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Invented Spelling Activities in Kindergarten

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Narrator:
Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:
I'm going to get right to it. I want to begin by asking you directly, yes or no, is handwriting an important skill to learn?

Laura Stewart:
Absolutely. No question. I think this is something that over the course of my career, there have been waves where handwriting has been de-emphasized, but I think it's really clear that this is a critical part of literacy. It's a major player in literacy.

Narrator:
You just heard Laura Stewart, national director of The Reading League. Ms. Stewart is our guest today on EDVIEW360.

PA:
This is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We're so excited to have you back with us. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are excited to welcome Laura Stewart, educator and national director of The Reading League. Ms. Stewart is our guest today for EDVIEW360. Welcome, Ms. Stewart.

LS:
Well, thank you. Hi, Pam. I'm really delighted to be with you today.

PA:
Oh, we are so excited to have you. As I said before, I love the topic we're going to dive into, but before we do that, Ms. Stewart, you have had an impact on teachers, administrators, and college students throughout your career. Before we dive into our topic today, please share your journey to your current role as an educator.

LS:
Oh, well, sure. Yeah, I've been in education for a really long time, a really long time, and it's been, I would say, a rewarding and challenging career. I started out as a classroom teacher. I've worked at the building level and district level as an administrator. I've taught at the college level, and I've worked in lots of different professional development initiatives around the country, including one in Jefferson Parish in your backyard there. Also worked in the state of Wisconsin during the Reading First years.

I've also worked in organizations. I was the VP of professional development for the Rowland Reading Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization. I was also the chief academic officer for professional development at Highlights. Highlights for Children, some of you might know the Highlights magazine. So, I've had a lot of varied and different experiences.

I have written a book. I have presented nationally, internationally, but I would say that the through line of my work has really been my passion for and my commitment to early literacy. That's what gets me up in the morning. I think we're at a really hopeful time in terms of knowing what to do to ensure literacy for all. So, I'm really excited about where I am in my career right now and the hope that we have for today's children.

PA:
Oh, my goodness. Such an eclectic background.

PA:
You can say you've done all things in the education world, just listening to the various roles that you have participated in. You honed in on early literacy, and just by you sharing that, it just makes me reflect on our topic for today. I'm going to get right to it. I want to begin by asking you directly, yes or no, is handwriting an important skill to learn?

LS:
Absolutely. No question. I think this is something that over the course of my career, there have been waves where handwriting has been de-emphasized, but I think it's really clear that this is a critical part of literacy. It's a major player in literacy.

PA:
Yes. Over the years, as you mentioned, it has taken a backseat. Why do you think that handwriting has taken a backseat in the educational world?

LS:
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I reflect back on, again, I've been around for a long time and there have been waves in my career where handwriting's been minimized. I think the first time I saw this was during the ascendancy of the whole language years when whole language was the methodology of the day. The emphasis then, I believe, was getting kids to write for expression and meaning. So, the thinking was, and I remember this clearly, the thinking was that if we emphasized handwriting, somehow that's going to get in the way of this expression.

Also I think there was the idea back then that we had to choose. We don't have time for both. So, handwriting could be relegated to a center or maybe a take-home sheet, but it really didn't get the instructional attention that it needed. So, I think that's one wave.

I think a second wave was when we really started emphasizing teaching keyboarding. Again, the thinking was...I'm not saying this was correct thinking, but the thinking was that anytime that we had devoted to handwriting now had to shift to keyboarding. So, I think in both those cases, it was really thinking about how are we prioritizing time? We can't fit everything in. Something has to go. So, handwriting was de-emphasized.

But I do think it's on the upswing for a few reasons. One is I think we're really paying attention to the value of legible handwriting. As I was preparing for this podcast, I did a little research, and I found some fun facts that I think your listeners might be interested in. Thirty-eight million illegibly addressed letters cost the U.S. postal service $4 million a year.

LS:
I know. Here's another statistic. So, nearly 20% of hospital medicine orders are returned by pharmacies as illegible.

