S5 E4 - Help! My Students Aren't Writing Enough!

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Hello there, my name's Jocelyn and I'm so pleased to welcome you to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, the place where we talk all things literacy and the nuances of bringing structured literacy to life in our classrooms. This podcast episode is recorded in Burnie, Tasmania, on the lands of the Palawa people.

They're Not Writing Enough

It is a really common worry for us to be concerned that our students aren't writing enough, and I recall very clearly times in my own teaching when I had this worry. So I'd like to start this episode by sharing a little bit of a cringy story about what I did when I was worried that my students weren't writing enough, and this was before I came to understand about a structured approach to writing.

Now it's worth noting that I was Mrs Structured Literacy for reading, absolutely. We had ditched the PM benchmarks in my school. We had a systematic synthetic phonics program happening. We had really robust text-based units focused on reading. But for writing, I personally was still living in a little bit of whole language balance literacy land, where I just didn't know what to do, I kind of knew that just immersing children in writing experiences wasn't going to get it done, but at the same time I didn't know what to do instead.

My Story

So when I was concerned that my Year Two to Six students weren't writing enough, we went for a visit to a local school, and what that school was doing at the time was they had this daily writing procedure where they'd put a prompt up on the board and the students had these writing books and they had manila folders that were sort of stuck together to be a bit of a visual barrier between each child. But also it contained sight word lists and word banks and all sorts of apparently useful things. And when we went to visit, all the children were very enthusiastic and the teachers talked about how amazing this was. And of course, as we all are, we're a little bit dazzled by what we perceive to be amazing practice in another school.

So we went back to our school and implemented what we called 30 Days of Writing, because I thought, wow, if we give children motivation by giving them something they're interested in writing about, then if they just practice writing about what they care about, their writing will improve. So we printed out literally hundreds of pictures from the internet. We had the children make a lovely cover in art for their writing book. I bought them sparkly and amazing pencils because apparently that helps you be a better writer. And even as I share this with you, I know how ridiculous this sounds, but I want you to know that developing pedagogy, developing understanding, happens over time. So every day we had the students choose an image and stick it in their book, that was their writing stimulus, and they got to write about whatever they wanted that related to that image.

Now the students who were already strong writers, the students who already loved writing, they thought it was the best thing ever.

The students who couldn't write, who didn't know what to say, who didn't really know how to get sentences onto the page properly, for them, 30 Days of Writing was 30 Days of Torture.

And my hypothesis that having something to write about that they cared deeply about would improve their writing? Well, guess what? That didn't work. So the kids who could write, they were writing more. And the students who couldn't write well, guess what? They didn't get any better at writing after this 30 days.

And so I looked at the results of this and evaluated the impact of the instruction and realised that it was kind of a bit of nonsense.

And then the thought struck me: What if we teach writing with the same rigour and approach as we teach reading? I wonder if that will make a difference? And guess what? It did.

The Moral of the Story

So sometimes you have to go through these experiences of trying something out and realising that it didn't get me where I wanted to go, so it's time to adjust course. One of the things that was tricky for me to overcome in this whole my students aren't writing enough journey was that I had a perception that it was only quality writing if they were writing multi-paragraph genre pieces. And so I didn't see, because that was my perception of great writing, I didn't see the opportunities that were in front of us all through the day, every day.

Before we get there, I would like to just take a pause for a second and talk about the necessary prerequisites for strong writing.

The Prerequisites

Now, research is really clear on this point that students need to have automatic, effortless handwriting or letter formation, and spelling also needs to be automatic and reasonably effortless.

If every time I go to write the letter D, I do it in a different way, and every word I want to write, I have to sound it out and give all this conscious thought to what the graphemes might be, then I'm not going to be able to produce anything decent in my writing, because all of my cognitive energy is going into that, and it doesn't matter whether you're teaching Year One, Year Four, Year Six or Year Ten, this is true.

It is widely accepted that we can only consciously focus on one thing at a time, and this is what the research tells us: one thing at a time. So if I'm wobbly on my letter formation, I'm wobbly on my spelling, I don't quite know how to construct a sentence because I don't speak the way that school language asks me to, and most of our students don't, we know that writing and speaking are different, they just are. So the sentence structures that we use, the levels of formality in language, they change between speaking and writing. So if all of that is effortful, I have no cognitive energy left over to spend thinking about what I'm going to say and in crafting great text.

So I'm going to say that again: handwriting and spelling must be automatic, and when it comes to sentences, Steve Graham says that sentence production must be fluent. And we're not talking about automaticity in sentence writing, because the construction of language is a cognitive process. If it's automatic, you're not giving any thought to it, but it has to be fluid. I have to be able to get sentences on the page.

Have Them Speak

But before I'm able to get sentences on the page, I have to be able to produce it orally. So if I can't say it, I can't read it or write it.

And one of the missing pieces of this 30 Days of Writing that I was asking my students to do was that there was no opportunity for idea development. There was no opportunity to talk with a partner and practice the words that I wanted them to write beforehand. So that's one of my key takeaways when it comes to writing: before you get children to write anything, have them speak. Have them talk to a partner, and there's lots of different structures you can use around this.

Explicit Teaching

So close on the heels of this automaticity and fluency business is that everything you want your students to produce in writing has to be explicitly taught. Saying, "Oh, today we're going to write a letter," that's great, and if you have grown up writing letters to people, that won't feel like an issue to you. But this generation of children? They don't write letters. They don't understand the greeting at the start, Dear such and such. They don't understand that you then drop a line. They don't understand how to structure a letter and the language features of it.

So next time you think, oh, we'll get the students to write, I would really, really like it if you would just pause and ask yourself this question, Do my students know how to do this and How do I know?

