Indiana University Southeast Writing Project

The seven conditions for effective writing. Written by, Donald Graves. Buy A Fresh Look at Writing. Click Here for Amazon.

I‘ve often been asked, “What is your method for teaching writing?” I think in my earlier books I tried to respond to the question by giving specific instructions—first this, then that. Granted, there are some systematic and highly structured elements to teaching writing, but I didn’t realize until I wrote the introduction to Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle that good writing doesn’t result from any particular methodol­ogy. Rather – the remarkable work of her students was a result of the conditions for learning she created in her classroom. This chapter is intended to give you an overview of the conditions that encourage good writing (most of them will be explored in greater depth in sub­sequent chapters).

Time

My best recollections of learning to write are connected to the “theme a week” in junior and senior high school. The essay was due on Friday and that ruined my Thursday evenings. I moaned, I struggled, I asked my parents for help, but most of all I procrastinated. Only the late night tenor and embarrassment of having nothing but a blank paper to hand in to my teacher the next day coaxed words onto the page.

But people don’t learn to write that way—at any age. Fifteen years ago students wrote an average of one day in ten. By “write,” I refer to compositions in which the student presents new ideas on a specific topic. Although the amount of writing has increased in recent years, we are a long way from having both the time and necessary condi­tions that make it possible for our students to learn to write.

Professional writers experience near panic at the thought of missing one day of writing. They know that if they miss a day it will take enormous effort to get their minds back on the trail of productive thought, it is extremely inefficient to miss a day. In addition, as our data on children show, when writers write every day, they begin to compose even when they are not composing. They enter into a “constant state of composition”

A fashionable educational dictum these days is “time on task.” We look to see if every child’s mind is on the book, on the paper. We want to see minds engaged, pencil and pens moving across the paper. What we don’t consider is the most significant “time on task” of all, what students choose to do beyond the walls of the school. Only when chil­dren read and write on their own because they have experienced the power of literacy can we speak of the significance of time on task.

If students are not engaged in writing at least four days out of five, and for a period of thirty-five to forty minutes, beginning in first grade, they will have little opportunity to learn to think through the medium of writing. Three days a week are not sufficient. There are too many gaps between the starting and stopping of writing for this schedule to be effective. Only students of exceptional ability who can fill the gaps with their own initiative and thinking, can survive such poor learning conditions. Students from another language or culture, or those who feel, they have little to say are particularly affected by this limited amount of time for writing.

When a teacher asks me, “I can only teach writing once a week. What kind of program should I have?” my response is, “Don’t teach it at all. You will encourage poor habits in your students and they will only learn to dislike writing. Think of something you enjoy doing well; chances are you involve yourself in it far more than one or two times a week.

How well I remember the seventh-grade students I had in my first year of teaching. I taught writing once a week on Friday afternoons— just as I had been taught in public school and at the university all my teaching was compressed into that one day, and that meant that I had to correct every error on student papers. Today I know that correcting errors is not teaching. Teaching requires us to show students how to write and how to develop the skills necessary to improve as a writer. And showing students how to write takes time. They need daily writ­ing time to be able to move their pieces along until they accomplish what they set out to do.

ACTION 7.1:

Examine the amount of time your students have for writing. Rethink the way time is used in your classroom in order to have at least four days a week when they can write.

If you have trouble finding time, consider some of the following ways of carving out the necessary block of writing time:

• Bring handwriting, spelling, and language skills into the writing block. You will be able to teach these subjects through mini-lessons. (See Chapter 12 for further help in this area.)

• Start the day with writing. The minute children come into the classroom in the morning, have them get out their writing folders and start to write. I find that a great deal of time is wasted in handling lunch money, taking atten­dance, and attending to other daily matters those students should learn to take care of themselves

• If you have a departmental structure and students change classes, then time is certainly at a premium. In this case have students pick up their folders and begin writing the minute they enter the classroom.

• Combine the teaching of reading and writing into a ninety minute language block These two subjects ought to be taught together since each contributes so much to the development of the other.

• For older students, combine the teaching of literature with writing. This works particularly well if students learn to read as writers read. (See Jane Hansen’s When Writers Read, Donald Murray’s Read to Write, and my five book series, The Reading! Writing Teacher’s Companion.)

Unless you are able to find time for students to write, there is little this book can do to help you to assist your students in learning what writing can do.

