Several dozen elementary school teachers were studying how to develop worksheets to assist youngsters learn to write in a windowless conference room in a Manhattan bookstore on a bright July morning.
Examples of student work were shown by Judith C. Hochman, founder of the Writing Revolution. "Plants need water, and they need sun, too," a first-grader had written, implying that plants require both water and sunlight. By high school, if the student has not learned how to correct pronoun disagreement and missing conjunctions, he may be writing things like this: "Well, machines are good, but they take people's jobs, like if they don't know how to use it, they get fired." That was a genuine entry in the essay section.
Dr. Hochman explained, "It all starts with a sentence."
One method of teaching writing is to concentrate on the principles of grammar. However, it is by no means the most important. Many teachers are more concerned with helping pupils take inspiration from their own life and books than with sentence-level mechanics.
Meredith Wanzer, a high school teacher and instructor with the Long Island Writing Project, was leading a weeklong program for six young females at Nassau Community College, 30 miles away. The goal was to get students ready to write winning college applications essays, a delicate genre that requires a student to highlight her skills (without coming across as egotistical) and present a compelling personal story (without coming off as self-involved).
Ms. Wanzer guided the pupils through a freewrite, a common English teaching approach that involves writing without pausing or judging. She began by reading aloud from Anne Lamott's masterpiece on how to write with voice, "Bird by Bird," which was published in 1995. "When you make space for it, when you halt the chattering of the reasoning mind," says the memoirist, "you have your intuition back." "Rationality wrings out a lot of the rich, delicious, and exciting aspects of life."
Ms. Wanzer then instructed the children to write anything they wanted in response to the Lamott extract for a few minutes. Lyse Armand, a rising senior at Westbury High School, sat her notepad on her lap. She planned to apply to New York University, Columbia University, and Stony Brook University, and she already had a story in mind for her Common Application essay. It might have something to do with her family's evacuation from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake that ravaged the island, she reasoned. But she didn't know where to begin or what she wanted to say.
"What is that voice in my head?" says the narrator. In her answer to Lamott's piece, she wrote: "I'm not in possession of one."
Ms. Wanzer stated that Lyse required a sense of "ownership" over her writing. Lyse's sentence-level skills were excellent. Even when Ms. Wanzer comes across juniors and seniors whose essays are littered with incomplete sentences — which isn't uncommon — she spends as little time as possible on tedious topics like subject-verb agreement. "By exposing kids to excellent writing, you hope they'll begin to hear what's going on."
According to the most current National Assessment of Educational Progress, three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack writing skills. According to the company's research, 40% of those who took the ACT writing exam in the 2016 high school class lacked the reading and writing skills needed to pass a college-level English composition class.
Poor writing, like anxiety over it, is nothing new. In 1874, more over half of Harvard's first-year students failed a written entrance exam. However, the Common Core State Standards, which are currently used in more than two-thirds of states, were supposed to change all of that. The Core asserted a claim for writing as integral to the American curriculum by requiring pupils to acquire three styles of essay writing: argumentative, informational, and narrative. It was a significant shift from the No Child Left Behind era, when the federal statute of 2002 prioritized reading comprehension as measured by standardized multiple-choice assessments.
However, six years after its implementation, the Core hasn't resulted in much quantitative progress on the page.
The Core, however, hasn't resulted in much quantitative improvement on the page six years after its launch. Students who need remediation in basic writing abilities continue to arrive on college campuses.
Educators agree that the root of the problem is that teachers have insufficient training in how to teach writing and are frequently weak or insecure writers themselves. A review of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs, according to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, found no evidence that writing instruction was being taught in a systematic or widespread manner.
A separate 2016 study by Gary Troia of Michigan State University and Steve Graham of Arizona State University of nearly 500 teachers in grades three through eight across the country found that fewer than half had taken a college class that devoted significant time to the teaching of writing, and fewer than a third had taken a class solely devoted to how children learn to write. Given their lack of preparation, it's hardly surprising that just 55% of respondents indicated they enjoyed teaching the subject.
"Most teachers are excellent readers," remarked Dr. Troia. "They've done well in college, possibly even graduate school." However, when you ask most teachers about their writing comfort and experiences, they don't do much or feel at ease with it.
The best approach is the subject of heated debate. Process writing emphasizes activities such as brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one's personal experiences, and peer-to-peer revision, as demonstrated by Lyse's Long Island lesson. Adherents are concerned that putting too much emphasis on grammar or citing sources will suffocate the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as a hobby.
A ninth grader from Staten Island takes a pre-assessment in social studies as part of the Writing Revolution program.
This mindset dates back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement adopted civil rights language, with teachers attempting to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences.
Dr. Hochman's strategy is radically different: a return to the fundamentals of sentence construction, from combining fragments to correcting punctuation errors to learning how to use powerful conjunctive adverbs like "therefore" and "nevertheless," which are common in academic writing but uncommon in speech. After all, the Snapchat generation may create more writing than any other set of kids before it, with numerous text messages and social media posts, but they struggle with the mechanics of simple phrases when it comes to the formal writing expected at school and employment.
According to Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, the Common Core has delivered a much-needed "wakeup call" on the necessity of rigorous writing.
The National Writing Project, which has approximately 200 branches and trains over 100,000 teachers each summer, is one of the major projects. In 1974, at the height of the process-oriented era, the organization was created.
A group of instructors — fifth grade and high school English, social studies, and science teachers — were sharpening their own writing abilities as part of their program at Nassau Community College, in a classroom not far from the one where the teens were working on their college essays. They took turns reading aloud the freewriting they'd done in response to Billy Collins' poem "The Lanyard." The poem, which is both hilarious and sad, is about the futility of trying to repay a mother's love:
She said, "Here is a breathing body with a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world," and "Here is the lanyard I made at camp," I replied.