LS:
Yeah. So, that's a lot of time and a lot of manpower that we really can't squander. So, that's one reason I think it's on the upswing, but also we know, and Steven Graham is a key player in this, and he stated that there's an...I'm paraphrasing him here...that there's an effect that's a little insidious, because people judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting. So, legibility really matters. By legibility, I mean handwriting that can be easily read by many people. It's a lifelong standard for handwriting.

LS:
Yeah. I mentioned Steven Graham. There's a lot of other leading voices in the area. Virginia Berninger, Beverly Wolf, Karin Harman James, Marilyn Wolf has written...Or, Marilyn Adams has written about this. Louise Spear-Swerling has written about this. Nancy Mather.

I think really the other big realization that has caused us to pay more attention to handwriting is that we recognize that it's critical to automatize handwriting as a transcription skill. So, it frees up working memory to devote that cognitive energy to composition. It's like when we think about making decoding automatic and building that storehouse of instantaneously recognized words so that our brain energy can be devoted to comprehension. There's a parallel, right?

If this transcription skill can become automatized, we devote more cognitive energy to composition. Louise Spear-Swerling even draws a parallel to math. She says if we have a lack of automatic recall, that reduces our mental resources available for advanced computational algorithms in math. So, these researchers, these leading voices, have found that automatized handwriting improves the quality and the quantity of written expression. So, back when we minimized it and we thought the expectation of legible handwriting would impede written expression, we've had it all wrong. We were completely off the mark.

PA:
Right. We thought that we have to choose one over the other. Right?

PA:
The very specific examples you gave that were very practical in regards to the post office for one, right, and the impact of being able to write legibly, right. It's part of those literacy skills, and when you think about that end goal of automaticity, that says a lot right there, Laura. I think teachers can make that connection when we are focusing on...With phonics, we have to understand and be able to retrieve that sound symbol automatically, so we can transfer that example to handwriting as well.

LS:
Yes, exactly. This is great.

PA:
You already answered my next question on how it's making a comeback and why it's making a comeback, which is great. You even alluded to some of the connection between handwriting and reading and writing when you spoke to it improves the quantity and the quality of writing. Can you speak more to that? How does handwriting reinforce reading effectively?

LS:
Yeah. I find this incredibly exciting. I think you do too, Pam, so I think we're on the same page with this.

LS:
OK. So, legibility counts for the reasons that I shared before. Automatized handwriting frees up that cognitive space, but there have been more advances in our understanding the importance of handwriting as it connects to reading and writing. So, I want to think about...Let's think about writing and dig into that a little bit deeper. So, when we write, we're dealing with lots of simultaneous demands. What do we want to say? How do I organize my writing? What do I need to do with each sentence? How do I spell that word? So, we're really taxing our working memory. So, to really devote that optimization to composition, handwriting, spelling, mechanics need to be fluid and internalized, right?

There was actually a study done in 2016 that looked at second-graders who had handwriting instruction and they showed advancement in language skills, alphabet writing, spelling, and composing. So, writing, there's a lot of evidence for, again, its importance in writing.

Now, thinking about this in the context of reading gets really exciting. So, alphabet knowledge, language skills, those are important to reading. I think we all would recognize that.

LS:
Marilyn Adams, back in 1990, said that we need to know the shapes of individual letters in order to read, and that writing, handwriting, aids that recognition. Karin James and her colleagues noted that the motor act of producing a word by hand results in these tactical sensations in the brain that link letters into a simple written word unit. So, I think that, really, I would argue that handwriting's a critical piece of foundational reading.

It gets even better. So, there's research around the areas of the brain that activate during handwriting. Guess what? It's primarily in that all important left hemisphere. So, that manipulation of thumb and fingers as we hand write activates the left brain, which we know manages planning, monitoring, organizing, revising, language processing, and all these skills are critical to not just in writing but self-management and metacognition. So, I think the value of the letter formation handwriting just continues to present itself.

PA:
So, handwriting is definitely valuable?

PA:
To reiterate, we can say that fluency and automaticity in handwriting is a foundational skill.

PA:
All aspects of literacy, we can say, goes back to handwriting. Would you agree with that, Laura?

LS:
Yeah. Like I said, it's a major player. No doubt. No doubt.