When I'm working with teams and I'm coaching them and I'm doing consultancy within the school, teachers will often say, Oh, yes, yes, the students know that, and my number one question to them is How do you know? Now, very often, the answer is, Well, it was in last year's scope and sequence, so they know how to do that. No. There's a big difference between we did some lessons in letter writing and the students know how to write a letter. So that's the first thing. Just because we taught it or we did it, it doesn't mean they learned it. So it's worth taking a moment to really have a look and make sure that when you ask children to do something on their own that you know they know how to do it.

Other Ways to Write

So I mentioned this misconception that I had back way when that the only valid, meaningful form of writing was that multi-paragraph genre level text. Well, there are other ways to have children write, and this is the one of the things that I have discovered in the years between then and now.

So other forms of writing that are perfectly valid and important, that you can be including, are:

• Writing a response to a learning situation or prompt
• Summarising the main points of a lesson
• Doing a bit of a brain dump: what is it that I now know about this thing?

There's strong evidence to indicate that writing about learning does two things. One of the things it does is it improves the quality of students' writing. The second thing it does is that it improves the recall and learning of the content of the lesson. So you get bang for your buck in that practice writing about learning. You can look it up and just Google "writing about learning, Steve Graham". So summarising the main points of a lesson or a piece of text you've just read is a great way to improve writing and comprehension and, of course, short answer questions are great as well. Now, this sits across the curriculum.

So here's another key point about increasing the amount of time that your students are spending writing. Spread the writing across the curriculum and across the day. When we ask the literacy block to do all of the heavy lifting, we're setting ourselves and our students up for failure, because there is no way you can get an hour a day or 40 minutes a day of writing time into every single literacy block. It just can't happen, and what you end up doing is saying, well, we have to do 40 minutes or an hour of writing, so let's just set the timer and let them have at it. If you spread it across curriculum areas throughout the day, you're breaking that writing up into shorter chunks so that students can increase their fluency.

The other thing you can do when we're thinking about writing from a cross-curricular perspective is be really intentional about how you use that precious instructional time within the literacy block. Teach about a text type within the literacy block. That's your text-based unit, you're being really intentional about what you're teaching. And then plan for meaningful application in the other curriculum areas. So if you want your students to consider adaptations, say, that plants and animals have within the world, and you want them to write about that as part of their assessment plan, to teach about the structure and features of information report in your text-based unit. We're not trying to teach the science in the English and the English in the science, but we're being really clear about where am I teaching students about and to use and where are the opportunities for meaningful application? Now that meaningful application will strengthen learning because they are consolidating and applying. It's almost a form of retrieval, if you like, that's being used in a really meaningful, robust and suitably complex way.

So we worry our students aren't writing. In the early years, this has sometimes been a top-down expectation.

So we have had in the past, and it may still be a thing in your school, that at the end of Term One of Foundation we're having a writing moderation. And my question around that is, moderation of what? These students don't even know all of their phonemes. They don't have phoneme-grapheme correspondence and probably don't have the phonemic skills to independently segment and write a word. What exactly is it that we are supposed to be moderating? So what do we do? We have the children tell us something and we scribe it on a board and we have them copy it. It's just useless and we all know this.

Us early years teachers who have had to do that have thought, wow, this doesn't make any sense at all. So for me, the point at which we can expect children to produce meaningful writing is when they are able to reasonably automatically sound out and write words with three and four phonemes. Until they can do that, they can't write a sentence, and the sentence is the first real meaningful word kind of writing they're going to do. So until they're able to segment and independently write words, we're not expecting it from them. And the same goes for those older students, and I've certainly met students in Years Five and Six with virtually no phoneme-grapheme correspondence knowledge and very, very weak phonemic processing. Now what I will also say is that with some targeted teaching, those kids actually picked up what they needed. But they didn't pick it up, did they? They learned it. They learned what they needed and away they went.

But if we do have older children whose transcription skills are weak, who are at a very different point from what the student could produce orally, we do need to have an adjustment for assessment. And so you can use an iPad, a computer, the students can use speech to text and all of those things. So just because the child can't write it doesn't mean we assume that they don't know it. So be realistic about the level of transcription you're expecting for the age group of your students. Be mindful of what the curriculum is asking for.

Now, frustratingly, the Australian Curriculum and the Literacy General Capabilities are not detailed in how much text is expected at different ages. So that one, I think, go to the team, have a discussion, what do you think? It does tell you how many ideas. So three ideas, and it's sensible to think that that's three paragraphs. But get consensus amongst your team about what level of text in terms of the length that we're looking for. But we have to provide adjustment for students if they're not able to transcribe or get words onto the page in a way that matches their grade.

Recap

So let's have a recap of what I've talked about in this episode. The first thing is that text level or multi-paragraph text level, genre writing is not the only meaningful piece of writing that you're going to ask your students to do. Right across the curriculum you can be asking them to respond to learning, to summarise, to record ideas. So don't make the literacy block do all the heavy lifting. Be intentional about what you're teaching in the literacy block and how you are going to have students use what you're teaching in meaningful context to produce those multi-paragraph genre level texts in those other curriculum areas. You can expect it if you've taught it. And finally, remember, for great writing to happen, the students need the prerequisite skills of automatic spelling, automatic handwriting and fluent sentence production.

I hope that today's episode has helped ease your worry about how do we increase the level of writing that students are doing or the number of minutes students are spending writing. It is a common worry. Let's just get Mildred, that voice that lives in our head and tells us we're not doing enough. Let's just tell her, Mildred, it's not time for you to help now. We're going to take a common sense approach to getting our students spending more time in writing and getting better at their writing as we go.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that it's been useful. I will see you next week. Thanks everyone, happy teaching. Bye.

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