What to DO and NOT Do When Teaching Writing.

Recently, I had Amy Verreault, an expert English teacher from Marlborough High School in Massachusetts, as a guest on my talk show for teachers, and we discussed the DOs and DON’Ts of teaching writing to reluctant writers, and her main points were so salient that I just had to write them down.

We established that many more students than we think are reluctant to write in school, because of negative experiences they have with teachers around writing instruction. Since I teach teachers, and since Amy’s main points align with the research on effective writing instruction, I decided to make two lists. The DOs and the DON’Ts. I want to start with the DON’Ts, because it is important to remove obstacles before developing good habits in our teaching. Here’s what she said.

What NOT to do when teaching writing:

“Don’t use massive rubrics.” These giant matrices only confuse students about what they should do next. Many students do not read rubrics with more than 5 rows and 5 columns. Teachers of middle or elementary school students, especially must follow Nancy Sommers’s rule LESS is MORE, when it comes to rubrics, marginal notes and endnotes. Dr. Nancy Sommer’s is one of the leading experts on providing feedback to students on their writing. She is professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

And, let’s face it. These massive rubrics are rarely created to help students. More often, they are generated to serve the needs of teachers and curriculum directors.

“Don’t criticize students spelling and grammar early in their process.” For example, teachers who mark up spelling errors and grammar mistakes on a first draft, often interrupt the relationship they have with students, reducing the trust that is necessary in order to do the honest work of helping students with the very personal journey of exploring the status of their own writing development.

“Don’t rely too heavily on formulas.” Teaching children to write thesis statements that should be located precisely in a specific place, should have a rigidly prescribed structure and must incorporate a microcosmic, DNA-like formula for the organization of the entire essay and then using this formula to reductively grade a student’s thesis by how closely they follow the formula, might help you get your grading done scientifically, but it:

A) won’t help students feel comfortable as the learn to write, and

B) won’t help them produce naturally fluent writing that has voice and authenticity.

In fact, formulas have a “half life.” They are meant to be temporary for these purposes, and should not be utterly reinforced. Because formulas rely more on synthetic structural concepts than the characteristics of the the everyday texts that we read and write in the real world when we are adults, they should only be used as long as they are useful. They should not be leaned on past that.

“Nitpicking will make them hate writing.” We all agree that when students hate writing, it makes the process of teaching it extremely difficult. Amy V. warned my audience about how the all too common practice of meticulously searching for minor errors in students’ writing and then using these errors to reduce a student’s grade on their writing will not only alienate the already reluctant writers, but it may also create reluctance in willing student writers.

We discussed why teachers nitpick, and one theory that rose to the top was that errors are easy to grade. Teaching writing is difficult, even before we consider the “grading papers” part of the job. But, when we add evaluating student writing to a teacher’s responsibilities, we are quickly overwhelmed. Of course, grading papers and evaluating writing are two different things, even if we conflate them more often than not, which injects a whole other level of stress for teachers, so we look for easy, objective, calculable methods for grading papers, when there IS actually no easy or objective way to teach, evaluate or grade writing. Amy and I suggest that teachers set the grading aside for a moment and teach your students what you know works. After all, grading is not teaching, and although it is necessary, we don’t have to make it a priority, if we don’t want to.

“Don’t pair difficult writing tasks, like essay writing or persuasive writing, with difficult reading tasks” like the interpretation of sophisticated literary content, like advanced poems or archaic plays. This will overwhelm students just when they need support. They need assistance while they are learning to write, not layers of rigorous challenge, so use an assessment other than write an essay about this theme or that motif in W.H. Auden’s poetry to assess their understanding of literature. Instead, use a paper pencil test, a graded discussion or student presentations to access reading skills. And, then, when you want them to write about literary texts, start with less complex poems than T.S. Eliot, less difficult novels than Virginia Woolf and less difficult plays than Shakespeare.

What to DO when teaching writing:

“Build trust with your students as early as possible.” Students will more likely be able to receive feedback from a person they know, someone they trust will not hurt them than a person who out of the gate starts criticizing them. Students who feel any amount of shame as they try to learn new writing skills will probably shut down, withdraw and resist. Hopefully not for too long. The trick here is to prevent the resistance by building trust whenever possible. Nitpicking and overwhelming do NOT build trust.

“Help your students learn to write by showing them HOW.” Writing involves many moving parts from ideation to editing, and we know how to do it. They do not. The best way to teach writing is to demonstrate for your students HOW you would do it. Show them what your process is. They don’t have to do it that way, and you don’t have to be perfect, but showing them instead of telling them will work better.

I used to DO every assignment that I assigned my students myself when I taught high school. It was hard work, but it accomplished two things:

• I understand what they were experiencing.
• I could should them my finished product as a model.

Remember what novelist, Anne Lamott, wrote in her memoir about writing, Bird By Bird, (1995). Shitty first drafts should be our first objective. Tell your students about Anne’s idea, that it’s better to write down something crappy than nothing at all, and if you start out with low expectations, it will be easier to sit down to the task, to get something down on paper, than building the writing task up and freaking yourself out, thus destroying your confidence and motivation.

Then, once the SFD is on paper, they can revise.

“Have your students share their drafts with you from the very beginning,” so you can intervene when things matter, and this will spread your advice out — as not to overwhelm them. You will also get to know their writing strengths and weaknesses better and be able to help them more easily. You don’t have to comment on, write marginal notes on or grade every iteration of a student’s writing, but DO read their early drafts, incomplete drafts, even first pages.

“Focus on the Big Picture.” This can be achieved by asking yourself these three questions as you read each student’s draft. What does this student need the most help with right now?” What is this student ready to hear from me and need to hear from me? What advice will help this student the most?

Amy V taught us much more than these, but these Dos and Don’ts are a good start. Thanks Amy.