Only 27% of eighth graders score proficient or above in writing on the NAEP. That means for every class of 30 students, eight of them can write proficiently. Eight… leaving 22 kids to receive core-level writing instruction when they’re clearly missing the basics.
Without writing fundamentals, our students produce writing pieces that are a few sentences long, contain run-ons, lack sophistication and detail, and keep them restrained to a communication style that’s best used for quick text messages.
If you’ve ever dreaded grading a stack of essays, you’re not alone.
If you’ve ever been frustrated and you’ve thought to yourself, “my students should be able to write better than this,” we hear you and we agree.
The Hidden Crisis
Writing is the subject that requires the highest level of cognitive load from our students, yet it is the subject that is the least explicitly taught.
Cognitive Load – the amount of mental effort or resources required to process information and complete a task using working memory.
The way in which we teach writing is akin to giving a student a violin and asking them to play a song before ever teaching them how to:
- Hold the violin
- Hold the bow
- Play a note
- Learn a scale
- Read music
Yet, we do this in writing instruction every single school year.
We consistently begin our school year by asking our students to write lengthy narrative essays because we’ve bought into the idea that writing about what their own lives will create buy-in for writing.
It’s a well-meaning thought. It’s meant to get students excited about writing and draw them in, but to that I ask, if kids are bought into writing by this, why are our writing scores so dismal?
The way that we teach writing isn’t working.
The Writer’s Workshop Problem
In the late 1960s, Ken Goodman began to challenge sit-and-drill, phonics-based instruction and called for a more immersive approach to literacy which focused on meaning-making, analyzing context, and comprehending texts as a whole – by the 1970s, this movement became known as Whole Language.
The goal of this new type of instruction was for students to learn to read and comprehend through exposure, rather than from structured, sequential instruction that moved students from learning to read (phonics) to reading to learn (comprehension.) Goodman based his type of instruction on how children learned to acquire spoken language, through immersion. Children are immersed in the entirety of language from the moment they are born. There’s no step-by-step instruction or sequential pattern. Spoken language acquisition typically happens all at once, through experience.
Throughout the 1970s, Goodman’s movement gained momentum as educators across the country embraced the message of his well-meaning goal – get kids to love reading through immersion.
Naturally, these goals began to impact writing instruction as well.
In come Donald Murray and Janet Emig.
Murray is known as the father of process writing – otherwise known as, Prewrite, Draft, Revise, Edit, and Final Draft.
Emig’s thoughts on the writing process echoed a similar sentiment: she believed writing to be recursive and continuous. Both of these ideologies are still respected and just as rock solid today as they were 50 years ago, and rightfully so.
The 1980s brought a new voice to the writing instruction scene: Lucy Calkins. Now a well-known and often controversial name in education, Calkins is the creator of the Units of Study and perhaps the most influential proponent of the Writer’s Workshop model.
Writer’s Workshop is a framework where students learn through brief mini-lessons followed by long blocks of independent writing time, peer conferencing, and reflection.
Calkins is the Godmother of Writer’s Workshop. Writer’s Workshop focused on the craft of writing – highlighting the importance of the process and the journey that the writer brings the audience on.
The Workshop Model flipped writing instruction on its head. Instead of sitting through sentence structure and grammar-based writing lessons, students were brought together for mini-lessons. In about 10 minutes, students received instruction on one, usually writing craft-based, lesson. They were then encouraged to return to their seats where they would immediately put this lesson into practice. Once complete, students would pair up, work in groups, or meet with the teacher to review their writing and their classmates.
The journey through the writing process and focus on writing craft was intended to immerse students in writing as if they themselves were published authors working on a piece to turn into a publisher.
Exposing students to the reading comprehension, and essentially, authorship, was meant to turn them into lifelong readers and writers.
As we’ve mentioned before, this progressive instructional practice was done in good-faith. Who would argue that turning students into avid readers and writers was a bad thing?
All was well in the reading and writing world… until it wasn’t.
Reading scores began to slip, and in 1997 the National Reading Panel was created to address these concerns.
By 2000, the National Reading Panel had determined that systematic phonics instruction was necessary for comprehensive reading instruction. This was in clear opposition to the Whole Language movement.
Keep in mind that while reading dominates policy conversation, writing instruction often follows the same patterns, usually as an afterthought.
The Overcorrection
In order to boost reading scores, nationally mandated measures were put in place by both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was implemented by the Bush administration in 2001. It mandated standardized testing and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in math and reading.
Schools that were unable to meet expectations were sanctioned through loss of funding and state intervention.
Needing to meet federal requirements, schools began to “teach to the test.”
Reading instruction became narrowly focused on decoding and comprehension and writing instruction became formulaic, needing to produce results for mandatory essays on the end of the year standardized test.
During this time, we see the sunset of reading for depth and pleasure, creative writing time, and many other activities that were deemed “unaligned” with AYP goals.
We also began to see the rise of scripted and rigid teaching curriculums and the continuation of Balanced Literacy instruction which attempted to, well, balance phonics instruction with comprehension instruction.
NCLB helped prop up the well-intended Balanced Literacy instruction movement. However, schools using Balanced Literacy instruction weren’t seeing any additional meaningful progress than their counterparts.
By 2008, NCLB did not produce any measurable growth in student achievement. Critics argued that it not only failed in outcomes, but also in equity.
The Common Core State Standards were introduced by President Barack Obama in 2010.