Choice

Children need to learn how to choose their own topics when they write. When I began teaching, I wanted my students to have chal­lenging, morally uplifting topics, so I assigned them. I thought I knew what would engage students’ minds. How well I remember the moment every Friday when my seventh grade students returned from lunch. Behind the Denoyer-Geppert map of the Soviet Union I had written the topic of the week—something like “Should there be capital punishment?”— on the chalkboard. To make it more chal­lenging and increase the dramatic tension, I would suddenly release the catch on the map, which would roll up to reveal the topic for the week. My students had no chance to read, interview, or gather mater­ial, to do what professional writers do before writing. I invited poor writing, and, got it. I should have realized how confused my students were when one asked, “Does this mean we capitalize everything?”

Several years later I moved into what I call my “creative phase” in teaching writing. I still assigned topics, but this time they were intended to release the spontaneity of students’ minds. I had the stu­dents write on topics like “If I could fly,” “If I were an ice cream cone or a baseball glove,” “If this glove could talk, what would it say?” I thought the writing they produced was cute, artsy, imaginative. It wasn’t. It was gushing and nonspecific. Worse, it had little to do with what writing is for: to help students learn to think through the issues and concerns of their everyday lives.

When students write every day they don’t find it as difficult to choose topics. If a child knows she will write again tomorrow – her mind can go to work pondering her writing topic. Choosing a topic once a week is difficult. The moment for writing suddenly arrives, and the mind is caught unprepared.

How well I remember Amy, a fourth-grade youngster in our research project in Atkinson, New Hampshire. The researcher, Lucy Calkins, kept asking this remarkable young writer how she wrote but got little response. Finally, Amy announced that she knew how she wrote: “Last night I was sitting in bed wondering how I would start my fox piece. But I couldn’t come up with anything. My cat Sidney, sat on the bed next to me. I said, “Sidney, how am I going to start my fox piece?” but I still couldn’t come up with anything. Finally, at about 10:30, my sister came home and turned on the hall light. Now over my doorknob there is a round hole where you’d have a turnlock. When my sister turned on the hall light a beam of light came through the hole and struck Sidney in the face and Sidney went squint. Then I knew how I would start my fox piece.” The piece goes something like this: ‘There was a fox who lived in a den beneath a stump. At midday a beam of light came through a crack in the stump and caught the fox in the eyes and the fox went squint’. That’s how I knew I’d start my fox piece.”

Here is a child in a constant state of composition: she knew that tomorrow she would write (time) and that she could write about the fox (choice of topic). The time she devoted to pondering the best lead for her piece was time well spent

When children choose their own topics, I can expect more of their writing. “What did you set out to do here? Did you have an audience in mind for this?” From the beginning in our conference I can focus my questions on their initiative and their intentions. I am reminded of how important it is that a writer choose his own topic by Donald Murray’s recent workshop experience at a New Hampshire confer­ence. The workshop participants sent Murray out of the room while they chose a topic for him to write about When Murray returned they announced their decision: “Write about your favorite place in New Hampshire.” Murray began writing on the chalkboard: he wrote sev­eral leads, erased them, began again, made some notes, started again. Finally, he turned to the group and announced, “I can’t write this piece; I have no favorite place in New Hampshire.”

Murray could have produced a false choice or decided, although he had never thought about it before, on a favorite place in New Hampshire. But as a professional, he knew that dishonest writing is not good writing. How easy it is to teach our students to write dishon­estly to fulfill curriculum requirements. Indeed, a student’s entire diet from first grade through high school can be a series of one dishonest piece after another. Sadly, the student can even graduate without learning that writing is the medium through which our most intimate thoughts and feelings can be expressed.

Although students can choose a topic for most of their writing, they are expected to write. They must produce. Sometimes topic assignment is helpful and even necessary. Students do make bad choices and expe­rience writer’s block, or they need to shift to new topics after exhausting their usual few. When you show students how to “read the world” by writing with them, you also demonstrate how to deal with many of these issues. You may even find it useful to ask students to assign you a topic in order to show them how you work on assignments. -

Response

It is important that you take children’s choices seriously. Your response to a child’s text helps him to realize what he set out to do when he started to write. When I began to teach—and for many years afterward—I only responded to students’ work when they had fin­ished writing. At that point I corrected their papers and made a few comments lauding or condemning what they’d written. But that wasn’t teaching, and what is worse, I was the only person responding to their texts. The students wrote for me, and only me.

Students need to hear the responses of others to their writing, to discover what they do or do not understand. The need to help stu­dents know how to read their own work and the work of their class­mates provides further teaching and demonstration opportunities (see Chapter 2.3).

