To Boost Learning, Weave Writing Activities Into Regular Instruction

Teaching writing can be a way of teaching, period.

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Weaving explicit writing instruction into class discussion can maximize the benefits of any content-rich curriculum—and help students become proficient writers.

As I mentioned in my last post, I and other advocates of knowledge-building have been accused of completely rejecting reading comprehension strategy instruction. That’s a serious misunderstanding of what we’re arguing for. Any good knowledge-building curriculum puts a text or topic in the foreground but also brings in whatever skills or strategies will help students understand that particular content.

Still, many students will need even more than that to reach their full potential as readers—and learners. That’s where explicit writing instruction comes in. If teachers are using a curriculum that’s rich in content, they can make that curriculum even more effective by incorporating writing strategies into their instruction.

Writing strategy instruction can provide all the benefits of reading comprehension strategy instruction—and more. Sentence-level writing activities can familiarize students with the complex syntax of written language, which can be a significant barrier to reading comprehension. And writing activities can help concepts and vocabulary stick in long-term memory, which enables comprehension and learning in general.

These are potential benefits of writing instruction, but we have plenty of evidence that most students aren’t getting those benefits—and they’re not learning to write well either. That’s not the fault of teachers. Few get good training in how to teach writing, and the instructional materials they’re given generally don’t provide the degree of support most students need to master even the basics of writing.

What’s Missing From Typical Writing Instruction

The usual approaches to writing instruction suffer from two basic flaws. First, they underestimate how difficult writing is for most students. We’ve been expecting kids to just pick up the ability to write if they keep reading and writing enough. Clearly, many don’t.

At the same time, we’ve been making the same fundamental mistake about writing that we do about reading comprehension: that it can and should be taught in the abstract, divorced from any particular content. Schools often have a separate “writing block,” when students may be asked to write about their personal experience or opinions, or about topics in a separate writing curriculum.

The assumption is that if students learn to write an “opinion” or “persuasive” essay on a topic like whether they should get a bigger allowance, they’ll be able to transfer that skill to writing an argumentative essay about, say, the consequences of the Civil War. Writing skills are transferable to some extent, but a student might be able to write a perfectly good essay about why she needs a bigger allowance and still be stymied by the Civil War assignment.

A separate writing curriculum might have its own topics but give students minimal information about each of them before asking them to write about it. As one teacher described the approach to me, “Here’s three paragraphs about insects—now write an essay about your favorite insect.” But three paragraphs might not be enough to enable a student to do that. And even if the writing curriculum provides adequate information, the writing skills—again—might not transfer to other topics.

Plus, having students write about personal experience or about topics in a separate writing curriculum overlooks the finding that when students write about what they’re learning—in any subject—they understand and retain the information better. So why not use writing to help students understand and retain the concepts we’ve determined to be important—in other words, the content of the curriculum in subjects like social studies and science, as well as the content of the texts they’re reading in English language arts?

Integrating Writing Into Instruction and Classroom Discussion

Even when writing is connected to curriculum content, teachers often separate it from instruction and class discussion. In one elementary social studies classroom I visited, students were learning about and discussing one aspect of a topic, but towards the end of class the teacher told students to take out some writing they’d been working on the previous day—about another aspect of the topic—and continue with that independently. That separation between discussion and writing has to happen sometimes, but integrating the two provides a golden opportunity to use writing as a way of turbocharging learning.

Educators who want guidance in how to take advantage of that golden opportunity might be pleased to hear that earlier this month, a new edition of The Writing Revolution was published, called The Writing Revolution 2.0.  I’m a co-author, along with Judith Hochman and Kathleen Maloney.

While the new version is not radically different from the first edition, which came out in 2017, we’ve tried to make it more user-friendly by providing more examples of activities, reordering the sequence in which we introduce some activities, and creating an additional and less challenging outline for multiple-paragraph essays.

Educators might also be interested in a webinar I participated in earlier this month titled “Writing: An Unsung Hero of Reading Comprehension.” Joining me on the panel were Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, and Julia Cooper, who works with schools through an organization called SchoolKit. The discussion was ably moderated by Kristen McQuillan, Chief Program Officer at StandardsWork. If you missed it, you can watch the recording here.

Writing is a complicated topic, and there’s a lot that could be said about it. But what I want to focus on here is the idea that explicit, manageable writing instruction isn’t just a way of teaching writing. It’s a way of teaching, period—which is why teachers should routinely weave it into classroom activities.

