Teaching Writing

My friend Julia has been reading one of my teaching journals aloud to me, because I wanted to refresh my memory about that particular year. I wrote a reflective journal most days for every year I was in the classroom. I used lesson plan books, which have boxes with lines for six periods, which is how most secondary schools have their schedules, six periods per day. My writing  had to be tiny to fit into the boxes. Julia has to use the magnifying glass and the flashlight on her phone. 

I would never be able to read it on my own. I even have trouble reading things on my device, because since my ALS has become advanced, I have trouble reading words on the left side of the screen. That’s why I prefer audio books and podcasts. 

But I digress. The second half of the journal, meaning the second half of the year, focused on writing. For more years than I would like to admit, I thought the way to teach writing to a whole class–as opposed to one student at a time– was to give everyone a graphic organizer, like the one below for argumentative writing: 

I may have modeled filling out the graphic organizer. As you can imagine, it didn’t work very well for most students. The ones who grasped the concept just wanted to write, and those who didn’t, gained no help from the graphic organizer. I always ended up making many comments on the finished drafts, and the students would never transfer my comments to subsequent writing assignments. 

Two things happened to change my method of teaching writing. One was when I transferred to the Highline School District. There I had a literacy coach, Mary Edwards, who vastly improved my practice in many ways, including introducing me to the “green book,”. That’s what we called a book published by Teacher’s College, Columbia University, that was filled with detailed scripted lesson plans with accompanying resources. With Mary’s help, I implemented an editorial writing unit, and started with having the kids read a bunch of editorials, and I modeled identifying various techniques that the writers used. I conferred with each student about what they were trying to do. This process was much more productive than graphic organizers.  

The second thing that pushed me to change my teaching of writing was the book Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop  by Katie Wood Ray. The premise of Study Driven is that students need immersion in the type of the writing that they are going to do. The examples need to be published pieces. 

I realized I already knew this from my own writing. When I wrote an article for Educational Leadership about my experience teaching for the first time in a high needs school, I first read several published articles about teaching. 

So, from then on, I structured writing units with immersion as the first step. When my ninth graders wrote their own Odysseys, we went back and studied how Homer began the Odyssey. When my eighth graders wrote biographies of someone in their family, first we read short biographies (picture books) of famous people. It made a vast difference in the quality of their writing. 

A few years later, another book revolutionized my writing instruction. It was An Ethic of Excellence, by Ron Berger. Berger describes a process that begins with students familiarizing themselves with the qualities of excellence in whatever they are going to make. Then the students do a first draft of the project, participate in feedback groups (after extensive modeling and whole class practice), and then repeat those steps until the student is satisfied that they have achieved excellence. (If you would like to see an inspiring example of this process, watch Austin’s Butterfly.) 

Joshua, my teaching partner at Highline Big Picture School, and I implemented that process with nearly everything the kids worked on. With writing, it was a perfect fit with what I was already doing with immersion. I had extensive experience with teaching how to frame feedback from my years as a facilitator of professional learning groups with other teachers. The immersion/identifying qualities of excellence and the multiple rounds of drafting and feedback, together with conferring with more experienced writers – either me or one of the volunteers I often had for big writing projects – was magical in improving student writing. Beyond that, it fostered a culture of multiple drafts. After all, that’s what professional writers do. 

I’m fortunate that I enjoy writing, because it’s the only creative endeavor I can do since I lost the use of my hands. When I decided to create a blog, I first read blogs from other people living with ALS. I learned that their blogs typically include a post about their diagnosis process, so I wrote one early on. I always write multiple drafts, and Barry gives me feedback until I’m satisfied that the post is ready to publish. The one thing I can no longer do regarding writing is teach. I miss it very much.