.

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“Writing Is Taught, Not Caught” by Carol Jago in Educational Leadership, April 2014 (Vol. 71, #7, p. 16-21), http://bit.ly/1iOOLRm; Jago can be reached at jago@gseis.ucla.edu.