After the webinar, Doug Lemov wrote a blog post elaborating on that idea, with videos of a couple of teachers transitioning between writing and class discussion. One of the points Doug makes in his post is that if students write down their thoughts before engaging in discussion, they don’t need to focus on holding those thoughts in their heads. That frees up their cognitive capacity to listen and respond to what their classmates are saying, improving the quality of discussion.

Doug has previously written about this benefit of writing in a post that introduced me to the valuable concept of the Transient Information Effect.

Segueing from Discussion to Writing and Back Again

I would add to Doug’s observations by noting that engaging students in discussion of a topic before having them write can help give them ideas to write about. If they’re not dealing with the heavy cognitive load that writing imposes on inexperienced writers, they’re likely to be better able to brainstorm. Then, after they’ve written, the teacher can reconvene a class discussion that’s informed by what they’ve put down.

I saw this in action in a third-grade class I observed that was reading Charlotte’s Web. The teacher had written questions for discussion on the board: “How is Wilbur different from the other animals on the farm? Why is he different?” When I arrived, a whole-class discussion was taking place. Students offered that Wilbur was the only pig on Zuckerman’s farm, the only runt, the only animal that had previously been treated like a human baby.

The teacher then segued to a writing activity using three conjunctions the class had been working with for several months: because, but, and so. Working individually, students used each of those conjunctions to complete the stem, “Wilbur is different from the other animals on the farm …” After circulating to monitor what students were writing, the teacher led a whole-class discussion based on various answers—displayed on the board—and whether they fit with each conjunction: Was it a reason why (for because)? Did it go in a different direction (for but)? Did it describe a cause-and-effect relationship (for so)?

As with reading comprehension instruction, this activity was asking students to draw connections between different parts of the story and attempting to ensure their overall understanding of the content. But it was doing so in a more powerful way than, say, trying teach the skill of “determining cause and effect” in the abstract, by modeling it through a read-aloud of a text on one topic and then having kids go off to practice the skill independently on other texts on a random variety of topics. At the same time, students were learning how to use conjunctions.

One advantage of using writing instruction in this way is that it reaches every student in the class—not just those who raise their hands to participate in discussion. And it can uncover misunderstandings that a teacher might otherwise miss or not recognize until it’s too late. The teacher I observed noticed that many kids were having trouble using but. One girl, for example, finished her stem like this: “Wilbur is different from the other animals on the farm, but he’s a different animal.”

This provided an opportunity to remind students that they needed to come up with contrasting information for but. And learning how to use but correctly leads to learning how to use a subordinating conjunction like although, which in turn leads, eventually, to learning how to write an argumentative essay. Once students have learned to do things like this in their own writing, they’re in a much better position to understand them when they encounter them in their reading.

How Writing Instruction Can Revolutionize Education

Those familiar with The Writing Revolution method will recognize because/but/so as one of the activities it includes. Other activities also teach what we might think of as comprehension skills or strategies. For example, teaching students how to write a summary sentence is a highly effective way of enabling them to find the main idea of a text.

But that involves more than just telling them to identify the most important information. Many students will struggle to do that, especially if the text is complex. The Writing Revolution teaches students to answer a series of questions about a text—questions like Who/What, (did/will do) What, When, and Where—in note form and then combine their answers into a well-crafted sentence.

A couple of caveats are in order. One is that if a curriculum is thin on content about a specific topic, as many elementary literacy curricula are, students may not have enough information to enable them to write about it. If that’s the case, it’s a sign that the content in the curriculum needs to be supplemented.

It’s also important to bear in mind that to boost learning, writing instruction generally needs to be both explicit and carefully managed so as not to overwhelm students. Just asking readers to write down everything they can remember about a text—a “free recall” approach—has been found to enable college students to recall 81% of the concepts a week later. But when the same experiment was tried with fourth-graders, the results were quite different: they could recall only 10% of the concepts they’d read about.

Why the difference? Probably because fourth-graders, or any inexperienced writers, need to devote so much cognitive capacity to the task of writing itself that they lack the ability to focus on the information they’re writing about. When the researchers provided more support, or less writing, fourth-graders’ recall improved significantly.

Carefully constructed writing activities—along with explicit instruction, repeated practice, and prompt feedback—can modulate the cognitive burden of writing so that students reap its benefits. And from what I’ve seen in classrooms, it’s not an exaggeration to say that weaving those kinds of activities into classroom discussion of rich content can revolutionize education.