PA:
Awesome. I do have another question for you. Just leading into the science of reading, how does handwriting support the science of reading? Now, you gave us some examples already. Can you expound on that?

LS:
Yeah. So, let's go back to the science of reading. We at The Reading League are working with some other like-minded organizations to produce what we're calling the science of reading, a defining guide. Any of you listening in today can find that at whatisthescienceofreading.org. That's our webpage devoted to that. We want to arrive at a simple definition for the science of reading, so I'll read to you this definition: "The science of reading is a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing."

So, if that's our baseline definition, all of what I just shared with you fits well within that body of scientifically based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing. Handwriting really spans both, right? Reading and writing.

PA:
So, the reading and writing connection is detailed here. What was that resource again, Laura?

LS:
Yeah. So, actually it's whatisthescienceofreading.org, and it's the Science of Reading, A Defining Movement. Within that webpage, you can find our defining guide. This is really designed to...Again, we're working with other mission-driven organizations in the science of reading community to bring to bear a common definition that we can all rally behind, some rationale for that decision, what the science of reading is, what the science of reading is not. We have a lovely equity statement. We have a preamble that just sets the stage for the science of reading. So, I encourage everybody to check that out.

PA:
Yeah. I encourage you to as well. I know I will dive into this guide myself. Now, we've been talking about handwriting, but people normally think, "Well, there's print and then there's cursive." Tell us more about the two great debates, print and cursive.

LS:
Yeah. Yeah. OK. So, printing or cursive is interesting. So, Steven Graham, as I mentioned before, he found in 2009 that the research is inconclusive regarding teaching manuscript versus teaching cursive in mainstream students who do not struggle. However, we also know from the research that A, students shouldn't be taught both simultaneously, and B, it takes at least two years of instruction to automatize a handwriting process. So, we do have to choose.

What seems to be prevalent practice is manuscript K-2, cursive 2-3. So, one argument in favor of this seems to be that, most, if not all text that our K-2 students encounter or are exposed to is manuscript. So, as we're teaching letters for both reading and writing, this makes sense.

However, I also want to add I listened to a presentation by the wonderful William van Cleave, and he talked about cursive for students with language-based learning difficulties because it cuts down on reversals. All cursive lowercase letters begin at the same place. It reinforces spelling because of continuous movement, and it reinforces the idea of words and spaces, because all the letters of the word are clustered together. So, there's not one definitive answer for that, but again, I think there is prevalent practice that is supportable.

PA:
Definitely. That makes sense. Then when we're dealing with students with those language-based difficulties, then we would likely shift more to the cursive. So, there's not one size fits all, but in the general population, we've got a standard, and then we can adjust what those students who need more.

PA:
OK. I think that's called scaffolding to the student needs. Most definitely.

PA:
Well, let's talk about handwriting or keyboarding.

LS:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, we have a lot of information on this now. We didn't for a while, but we have enough information now to know that keyboarding just doesn't have the same benefits as handwriting. Now, I don't want to minimize it because it does have benefits, surely, but to think that we can replace handwriting with keyboarding, I believe, is misguided. There have been studies about better understanding and retention of concepts, and that students are trying, when they're using their laptop and their keyboards, they're trying to transcript every word because of the speed at which they can type notes.

But with longhand, you have to be cognitively active in picking out key ideas and summarizing and drawing conclusions and putting things into your own words. These are higher-order skills that require a level of cognition that benefits your retention of the concepts. So, there have been studies on this. Three in particular have concluded that college students who took notes by hand performed better on assessments than their peers who typed their notes. That just makes sense, right? When you're longhand, you have to really be thinking about, what do you want to capture?

Then, there was another study. Berninger and colleagues in 2009 did a study where they found that students expressed more ideas and used more complete sentences when they wrote longhand as compared to keyboarding. There was another study in 2016 that found that printing taps into letter processing networks better than typing. There was also, I just read again in preparing for this, I read this article, Where Does Handwriting Fit In? by Susan Cahill. She's an occupational therapist. She stated that even in an era of technology, this kinesthetic process of writing letters is favorable to the act of composition.