How well I recall my first attempt to initiate peer response in my seventh-grade classroom. I simply said, “Okay, I want you to exchange papers and respond to each other’s work. Listen carefully, take the paper back, and return to your writing.” What I got was a massive blood-letting: first wails, then silence. My students went into shock. Their responses were not helpful. At the time I couldn’t under­stand why peer-response didn’t work. In retrospect, I realize that they responded to each other as I responded to them—with nit-picking criticism. My approach in those days resembled an old-time, New England hell, fire, and brimstone method; I tried to stamp out the sin of error.

My first response to student work comes in the form of short con­ferences (see Chapter 5) as I move around the classroom during writ­ing time. Each class session I rove among the desks, connecting with perhaps six to ten students while they are engaged in writing. Stu­dents axe constantly writing; as soon as they finish one piece they begin mother. Some may be just starting to write, while others are beginning a second draft, and still others are considering final copy. I recognize that since students are constantly writing, it is not possible to respond to all of their work. I keep careful records on which stu­dents I visit so that each student, over time, gets a response.

At the end of each class, time is set aside for sharing students’ writing and their learning experiences during their writing. One or two students share a piece while the rest of the class listens carefully, first stating what they have heard and remembered from the piece, then asking questions to learn more about various aspects of the piece. This general sharing can also include talk about practices that worked and those that didn’t, new verbs, quick profiles of the genres in which children are writing, and brief introductions to fictional char­acters. This end-of-class experience reaffirms the essential conditions for writing: in this class we experiment and learn.

Demonstration

You, the teacher, are the most important factor in creating a learning environment in the classroom. Your students will observe how you treat writing in your own life, how you learn, and what is important to you through the questions you ask of the world around you. How you demonstrate values, how you knowledgeably show the meaning of writing as a craft will have a profound effect on their learning.

When I began teaching, I didn’t show my students how to work with their writing. I merely corrected. I didn’t know any other way. When you actually take your own text and put it on the chalkboard, an overhead projector, or experience chart paper, and show your stu­dents how you read it, they will receive the clearest demonstration of what writing is all about. (Chapter 13 will discuss in greater detail how to demonstrate reading writing with your students.)

Students can go a lifetime and never see another person write, much less show them how to write. Yet it would be unheard of for an artist not to show her students how to use oils by painting on her own canvas, or for a ceramist not to demonstrate how to throw clay on a wheel and shape the material himself. Writing is a craft. It needs to be demonstrated to your students in your classroom, which is a stu­dio, from choosing a topic to finishing a final draft. They need to see you struggle to match your intentions with the words that reach the page.

To demonstrate the meaning of conventions, you offer “meaning lessons.” You show your second-grade children where quotation marks are placed and what they are for: “I’m going to put these marks here because I want to know where my person starts to speak… see if you can tell where this person stops speaking. Come up here and put your finger in that very place where they stop speaking. Good. These are the marks I put here because they help me and the reader to know where this person speaks.”

Every mark on the page is art act of meaning. The words march across the page from left to right. Words are spelled the same way every time they’re used. Spaces go between words. Periods go at the end of the sentence. The conventions are as much for the writer as for the reader. I won’t know what I mean until I have set my thoughts on the page in a conventional text.

In my writing with the class I demonstrate a mood of discovery and experimentation. “Hmmm, I wonder where my writing is going to go. I’m not sure if I’ll write about the way people use the mirrors in the weight room, or my own reaction to the mirrors (see Chapter 3). I’ve got two things here; I guess I’ll keep writing about my reaction to the mirrors.” I demonstrate curiosity about what thoughts are around the next comer.

Expectation

I have high expectations for every one of my students. To have high expectations is a sign caring. Perhaps you have been in a class or a learning situation in which it is clear that the teacher wonders how you got in. When the teacher’s eyes scan the class, they seldom rest on your face as if you knew something. Of course, there are times when you might wish to remain unknown and undiscovered. But when you teach, your task is to find out what your students know, to show them how to put what they know into words, and to expect them to do it

“What are you working at in order to be a better writer?” This familiar question is one I ask a lot because I assume that everyone develops objectives in order to improve as a writer. I expect young writers to experiment, and I nudge them into trying new things in their writing.

Room Structure

The writing classroom requires a high degree of structure. When children face the empty page, they suddenly feel alone and want to talk or move around the room. But if children are to choose topics or fig­ure out how they will solve writing problems, they need a highly pre­dictable classroom.

