How did you learn to read and write? Can you tell a story about your literacy? This is a question I ask my students at the start of each year. Every year, I am struck by the diversity of student responses, as well as the varying levels of enthusiasm for both skills. My own memories of my literacy development are limited, outside of a lot of recollections about my love of reading. I don’t recall much about learning to write, or the writing instruction I had as a child. As a high school student, I had experiences of direct writing instruction, but generally, outside of English classes, teachers assumed that I knew how to write. They weren’t wrong, but in retrospect, I think my development as a writer would have been hastened by more direct instruction within the different disciplines I was writing in.
As a teacher, I’ve been working through the problem of how to teach students to write since the beginning of my career. A book I read around this time, Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher was hugely influential. In it, Gallagher argues that students learn to write best for real-world purposes from reading mentor texts and then writing texts based on models. He makes the case that much of how students are taught to write in school has no real-world application, and that writing instruction should be developed around authentic purposes for writing. For him (following from Reading Rhetorically), these are express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and judge, inquire and explore, analyze and interpret, and take a stand/propose a solution.
Gallagher, and others, – also make the case that teachers are typically the expert writers in the room, so teacher-produced models, are also useful guides for students. Rather than assuming students can already produce the types of texts we want them to produce, Gallagher argues that teachers and students should identify and analyze models of the types of texts that students will produce, and then produce their own versions of these models. I used these strategies to great effect in my English classes in Somaliland, and was proud to see significant development in students’ writing.
Over my first couple of years teaching in Chicago, I went deeper. In addition to models, I was also influenced by a colleague who used graphic organizers to help students develop and structure their ideas. These were effective as a scaffold but also felt limiting. They worked to help students develop and support claims with evidence and reasoning, but instead of inspiring students’ creativity, long-form writing became an exercise in filling out boxes, and the cognitive load of writing was shifted. Students responded to a variety of prompting questions in an organizer, and although the final products were good, they often looked very similar. The boxes of the organizer stifled their creativity and didn’t effectively prepare them to write without them.
Over the last couple years, my teaching has shifted again. I continue to produce, use and analyze model mentor-texts, and often provide some prompting questions for students to consider if they are stuck, but the structure is much more open-ended. Whether we are writing letters to the editor, arguments, analyses and interpretations of arguments, or reflection, I provide a model that we analyze, some prompting questions, some direct instruction on key elements of the assignment, but no graphic organizers. Consequently, student responses are much more interesting, creative, and unique to the students in my class. They are developing their own voices, and where their writing is deficient, I provide feedback and prompting questions for them to consider.
I expect that I will continue to learn and grow as a teacher of writing, but I am happy with the progress I have made as a teacher of writing and have been so impressed with the growth of my students’ writing over the past couple of years.