So, to unpack that a little bit more. So, when you type, you're hitting a key, and that process, hitting a key, is the same for all letters. When you hand write, each letter has its own unique shape, its own unique formation, so we're kinesthetically imprinting that distinctive shape with each letter. So, bottom line, this study with James, Jao, & Berninger suggests, and I'm going to quote here: "The goal of writing instruction in the information age should be developing hybrid writers who are adept with multiple writing tools, including pens and keyboards."

PA:
I just love it. So, we don't have to choose one or the other? Right?

PA:
We can choose the best of both worlds. There's a phrase you use, cognitively active. I just love that. It's all about engagement and retention, right? So, when you are writing by hand, you are practicing. You're applying those higher-order skills.

PA:
I love it. Engagement and retention. That's what the benefit is there. Thank you. I just love the information that you're sharing. What are some recommendations for handwriting instruction?

LS:
Yeah, so I think it might be cool to look at how children develop in terms of grasping writing implements to think about where do we start, when do we start, how do we start? So, at about 1 to 11/2 years old, kids tend to have this, what is called a fisted grasp, where they just wrap all their fingers around the writing tool. They use their whole arm to make marks. At this age, kids just switch from hand to hand, so they're just experimenting. At about 2 to 3, they do this interesting grasp that I think a lot of OTs refer to as digital-pronate grasp, but this is where the child holds the writing implement in a diagonal position across the palm of the hand, and the fingers in the palm are facing down.

I have to laugh because I was with my granddaughters last week. I have a 2-, almost 3-year-old granddaughter, and that's exactly what she was doing. She's holding this pen in this diagonal position. Again, at this age, kids might switch from hand to hand. There's no hand domination. At 3 to 4, we tend to see a five-finger grasp, again, but this is not a fist. It's where all five fingers are on the pencil or pen or crayon, and they're starting to use wrist movements as opposed to the whole arm. Sometimes this is hard for kids because they're grasping it so tightly that their hands get very fatigued. But at this age, we tend to see more hand dominance.

Then we see this tripod, the typical tripod grasp, at around age 5. That's where kids hold the writing tool between their thumb and their pointer and their middle fingers, and they can keep that ring finger and that little finger curled under. This is about 5, hand dominance starts to really emerge.

I did want to mention the OT community also supports an alternative grip where the writing tool is lodged between the pointer and the middle finger. So, pencil grip is kind of an interesting thing...Just to think about a child's development is an interesting thing because it helps us to ponder instruction, because reinforcing that pencil grip is important. If kids have a cumbersome, awkward pencil grip, it can cause fatigue and discomfort, so we do really want to help our kids get this right. Even though a poor pencil grip can be changed, the older the child is, the harder it is to change. So, that early modeling, early reinforcement is really important.

PA:
So, the understanding that the developmental progress and pencil grip will help us understand that need for providing instruction on something as simple as a how to hold a pencil.

LS:
Yeah, for sure. Also, if we think about that, those developmental milestones, there's readiness skills that we can help our kids develop for this. So, let's think about our preschoolers. Fine-motor manipulation, like using fingers to pick up objects and manipulate objects, and learning basic strokes like vertical lines and horizontal lines and circles and slants. Those are things that we can do with our youngest learners in order to help them be prepared for more formal handwriting instruction.

Then when it comes to that, when actually teaching letter formation, there are key principles to keep in mind. So, we want to have kids get themselves and their paper in position. Position's really important. Sit up tall, keep your feet on the floor, keep both arms on your desk. You want your papers slanted slightly in the same direction as your dominant hand. For cursive, you want even more of a slant. We might want to do warm-up routines for our kids. For example, things like when they're learning manuscript, help them "get ready to print" by making tall and short vertical lines, making zigzags, making circles, making mountains, which is just like pointy, pointy, making waves, making dashes. So, helping kids warm up.

Proper pencil grip, proper paper position, proper seated position, and then warming up. For cursive, we can warm up using what are called windshield wiper movements. Again, mountain movements, wave movements, circles. Just warming up our arms and hands and getting ready for instruction. So, those are some instructional principles to think about.