Teachers help the room to be predictable when they:

•Have students write each day. If students miss a day or don’t know when they will write again, they are losing a sense of structure and predictability

• Establish a basic structure for the student to follow, a writing time, such as, “First, get your folders containing all your writ­ing, write, and then share writing”

• Set up procedures for solving problems. Basic procedures have been posted telling students what to do when they don’t have the right supplies, are stuck for a topic, need to confer with another student, need help proofreading their writing.

• Circulate among the students. The teacher contributes to structure by moving through the class conferring with stu­dents, so that students feel the teacher’s listening presence.

• Negotiate class management problems with students. When issues such as noise or how to work with others arise, the teacher discusses new ways to solve these problems with the students.

The classroom is not structured for writing alone. Indeed, if writing is the only structured time in the self-contained classroom over an entire day, then the hope that students will learn to make choices and take the initiative is an empty one. Teachers can help to ensure the condi­tions for effective learning by carefully delegating the jobs necessary to maintaining the classroom and showing children how to do these jobs. As the year advances, the jobs become more and more sophisticated. (Chapter 8 talks further about how to develop a structured classroom.)

Evaluation

When children choose their own topics, they need to know how to decide if their choices are good ones. They need to know how to evaluate their own work. Here again, the teacher can show children how to read their own work—by reading her own. Indeed, the teacher’s entire effort is geared to helping children learn how to examine their own work at a level appropriate to their developing abilities.

For eons learners of all ages have passed their work on to some­one else for evaluation without participating in the process them­selves. Yet children spend 99 percent of their time alone with the topic they are writing about or book they are reading. During those long hours they need to know how to say to themselves, “This is what this is about…no, it isn’t about that, it’s this.” Teachers do have an important role in evaluation, but it consists primarily of helping children become part of the process.

A child comes to the teacher and says, “I’m done.”

“Oh, how did you decide you were done?” responds the teacher. When I began teaching, I used to pick up the child’s paper, read it over, then give it back, and tell the child precisely what needed to be done to make the piece better. Now, when I move around the classroom con­ducting writing conferences, I expect the students to respond first

• This is what my piece is about (It can only be about one thing.)

• This is where I am in the draft (I’m just getting started. I’m finishing up. I’m ready to publish.)

• This is what I’ll write next or this is where I need help.

I expect them to be prepared to tell me about their work and how it is going. This gives them practice in dealing with the structure of evaluation of work in progress.

From the beginning of the school year students keep collections of their writing in folders or portfolios (see Chapter 11). This gives them a sense of their writing history and what they have accomplished that stays with them throughout the year. When a student is blocked on a particular piece, I find it helpful to have him stop for a moment and regain a sense of his history as a writer. Children also need practice in examining and evaluating their work from a variety of angles, and collecting their writing in one place allows them to do that. In all of these ways, children gain practice in using the language of evaluation in reading their own work and that of their classmates, language that has traditionally been viewed as the teacher’s property

Final Reflection

When you decide to focus on the conditions that make for sound, long-term literacy, you enlist in a lifetime venture. Cultivating a class­room that encourages and sustains writing takes far more work than methods because it forces us to look first at ourselves and our own writing. In one sense, teachers are the chief “condition” for effective writing.

You provide time for writing, the first fundamental condition. If students can’t write at least four days out of five, they will make little headway or have too little time to listen carefully to a piece that is going somewhere. Four days of writing also give you more access to your students through conferences, mini-lessons, and demonstrations. You have worked to carve out the necessary time for writing because you recognize that unless individuals gain the power to think and express their thinking in a clear manner, they lose part of their birthright as citizens in a free society Writing is not the property of a privileged elite.

Your students write about what they know. They choose a major­ity of their topics in order to discover what moves them and what they think. And they share what they write with a variety of audi­ences—through small groups, whole class groups, and publishing their work. You enable the students to become an effective writing community where they all help each other express what is important to them.

When you write with your students, you show them what writing is for. You show them the “why” of writing and how to negotiate the journey from the germ of an idea to final copy. You demonstrate con­stantly with the mini-lessons that pinpoint the specific skills writers need in order to write well.

You set high expectations for each writer. You can do this because you write yourself, and you know how the process unfolds. You nudge your students to try new things as you move around the class­room and huddle in conferences.

The conditions in your classroom are highly predictable. Well before students begin to write, they are aware of how the room works. The first and most predictable condition is that each day they will write and exercise choice in their topics. They know what to do when hey run out of ideas or need a response to a passage, and they know how to help each other.

written by David Stoner