Module 4: Writing

How can we, as discipline specific teachers, be successful in motivating and engaging our students to write?

            Student writing achievement suffers when teachers simply assign writing. If students are to succeed at writing, it needs to be integrated in content areas throughout the day and not just limited to a writing or literacy block. Three instructional routines that teachers can implement throughout the day are: Power writing, Shared and Interactive writing, and writing from sources to inform and explain. Another idea to motivate students is to teach students to annotate texts.  Fisher and Frey (2013) stated that, “Effective writing teachers know that building stamina, discussion, and knowledge are integral for developing stronger writers.”

            Power Writing is a method for building writing fluency through brief, timed writing events (Fisher & Frey, 2013, p. 97). This improves students writing fluency and provides teachers with an assessment of content knowledge and student error patterns. Teachers can implement power writing into the classroom on a daily basis by giving students one minute to write down as much as they can about a content word or phrase. This can be repeated three times and students then reread what they wrote and circle any errors they notice. Students then keep track of how many words they wrote each day and watch the number increase.            

           Shared and Interactive writing both emphasize the importance of oral language development. However, they differ because the students are the ones that are doing the writing in interactive writing. During this strategy, the teacher guides the students to write.

           Students need to be taught to carefully read texts and collect evidence from those texts. Therefore, students should learn annotation skills to help them write from sources to inform and explain. This is especially important for Science and Social Studies content writing.

According to the video, “Writing in the Content Area” Dr. Paul Rodgers suggests that teachers should look out into the world to see what kind of writing is being done and match it to what we ask our students to do. Writing should be implemented to build knowledge.

Scenario

These research based strategies can be implemented in a secondary Biology classroom while teaching a lesson on Genetics.

To begin the lesson, the teacher can implement Power Writing. For example, the teacher can write the content word “Punnett Square” on the board. The students will have one minute to write as much and well as they can about this word. When the minute is up, the students will circle any errors they notice and record the number of words they wrote. This will be repeated for next content word “dominate” and finally the content word “recessive.” After this is completed, the teacher can begin to build content knowledge by holding a class discussion about these three words. Students may then read the text while making annotation marks to help them answer the question the teacher writes on the board. The teacher may tell the students to underline major points and circle key words or phrases. Students may answer the following question: What do you think your genes for your hair color are? Cite evidence from the text. According to Fisher and Frey (2013), “Writing from sources is an important aspect of content area learning. Students must use their writing skills to produce pieces that are informative or explanatory. This is especially important in learning science and social studies.”

References

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2013). A range of writing across the content areas. The Reading Teacher, 67, 96-101.