I also think it's important when we...I mentioned paper, and I wanted to mention this too. We want to give our youngest writers wider-ruled paper when they're just starting out and then narrow the lines, the rules, the lines as they get older. So, those are some things I think that are important to remember. Then I think it's important to remember that handwriting is taught explicitly. We want to teach each letter. We want to model. We want to use clear, verbal cues. We want to make sure kids start at the right place on the line.

So, when I say clear, verbal cues, what I mean is let's say I'm teaching.

Start at the 2:00 position on the midline, circle to the baseline, come up slightly off the baseline. Now that would be lowercase C. So, just having the language around handwriting and being consistent in that language is really important. That's important for both manuscript and cursive.

There's another element to cursive that has to be taught very explicitly, and that's joining. Joining from letter to letter. So, again, teaching kids the right position, having the right kind of paper with the appropriate lines, I think having models to trace, starter dots and arrows to help them remember where to start and how to move, I think those things are very important as well.

PA:
Very good. You gave us a lot of good information, and so I'll just summarize exactly what you shared with us.

PA:
Pencil grip, highly important. Position of the paper, warm-up routines that are specific to print or to cursive. Then that direct, explicit instruction. You mentioned there are various ways to offer that direct, explicit instruction. You talked about naming the lines and some programs. We have a program, Read Well®, where we have the hat, the belt, and the boot line.

PA:
So, what are some common questions you get around handwriting instruction? You gave us a lot of information. What are the most common questions that you hear from people?

LS:
Yeah. So, one question I often get is, so what do we help kids look for in their own handwriting or what are we actually teaching kids that make handwriting legible? I want to refer to these what are called keys of legibility, which I learned from my friends at Zaner-Bloser, and this is their proprietary content, so I did get permission to share. So, their keys to legibility are shape, size, spacing, and slant. That's easy to remember because they begin with a letter S. Shape, size, spacing, and slant.

Shape is the most fundamental because it's the actual appearance of the strokes. Size is the height of the letter. Spacing is the consistency between letters, consistency between words, spacing between sentences. Slant is the angle of writing on the paper. So, this is what we're teaching. We're teaching these attributes of instruction.

Then we want kids to self-evaluate on these keys as they examine their own writing, because one of the aspects of instruction is the modeling and the practice, but the self-evaluation to determine if this is indeed legible. So, let me give you an example. We can have kids look at the height of their letters and ask themselves are all your tall letters the same height? Are all your short letters half the size of tall letters? Do all the descending letters go below the baseline? Are there tails the same length? That type of thing. So, helping kids become discerning and self-evaluative is a really important part of instruction.

Another question I get is how do we help kids with spacing, because spacing is difficult for young children. So, giving them props like paper clips or Popsicle sticks or just having them use their fingers, one paper clip between words, two paper clips between sentences. I know that when I was teaching, I took Popsicle sticks and I drew a little face and a little antenna on the Popsicle sticks, and we called them Spacemen. Right?

LS:
So, giving kids those kinds of props. For slant, to help kids with slant, have them draw lines between their letters in the direction of those letters, and then check to see that the slant is consistent. That works for both manuscript and cursive. So, those are some tips and pointers, I guess, that help kids really gauge their own legibility. That's one question.

Another question I often get is which letters do I introduce when? Now, there is no hard research on this, but we can think about what makes sense, which is what we do a lot in making instructional choices. So, it makes sense to introduce manuscript letters according to their beginning stroke, or what we call their motor stroke family. So, in manuscript, we might group B, H, K, L, T because they all begin with that top-to-bottom vertical stroke.

Now D you think is a tall letter, but it would be grouped with C, O, and G because although it's tall, it's beginning stroke is identical to the strokes in lowercase C, lowercase O, lowercase G, and lowercase A. So, think about stroke families like in cursive, A, C, D, G, Q would be grouped together in the same stroke family. So, that's another question I get.

Another question is, do we introduce lowercase and uppercase simultaneously? Again, no hard research on this, but I believe yes, because handwriting should be taught alongside all the other aspects of each letter. We want kids to know letter names, letter shapes, the sound the letter represents, and its formation. So, I think teaching all those attributes makes a lot of sense.