The goal was for students to be college and career ready by the time they graduated high school.
First and foremost, it aimed to align instruction across all 50 states. Ideally, 4th graders in Ohio would be learning the same content as fourth graders in Mississippi.
It also shifted reading and writing instruction to a more evidence-based approach. As a nation, we saw a fall off of reading and writing narrative texts and an increase in more informational texts.
The goal? Increase the rigor in schools in order for students to be ready for the real world and be globally competitive.
The “Dawn” of the Science of Reading (and Writing)
Since 2001, the US has been scrambling to raise reading and math scores with neutral results.
The pendulum swing between Whole Language and NCLB/CCSS in the span of 40 years hadn’t yielded much to boast about.
Balanced Literacy’s well-intended initiative checked boxes that required the inclusion of phonics instruction, but blended it with several of Whole Language’s fruitless practices.
In comes the Science of Reading.
Although the research behind the Science of Reading has existed for quite a long time, it isn’t until 2018 that investigative journalist Emily Hanford’s Hard Words podcast, and later her Sold a Story podcast really shine a light on the need for more effective reading instruction.
Beginning in 2019, states like Arkansas, Mississippi, and Colorado begin passing statewide legislation that require systematic phonics instruction and teacher development programs that support SoR aligned instruction.
Mississippi has been the outstanding case for phonics-based instruction as proven by the substantial increase in their NAEP scores after implementation.
We’ve also started to see school districts ditch, and at times, even ban, Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study and Fountas & Pinnell’s literacy and intervention programs.
The purpose of SoR-backed instruction is to re-center the conversation on evidence, brain science, and structured instruction by providing the “how” that both NCLB and CCSS ignored.
So, what does this mean for writing instruction?
From the Science of Reading to the Science of Writing
We know literacy and comprehension are incomplete without writing. Strong writers become stronger readers, and well-read students become more sophisticated writers. Writing slows students down. It forces them to organize ideas, process information, and make meaning in ways that deepen comprehension. In fact, when students write about what they’re learning, their memory and understanding improve. (Graham & Hebert, 2011)
Reading and writing don’t just complement each other, they share a foundation. Orthographic mapping, phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, sentence structure, and working memory demands are at the core of both. But writing goes further; it ups the ante. It calls on students to generate language, not just interpret it, making it one of the most cognitively demanding tasks we teach.
And just as reading comprehension depends heavily on background knowledge, good writing depends on it too.
You can’t write clearly about what you don’t understand.
So if we want to improve literacy outcomes all around, we can’t stop with SoR’s focus on phonics and decoding. We have to start teaching students how to write explicitly, intentionally, and from the ground up.
Fusing SoR and SoW for Real Results
As education has changed over the last 50 years, we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Now it’s time to cherry-pick research-backed instructional practices, combine them, and refine them into a form of instruction that supports the Science of Learning.
Now that we know what works, it’s time to bring it into the classroom, intentionally and systematically. That’s exactly what we do at The Teacher Next Door.
TTND has an immense amount of experience and knowledge with Explicit Writing Instruction.
Reading begins with decoding the words on a page. Writing begins with jotting down a complete thought into a sentence.
Our instruction begins with explicit practice with what a sentence is and isn’t. Many are surprised to learn that we teach this to all writing students, regardless of their grade level.
Why? Because this type of instruction is easily scaffolded for students who are ready for more sophisticated work. Once a complete thought is jotted down, we can teach students how to vary the sentence length, how to add detail, how to manipulate their vocabulary for a particular audience, and how to incorporate sophisticated punctuation and handy tools like appositives in order to keep their audiences engaged.
Sentence-Level Instruction for All
From sentence instruction, we move to paragraph organization. This is done through an ample amount of paragraph exploration and modeling. Surprisingly enough, we hardly write when first learning about paragraphs. We explicitly explore the types of sentences used in paragraphs, why they are organized in the order in which they are, and we dissect well-written paragraphs over and over by color coding them and reverse outlining them. Then, and only then, do we set our pencils free to write.
A Globally Renowned Complete Paragraph Program
Once a solid foundation of paragraph writing is established, we move into essays – keeping the same explicit instruction and exploration of organization, but expanding into the five paragraph structure.
Essay Writing That Makes Sense
We explore informational essays, opinion essays, and narratives in the exact same manner.
And it’s worthwhile to mention, never once do we leave a previously taught skill to die. We are constantly exploring sentences, consistently modeling the same paragraph structure throughout all five paragraphs within our essay, and we’re even injecting lessons on writing craft when students are ready for it.
Effective Writing Instruction Doesn’t Mean Reinventing the Wheel
This is what effective writing instruction looks like.
This is how building a foundation of writing skills benefits reading comprehension.
We don’t keep this in a vacuum. These skills are applied throughout science, social studies, and math in our classrooms, consistently supporting the Science of Learning as a whole.
The Free Explicit Writing Kickstarter Kit by The Teacher Next Door
Too many big-box writing programs ask students to write essays before they know how to write a sentence. It’s backwards, and it’s failing our students. (NAEP scores are showing it.)
The research is clear. When we teach writing explicitly and when we build it step by step – students thrive.
That’s why we created the Explicit Writing Kickstarter Kit, a free 98-page resource to help teachers begin this journey with confidence.
We have the research. We have the tools. Now it’s time to rebuild writing instruction – one sentence, one paragraph, and one confident writer at a time.
