Engaging, culturally relevant and useless: Teachers aren't trained to teach writing

As a first-year teacher, Patrick Hunt was unprepared to teach writing at a high-poverty, low-performing New York City high school, he writes in a guest essay on BellRingers. He tried to be "student-centered" and engaging and culturally relevant, but his students weren't learning.

Experienced teachers gave conflicting advice, recalls Hunt, who now writes on Cafeteria Duty. Everyone was doing his or her own thing, so there was no consistency from year to year. Direct, explicit instruction was "heretical," according to his teacher training.

"Even what an 'essay' is has become open to interpretation, with lots of teachers accepting Google Slides presentations in lieu of a proper argument essay."

When he took master's degree courses at Teachers' College, Columbia, Hunt thought his charismatic graduate-school professor would explain how to teach writing in The Teaching of Writing class. Nope. "Every class discussion found its way to the subjects of power and identity," writes Hunt. There was “Writing As Social Action,” but nothing on how to give effective feedback to students.

"Literacy" has become "a general skill that could be bolted onto any domain or concept," he learned. That opened the door to "digital literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, and something we talked about ad nauseum called racial literacy."

Traditional literacy was considered outmoded and oppressive. "The usual tools and techniques English teachers employed to teach writing — graphic organizers, rubrics — were actually bludgeons used against disadvantaged students," the professor explained.

The five-paragraph essay was "formulaic and inauthentic," most of the class agreed. It was “Eurocentric.” And “carceral.”

“But maybe its rigid structure actually helps struggling writers?” Hunt said, recalling the "jumbled mess" of essays his students had turned in after three weeks discussing a single poem. He made a pitch for coherence. "Topic sentences. Supporting details. Transitions. Shouldn’t our students learn how to do all this?” (I spent four years in high school learning how to write a 3-3-3 paragraph with topic sentences and supporting details. We hated it. It turned out to be very useful.)

"There is not one way to write," the professor told the class. Teachers' biggest "challenge is to question our deficit mindsets, especially about particular populations of students, and to think deeply about how that informs how we teach writing.” When Hunt asked what that meant, the professor said, “Based on some things you’ve shared, I do wonder how you see the children in your classroom.”

Hunt saw them as students who needed "sound writing instruction from a competent teacher"to have a shot at escaping poverty. The professor and most of his classmates thought they needed teachers "who could eloquently critique the socio-political conditions that had caused that impoverishment." But not teach them the "basic writing skills they themselves possessed and had built upon to succeed in school (and, at least in one case, to secure a lucrative tenure at a prestigious university)."

In the end, he had to teach himself how to teach writing through trial and error and borrowing ideas from colleagues, Hunt writes.

Teacher-prep programs should teach the "coherent body of research-informed principles and techniques" that might be called the Science of Writing, he writes. "It’s not as if this doesn’t exist. It does. Very much so."

Writing instruction was a "hodgepodge" in Douglas County, Colorado schools, writes Hechinger's Jackie Mader. "Teachers didn't know how to teach writing," says literacy coordinator Janet Merrill.  Now the district is training teachers in "evidence-based writing approaches" and seeing state test scores rise for writing -- and math. "Similar efforts are underway in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, California and Rhode Island," she writes.

"While the 'science of writing' isn’t as deeply researched as the science of how children learn to read, experts generally agree" on some practices, Mader notes. "For example, students should be given time each day to write and taught different genres and purposes of writing," and they should "explicitly instruct students in individual components of writing, starting with handwriting, spelling and vocabulary."

However, teacher preparation programs vary in how they prepare new teachers to teach writing, she reports, and some "lack standalone writing instruction courses."

Douglas County teachers were used to asking students to write about a vacation or birthday or "describe your shoe," Merrill told Mader. The new model, called Self-Regulated Strategy Development encourages "students to respond to texts using evidence and giving them specific strategies for planning and organizing writing."

"Federal research has found the SRSD approach improved writing quality across different genres, grades and assignments, and can be an effective intervention for students with learning disabilities," writes Mader. "But despite the evidence behind SRSD and similar approaches based on the science of writing, they haven’t made it into mainstream curricula and classrooms."

Olivia Eastwood, a third-grade teacher, transformed how she teaches writing by using the SRSD model, also known as Releasing Writers. Instead of trying a bit of everything, little of it based on evidence of effectiveness, she is now "confident that what I am teaching is rooted in research -- and I can see it working!"