I often get a question about reversals. When kids are first learning, reversals are fairly common, especially letters like B and D and F and Q. J is very common. Reversals are typically developmental and will improve. In the early stages, it's fairly normal. It isn't necessarily an indicator of dyslexia or another learning disability. I just wanted to throw that out there. So, those are the main questions I often get.

PA:
Wonderful questions, and you can tell they came directly from educators.

PA:
If these are the most common questions you have out there, then you've actually answered my next question. That was about what are some strategies that educators can use to help teach handwriting on a daily basis in the classroom? You've listed a great many of them. Are there any other resources that you'd like to share as well?

LS:
Yeah. So, in terms of strategies, yes, teaching kids what makes a letter legible, self-evaluation, doing explicit modeling. But I also think it's important to remember that this doesn't have to take a lot of time in our school day. One of those waves that we talked about of handwriting avoidance was that we thought there just wasn't enough time for handwriting in the school day. Well, again, I think we had it all wrong because we really can accomplish handwriting instruction and practice in no more than 15 minutes a day. If we think about explicit instruction, I do, we do, you do, we could have five minutes of explicit instruction, five minutes of guided practice with monitoring and coaching, and then five minutes of independent practice and self-evaluation. That can be done as seat work during independent work time, which is totally doable.

But I think more importantly, it's this great bang for our instructional block. Right? Think of all those benefits of handwriting that we mentioned earlier. It couldn't be more important and it's so worth the time. There's a huge return on investment for that. Right?

LS:
So, I think that's another thing just to reassure people. I also would encourage people to look at systematic programs and avoid just downloading stuff off the internet. I think a systematic approach based on the research is really good. I just don't think teachers should have to figure this out for themselves. So, we want to put good resources in teachers' hands to make teachers' lives more manageable.

PA:
Just 15 minutes a day to build that strong foundation to improve writing.

PA:
As you said before, not only the quantity, but the quality of writing as well.

PA:
All right. So, we are nearing the end of our podcast. Are there any final tips you have for educators of handwriting reading and writing?

LS:
Yeah. I don't know if this is a tip, but I want to offer some reassurance. So, Steven Graham, as I mentioned before, and his colleagues did a survey. They found that 90% of first- through third-grade teachers surveyed teach handwriting and most agreed it was important, but only 12% believed they received adequate preparation to teach handwriting in their college preparation courses. Another leading voice in the field, Jane Case-Smith, she found the same, that teachers don't necessarily feel adequately prepared to teach handwriting.

I heard the same from many teachers around reading. I didn't know about the science of reading or evidence line instruction myself, and I felt a tremendous sense of guilt about not knowing and not doing so. I don't know if this is a tip, but my advice is to give yourself grace. You didn't know what you didn't know. We learn, we move on from there. No blame, no shame.

PA:
I love it. Yes. Give yourself grace. Well, we know now we can go forward and make better.

PA:
So, finally, if you could wave a magic wand and change anything in the world of education, what would you change and why?

LS:
Well, oh my goodness. So, I believe all students deserve to learn to read, so I would create a world in which that is the norm. I would create a world where all teachers are fully prepared and fully supported to make that happen.

PA:
I love that. I'd have to join you in that wish as well.

PA:
Thank you for joining us today at EDVIEW360, Ms. Stewart. It's been a pleasure visiting with you. Tell us how we can learn more about you or The Reading League and follow you on social media.

LS:
Oh, thank you so much. Well, it's been my pleasure, Pam. Yeah. So, The Reading League, if your listeners aren't familiar, we're a nonprofit. Our mission is to advance the awareness, understanding, and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction schools. We really want to increase the knowledge of these science-based approaches and demystify how people learn. We want to benefit the lives of millions of our students.

So, please check us out at www.thereadingleague.org and find out more about what we do and who we are and what we offer, because we have many ways to support educators in their work. We have a journal, which is really one of a kind. It's a research-to-practice journal. We offer live events. We offer amazing professional development, lots of free and accessible resources on our knowledge-based webpage, on our YouTube channel.

I have to give a shout out for my podcast. It's called Teaching, Reading and Learning. I have had the honor of speaking to so many of my heroes, in Louisa Moats, David Kilpatrick, Anita Archer, Parker Palmer, Linnea Ehri, Maryanne Wolf, so many along with practitioners in the field, too. So, please tune in.