The majority of the teachers' replies rapidly shifted from praise for the poetry to memories of their own moms, who worked many jobs to make ends meet, or who selflessly cared for grandchildren. It wasn't literary critique at its finest, but that wasn't the objective. One of the main goals of this workshop — the Long Island Writing Project's teacher-training component — was to get teachers writing and rewriting their own work during the summer so that they would be more excited and comfortable teaching the topic to youngsters in the autumn.
Kathleen Sokolowski, the Long Island program's co-director and a third-grade teacher, stated, "I went to Catholic school and we did grammar workbooks and circled the subject and predicate." She found it tedious and believes that she improved her writing skills in spite of, not because of, such sessions.
She would sometimes reinforce grammar by having pupils reproduce a sentence from a favorite book and then analyze how the author utilizes commas, she said. "I had to teach myself to look beyond 'There's no capital, there's no period,' to say, 'By God, you created a lovely phrase," she remarked, when it came to grading student work in general.
Formal grammar training, such as distinguishing components of speech, does not work well, as Mrs. Sokolowski points out. In fact, studies show that children who receive a lot of this type of training do worse on writing tests.
English teachers have taken to a musical approach to writing, in the hopes of training the ear to "hear" flaws and emulate outstanding prose. But what about those pupils who fail to get from reading a beautiful sentence to knowing how to write one? These students are often low-income and have few books at home. Is there a less soul-crushing way of enforcing the fundamentals?
Dr. Hochman of the Writing Revolution uses a slide showing a cute little girl laying blissfully on her tummy, scrawling on a sheet of composition paper, in her teacher training courses.It's the kind of stock shot that's undoubtedly been in a hundred PowerPoint presentations by educators, intended to depict a warm and welcoming learning environment, possibly in one of the cozy writing nooks beloved by process-oriented writing gurus.
"This isn't a good writing position!" exclaims the author. Dr. Hochman squealed with delight. She feels that young children should be able to write at a desk. While she isn't advocating for a return to traditional grammar lessons — she recognizes that sentence diagramming leaves most students confused and disengaged — she does believe that kids should spend time filling out worksheets like the one below, which demonstrates how simple conjunctions like "but," "because," and "so" add complexity to a thought. The root clause is supplied to the students, and they must finish the sentence with a verb.
Because fractions are all portions of wholes, they are similar to decimals.
Fractions are similar to decimals, but are expressed in a different way.
Because fractions and decimals are similar, they can be used interchangeably.
Students learn to recall relevant knowledge from math, social studies, science, and literature along the way. Teachers should be crafting essay questions by middle school that prompt sophisticated writing, rather than "What were the events leading up to the Civil War?" — which could result in a list — but "Trace the events leading up to the Civil War," which necessitates a historical narrative of cause and effect.
"Freewriting," Dr. Hochman told the instructors, many of whom work in low-income areas, "hasn't worked." She believes that children do not learn to write well by recording their personal experiences in a notebook, and she applauds the Common Core's requirement that kids write more about what they've read and less about their own lives.
"I call it a move away from child-centered writing," she agreed, as well as away from what she deems simple assignments like writing a poem "about a particular something they may have witnessed 10 minutes ago out the window."
"I'm not trying to be dismissive," she added, "but every instructional minute has a purpose."
Her training session lacks the pleasure and interaction of the Long Island Writing Project because it focuses on the often tedious task of generating worksheets and writing assignments that reinforce basic principles rather than motivating teachers to write and discuss with colleagues. Nonetheless, many teachers who discover Dr. Hochman's techniques become ardent followers.
Dr. Hochman's explicit and technical approach is appreciated by Molly Cudahy, who teaches fifth-grade special education at the Truesdell Education Campus, a public school in Washington, D.C. She believed it would liberate rather than confine her students' voices. Every pupil at her school comes from a low-income family. "Students don't have the means to put their ideas on paper when we try to undertake creative and journal writing," she explained.
Although there is a dearth of high-quality research on the teaching of writing, studies that do exist point to a few specific strategies that can help students perform better on writing tests. First and foremost, children must learn how to transcribe both by hand and on a computer. Many pupils who can type reams of text on their cellphones, according to teachers, are unable to work efficiently on a laptop, desktop, or even a paper notepad because they've become so accustomed to the little mobile screen. On a smartphone, quick communication virtually forces writers to ignore syntax and punctuation norms, which is exactly the reverse of what is desired on the page.
Children must practice writing outstanding sentences before they can write paragraphs, which is often part of the kindergarten curriculum. Students gain from explicit feedback on their writing at all levels, as well as seeing and attempting to copy what excellent writing looks like, known as text models. Some of the sentimental stuff is also important. Students who are more confident in their writing abilities do better in class.
All of this points to a hybridization of the two approaches. "The students who struggled didn't make any progress" in classrooms where freewriting is used without a focus on transcription or punctuation, according to Michigan State profesSor Dr. Troia. When grammar instruction is separated from the writing process and from complex ideas in literature or science, however, it becomes a chore.
Lyse may be among a small group of students who receive explicit writing instruction due to a lack of adequate teacher training.
Lyse and her classmates went on to analyze real students' college essays in Ms. Wanzer's workshop to determine their strengths and weaknesses. They also read George Ella Lyon's poem "Where I'm From" and used it as a text model for their own work. Lyse wrote her own version of "Where I'm From" to help her remember details from her Haitian childhood.
"I am from the rusty little tin roof house, from hand washing and line drying," Lyse wrote. It was a lovely sentence, and she was well on her way to writing an effective college application essay.
0 Comments