Best Practices in Implementing a Process Approach to Teaching Writing

Best Practices in Implementing a Process Approach to Teaching Writing Pritchard & Honeycutt

Important Concepts in Developing a Plan for Writing Instruction • Writing is a cognitive task; it is developmental • Writing is a social act; it moves from egocentrism to larger audiences. • Simply writing or enjoying writing does not in itself lead to improved writing

Overall research finding for process approach: • All stages must be FULLY implemented if students are to build a repertoire of writing strategies. • Students do not benefit from a pick-and-choose approach to teaching writing . • Students do not benefit from a smorgasboard approach, such as using a rubric, but not involving students in understanding and/or creating the features of the rubric. • Students do not benefit from a piecemeal approach, in which writing process instruction is implemented unevenly across time or grade. • Do we teach all facets of the writing process equally at all grade levels? It is not about the TYPE of writing we teach, but about the WAY we teach it.

Process Approach • Is recursive, not linear • Not every pre-writing will lead to a draft • How often do we have students do prewriting for something that does not become a fully-processed essay?

Six Major Lesson Foci • Dealing with emotions that surround writing • Developing students’ understanding of writing process • Modeling and teaching self-regulation processes • Training and monitoring peer response partners and groups • Guiding writing development through targeted strategy instruction that addresses the “features of writing” • Developing a writing vocabulary

Emotional Issues Surrounding Writing • Students need adequate instruction and time to compose in class • Students compose more when they are part of a writing community • This means they experience uninterrupted time for individual practice. • This will reduce some of the stress that fosters negative attitudes • Does our “two fully-processed essays per quarter” create a stressful situation for our students? • Many students who enjoyed writing in their early education end up hating it . Are we contributing to that feeling?

Contributing Factors to Students’ Negative Perceptions of Themselves as Writers • Failure to understand and apply appropriate strategies when composing text • Flawed understanding of the writing process • Confusion about what the assignment is asking them to do (e.g., inability to deconstruct a prompt) • Unfamiliarity with the features of the assigned genre

Writing-on-Demand Tasks • Provide explicit instructions • Practice unlocking writing prompts • Strategies for planning

Celebrate Student Accomplishments!Post, Print, Perform • Class publications • Bulletin boards • Montages • Mobiles • Collections • Author’s Chair • Hall displays • Readers’ Theater

Develop Students’ Understanding of the Writing Process • Demystify the writing process • All writers perform just like professional writers • Utilize a process to develop manuscripts • Go through several stages of revision • Seek responses of others • Edit for errors • Writing is never perfect and is always open to revision

Model and Teach Self-Regulation Strategies • “Self-regulation” in writing = “metacognition” in reading • Monitoring one’s comprehension when writing as well as applying specific strategies to complete an assignment • Students respond to lessons that provide specific strategies for reflection and self-evaluation. • By providing guidelines, teachers can prompt self-evaluation and reward self-reflections about one’s final piece on the evaluation rubric.

Train and Monitor Peer Partners and Peer Response Groups • Researchers attribute the effectiveness of the writing process to the essential practice: • The interaction of writers with teachers and peers during conferences and small-group work. • Writing practice alone does not improve writing • Rather, having writing responded to using specific criteria for response improves writing.

Social Benefits of Peer Groups • Nonthreatening audience • Immediate feedback • Experience of a wide range or writing abilities • Reduced writing apprehension • Development of positive attitudes about writing • Increased motivation to revise • Increased quantity of writing • More teacher time for individual attention • Development of cooperation and interpersonal skills

Targeted Strategy Instruction • Strategy: a series of steps that, when followed, lead most learners to succeed in a given task. • Direct instruction is targeted at identified weaknesses evident in student writing • Best introduced during group mini-lessons based on examples from students’ writing & reinforced in individual conferences

Focus Correction Areas (FCA’s) • Selective approach to correcting student writing • Incrementally introducing controls and constraints in writing • Writers are not overwhelmed during early stages of drafting or in later stages of revision • Teachers select one, two, or three critical problem areas and correct only for those areas • Select areas for an individual, a group, or the whole class

Six Traits of Writing (Spandel & Stiggins, 1997) • Idea and Content • Organization • Voice • Word Choice • Sentence Fluency • Conventions

Idea and Content • Present mini-lessons that model how to move from the basic plan and translate ideas to text • Provide multiple strategies for planning • Teach inductive writing more than deductive • Students who have had practice in inquiry approach do not need to be assigned topics • Middle & high school students benefit from multigenre writing assignments that are less restrictive and allow for creativity

Organization • Problems: • Tickertape writing (list of loosely connected ideas) • Scotch tape approach (ideas are unified but not coherent) • Knowledge telling (author has engaged in little or no planning; text seems to have been quickly drafted, little or no revision or reflection is evident)

Voice • Author’s unique style and personality as reflected in his or writing • Tone • Vocabulary • Syntax • Expression • Imitate the voices of professional writers • Voice and style are intertwined

Word Choice • Vocabulary is best taught in context • Poetry is a great vehicle for teaching word choice • Connotation & Denotation • Impact of word choice on meaning and tone • Language expertise a writer embraces in narrative, poetry, personal, and expressive writing helps with composing OTHER types of writing. You do not learn exposition by writing exposition all of the time.

Sentence Fluency • Direct teaching of grammatical structures should occur after a draft is produced, as part of the revision • Pull out common errors from students’ drafts & develop mini-lessons around them • “We didn’t learn that last year!” (We KNOW they were TAUGHT it) = the need for that skill had not arisen in their writing yet!

Sentence Fluency • Recognize growth (e.g., movement from fragments to run-on sentences) • Honor the new, more sophisticated structure • Use sentences taken from student writing for sentence combining activities • The best lessons are based on sentences derived from students’ writing.

Conventions • Spelling, punctuation, usage, paragraph indentation, etc. • “When asked to read aloud a piece they have composed, students commonly correct their mistakes. Therefore, teachers should not correct their students’ mistakes, but rather point out the general location with a check mark in the margin and have students identify and correct the errors.” • Students should personalize the names of the different types of errors they make and use those manes as part of their composing vocabulary • Students’ awareness in detecting mistakes is increased when they have language that makes sense to describe the errors

Develop a Composing Vocabulary • Parts of speech & structures that are emerging in student writing • Terms used in process approach • Emotional issues (writer’s block, getting stuck) • What happens during process (shaping, looping, cooking) • Features of writing products (active verbs, sensory images, sentence variety)

Conclusion • Student productions should be examined “side by side with analogous professional writing” to teach these six foci. • Skip skill & drill worksheets. Instead, teach mini-lessons & conference individually with students.

Best Practices in Implementing a Process Approach to Teaching Writing