We also offer, this is really exciting, a TV show for children. It's called The Reading League's Reading Buddies, and it's pure delight. You can subscribe on YouTube and it's broadcast also on WCNY, which is in central New York. So, check that out. Again, The Reading League's Reading Buddies. I also mentioned whatisthescienceofreading.org to find out more about our defining movement. So, those are all the ways that we're really supporting teachers in their work.

So, join us, become a member. Also check to see if your state has a Reading League chapter, and you can join your state's mission as well. You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and you can reach me at laura@thereadingleague.org. Also follow me on Twitter at StewartLauraD.

PA:
Oh, thank you so much. There's so many avenues to make a connection with The Reading League and a connection with you, Ms. Stewart. Thank you so much.

LS:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

PA:
This is Pam Austin bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you.

Narrator:
This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/podcast. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.

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How Handwriting Supports the Science of Reading

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Narrator: Welcome to EDVIEW360. Pam Austin: I'm going to get right to it. I want to begin by asking you directly, yes or no, is handwriting an important skill to learn? Laura Stewart: Absolutely. No question.

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Transcript

Narrator:
Welcome to EDVIEW360.
Natalie Wexler:
It's not that kids don't want to write. It's that they haven't been explicitly taught how to do it. And once you show them how to construct a sentence and how to put a paragraph together, what I've heard is that reluctant writers often become eager writers.
Narrator:
You just heard from Dr. Natalie Wexler, international literacy expert and author of The Knowledge Gap. Dr. Wexler is our guest today on EDVIEW360.
Pam Austin:
This is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We're so excited to have our listeners back with us today. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, where it is extremely hot. Today, we are excited to welcome Natalie Wexler, Washington, D.C.-based education journalist focused on literacy, the importance of writing skills, and the achievement gap noted by ongoing NAEP scores and input from college professors regarding the quality of writing of incoming students. She is the co-author of The Writing Revolution, Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades, and the author of The Knowledge Gap, the Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System and How to Fix It. She is also a contributor on education to forbes.com and the author of three novels. Welcome, Natalie.
NW:
Thanks Pam. I'm delighted to be here.
PA:
Tell us a bit more about your background and what drew you to literacy teaching and learning before you became an author and education journalist.
NW:
Well, I've never been a teacher. My mother was a teacher. That is, I've never been a teacher at the K-12 level. I have taught writing and English as a second language to highly motivated adults, but I know that's a whole different ballgame. But about oh, 12 years ago now, I got very interested in the education reform efforts that were going on in Washington, D.C., where I live, and I started just looking into it and it seemed incredibly important. I was specifically focused on what is sometimes called the achievement gap, this gap in test scores and other education outcomes between students at the upper and lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. And it just seemed to me incredibly important to figure out how to narrow that gap. And it looked like we weren't making as much progress as we should be. So, I drew on my background as a journalist and I started writing about it for a local news website, but I just stumbled upon some issues that were clearly bigger than Washington, D.C. And that led me to dig even further.
PA:
All right. Wow. What a journey. I think we all have our journey to teaching and learning in so many different ways and how we all can collaborate and provide that input. We've heard you say that writing is potentially the most powerful lever we have for building knowledge and improving reading comprehension. Tell us more about that and how writing can uncover and support those gaps in background knowledge and application of strategies preventing students from accessing grade-level materials.
NW:
Yeah, I mean, I think writing has a huge potential and it really hasn't been unlocked. But the potential has to do with the way our minds take in new information. It has to do specifically with working memory, which is that aspect of our consciousness where we're taking in and trying to make sense of new information. And the important thing about working memory is that it can easily get overwhelmed. It can only handle about four or five new items maybe for about 20 seconds before you start forgetting stuff. And you don't have the cognitive capacity to really think about what you're trying to take in. And what writing can do is get around that limitation on working memory in a really effective way. So, the way around those constraints of working memory is to have more relevant information stored in long-term memory. So, that means you have to, first of all, transfer information, new information from working memory to long-term memory and a great way to do that is to attach meaning to it, maybe by explaining it to someone else.

