Which elements do you believe are crucial for successful writing interventions in the classroom, and why?
Graham (2020) recommends adding writing time into the week to improve written output. It improves writing quality by 10-12% at the elementary level. There is no comparable studies done at the secondary level, but Dr. Graham expects that it is the same. I added quite a bit of writing time to my English 9 classes this year, and I really saw the dividends at the end of the year. They improved enormously in their writing ability, and I felt confident that I was sending strong, clear writers off to high school. I do not have an hour a day for students to write, as Graham recommends, but they at least write for some period a day. I am hopeful that students spend time in their other classes writing, but I don’t hear that they really do. I am interested in spending more time having students doing analysis and interpretation in their writing, as Graham recommends. I definitely have students do this kind of writing, but I’d like to deepen that practice next year. I would also like to spend more time teaching writing strategies for regulating the writing process, rather than just explaining and modelling. I have to think more deeply about how to teach the strategies in ways that are not just posting, explaining, and modelling. I was reflecting on some of the strategies I teach. I try to teach planning out essays using the PEEL method for paragraphs, and I teach editing explicitly, over and over, using a checklist that they can work through.
Which strategies resonated with you, and how might you incorporate them into your teaching practice? Are there specific examples or case studies that stood out to you?
I have been thinking about how I would like to spend more time writing examples with the kids, and sharing my poetry and essay writing in order to demonstrate writing through guided practice. This would work well with the gradual release model Graham talks about, and which we are all familiar with. Graham suggests that we go beyond modelling, and ensure that students are able to independently practice the strategies. I would like to teach sentence construction skills, as Graham recommends. I try to emphasise for students that they should vary their sentence structure, but I am not sure that I am effective enough. I’d like to build their capacity for this through repeated practice and repeated feedback. I’d like to encourage students to apply more complex sentences in their own writing. I have not spent a lot of time on vocabulary teaching previously, and felt validated in that in earlier readings for my course that showed that vocabulary instruction was only effective for words that would then be read contextually, and that vocabulary instruction in general was not effective. Graham emphasized again that vocabulary should be taught within context, which I can look at doing more. I think that I do it off the cuff, when we read a word that the students aren’t familiar with, but I can probably integrate it more intentionally next year. I’d like to build in more opportunities for feedback, and ensure that I spend time giving prompt feedback. I appreciate that Graham talks about limiting feedback, because it can be discouraging and make kids shut down. I have always taken this very seriously, and have tried to be cautious with my feedback. I never use red pens, and I try to focus on specific patterns in each assignment. I am going to think seriously about how he asks us to say, “I liked how you did this,” and try to integrate more positive feedback like that into my responses. I LOVE self-assessment, and think that it is incredibly important within our curriculum, and think that it is critical for students’ self-awareness and personal growth. I love that Graham encourages self-assessment as a way to build students into self-aware critics and analysts. I would really like to get better at providing clear writing goals. I think that, in everything, I am too vague and open-ended, currently. I need to build in more clarity for students so that they know what they are doing and feel mastery over their process, and can get into more of a flow state. Given my general focus on developing self-aware writers, I like the idea of encouraging students to set their own goals, possibly through beginning with giving them a range of goals that they choose one or two from. I like the idea of having peers work together over process. I think that I would have to work to build this capacity up, but that it would be very worthwhile. Graham notes that we need to provide guidance and instruction in how to work together, which I definitely agree with. I like that Graham worked directly on building up feedback ability with a reluctant student. I think that I should likely work to do this with reluctant students with feedback. I like the idea of connecting writing with reading more. I tried sometimes to teach students to think like writers, and analyse materials that we read for how the writer made choices and structured things, but I think that I could go deeper with this, and be more intentional with it. I’d like to keep using model texts to scaffold student writing. Overall, I love the idea of creating supportive writing environments where students can take risks. We want to encourage students to become self-reliant, and make sure that we nudge students to do what they can do themselves, while still being sensitive to the individual needs of kids. I love the emphasis on creating a community of writers and learners. This is very much what I strive to do, and I think something that I accomplish each year. Community-building is what I am best at as a teacher. I would love to also integrate myself into that community by sharing more of my own writing with the students.
I like the idea of explicitly teaching notetaking, as I find that my students are very hopeless about taking notes, and have not been taught or done notetaking by the point they get to me in ninth grade. I think that it is a good way to integrate reading and writing, and to ensure that students analyse what they are reading. It elevates their reading experience, and helps to cement the ideas into their understanding and memory. I could certainly spend more time teaching this next year. When I was in university, I remember that my professors emphasised the importance of hand-written notes for retention. I at that point used the Cornell style of notetaking, which is a beautifully laid out way of structurally scaffolding notetaking for students. I may try to explicitly teach Cornell notetaking in upcoming years, as it was so helpful for me in university classes. I really, really love the idea of pausing during notetaking for reflection and revision. I feel like this would be incredibly effective for encouraging metacognition and for helping to synthesize the information. I also love teaching summary writing, as I know, from my own experience, that this is an effective way for students to increase their reading comprehension and to better understand text. I teach my ninth graders how to summarize readings, and that doing so is an effective way to approach text. I also like the push for rereading when summarizing. This is also something that I explicitly teach both my English and resource students.
Reading and writing are so interrelated that improving one tends to improve the other. I like that Flanigan and Hayes (2023) showcase asking students to look at how sentences are composed and constructed. I think that reading like a writer is a key strategy that we need to teach our students in order to encourage them to become self-aware, reflective writers. Writing can “foster a personal involvement with text,” as students must integrate the text’s ideas with their own ideas about what is important (Flanigan & Hayes, 2023, p. 190).
Immediate feedback is essential in allowing students to integrate the feedback suggestions into future work, and to connect commentary to their recent thinking. I like the idea of explicitly teaching signal words to make connections between ideas. I think that this would also be helpful for a lot of my students who struggle to write connected text.
I am very interested in teaching Cornell notetaking next year, especially when I return to teaching social studies, where I think that it will be even more relevant. I love the idea of incorporating visuals with the notetaking, as I think that this will especially appeal to some of my artistic, creative students who don’t generally excel with writing. I always try to make assignments as open-ended and universal as possible, so this would be a nice adaptation. I am very interested in working more next year to teach students to deconstruct sentences and writing, and to think of how the writing is shaped, in order to better inform their own writing. I think that this is elegant and effective, and I look forward to better integrating it into my teaching.
I think that the collaborative, evidence-based approach is the best for students and allows for optimal learning and encourages success. I don’t think that we always get to this, especially at the middle school level, when teaching is more fragmented—students have more teachers with different goals, understandings, and perspectives, and they are less likely to know the student’s abilities deeply. IEPs tend to be more general and strategies and adaptations are not applied as carefully and intentionally.
I find that most of these strategies could and should be applied to all learners, not just to struggling writers. So, I feel like they are universally helpful. I can see a potential roadblock being that teachers at the middle school level do not always have time to plan strategies and adaptations in as much detail as seen in this article, given that they frequently have around 150 students. I hope that learner support teachers and literacy teachers might be able to work on helping develop the plan and strategies for students to help make this work, as it really does seem wonderful for everyone!
References
Flanigan, K, & Hayes, L. (2023). Literacy intervention in the middle grades: Word learning, comprehension, and strategy instruction, grades 4-8. Guildford Press.
Graham, S. (2020). Research-based best practices to improve secondary writing instruction. Write Center. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgBHWp4\MNTY