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Key takeaways
- Explicitly teach writing. Don’t just assign writing tasks and hope for the best. Instead, break writing instruction down into manageable chunks for students to tackle using deliberate practice activities.
- Teach students how to write great sentences. Sentences are the building blocks of excellent writing, so writing instruction needs to give students plenty of practice at sentence-level writing
- Embed writing into the teaching of content. Don’t see this as another thing to teach on top of content; instead, use writing instruction to deepen students’ engagement with what they’re learning.
- Teach grammar as you teach writing. Stifle the yawn and let your students in on the secrets of excellent writing, this includes teaching the proper structure and function of great sentences while they write.
Knowing how to write is an essential skill. Constructing written work that effectively explains, informs or persuades helps students succeed in school, and later in their working lives. People spend a lot of time at work using network tools that require them to write. Email, social media and text messaging mean that whatever path students choose in life, their ability to communicate thoughts and ideas effectively in writing sets them up to thrive. Unfortunately, schools don’t always teach writing very well. Teachers often ask students to complete a lot of writing but less frequently carve out instructional time to explicitly teach students how to build effective sentences and combine these sentences into effective paragraphs and essays. Thankfully, Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler have a book that tells you exactly how to teach your students to be better writers. The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades provides a comprehensive school-wide framework for developing better writers and is jam-packed full of classroom-ready activities and strategies.