And then you also have to be able to retrieve that information when you need it, because if you can just withdraw information from long-term memory, it doesn't take up that space in working memory. And it turns out that a very effective way to practice retrieving an item is again, to attach meaning to it by explaining it to someone else in your own words. And the more you do that, the more likely it is you're going to be able to retrieve the information when you need it. So, writing is a powerful way of both transferring information to long-term memory in the first place, and also practicing that retrieval of it. Because when we're writing, that is what we're doing. We're retrieving information from long-term memory that we've slightly forgotten and putting it in our own words, explaining it to the unknown reader. So, that's the potential of it.

It is also a very effective way of figuring out what kinds of gaps in background knowledge are preventing kids from accessing the grade-level work that we're asking them to do. Especially with anything really other than math, I would say you can't sort of go back and just cover everything that kids might have missed in previous years if they have these gaps in knowledge. But what writing can do is, especially if you are doing it in manageable chunks like sentences, if you give everybody in the class a sentence stem to complete about the content you're teaching, and I can go into examples of that later, but what you get back will very quickly tell you there are kids who just have misconceptions. If they need some additional information, that's going to help them access the content. So, it's a very effective way of pinpointing what is it that we need to fill in here so that kids can actually do grade-level work. So, that's really what a lot of the potential of writing is.
PA:
So, Natalie, what you're saying is writing can help transfer that information from working memory to long-term memory, which will allow students not only to retrieve, but be able to explain and writing is the tool used to make it happen and also to uncover those gaps, right? Because kids' gaps are different based on their experience, where they've come from, what they have interacted with. It's just a different experience for each child as they're going through that learning situation.
NW:
Yeah. And I think teachers, we often rely on kids to sort of raise their hands and say, "Wait a minute, I don't understand this." And often they don't do that. So, by the time we figure out that there's something they're not understanding, or there's some piece of knowledge that they're missing that's preventing them from learning what we are expecting them to learn, is sometimes too late. So, writing can be that kind of just-in-time identifier of what's needed.
PA:
Right. Great. And you're right. Students don't always raise their hands. I know that sometimes adults are reluctant to raise their hand or ask a question.
NW:
Absolutely. Yep.
PA:
What do we know from national assessments about American students' writing ability?
NW:
Well, I wish we knew more. But what we do know is that a lot of kids are not writing well. The most recent national test of students' writing ability, which was done in 2011 and it showed that only about 27 percent of eighth- and 12 th-graders were at the proficient level or above. That's on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And that's a lower proportion than is it proficient or above in reading. That's about a third of students. So, we're talking about a quarter of students being proficient in writing, which it stands to reason that there would be fewer because actually writing is harder than reading.

Now, those tests can't tell us exactly why or exactly what the problems are. And they're also over 10 years old, those results at this point. I doubt things have gotten better, but I will say that the dismaying news that I got recently is that we're not scheduled to give another one of these national writing tests until 2030, which means there'll be a 20-year gap between these assessments of kids' writing. And the NAEP tests reading every two years. And I think that's just a reflection of how we haven't really given writing the attention it deserves.
PA:
Yes, definitely. And the NAEP scores have given us an indication that we have to have some attention to writing.
NW:
Yep.
PA:
Well tell me, Natalie, how has writing been taught in the past and what's the dominant approach today?
NW:
Yeah, well, I think it's clear from those test scores that whatever we've been doing hasn't been working very well for most students. The traditional approach is thought of as teaching grammar, rules of grammar, parts of speech, maybe having kids diagram sentences. And some people feel like we need to do more of that. And in some ways we do, but studies going back maybe 100 years now have shown that for many kids, that kind of grammar instruction in the abstract doesn't carry over to their own writing. It's just, it's too abstract. And, so partly, I think in reaction to that research in the last 20 or 30 years, the dominant approach to the extent that we teach writing at all has been to not pay so much attention to rules of grammar conventions, but just to focus more on having kids express themselves, to develop their fluency, their voice, their writerly voice.

But, unfortunately, for most kids that hasn't really worked either. And one of the problems there I think is, well, one problem is that writing's really hard. So, if you ask kids to write at length, it just becomes harder. But often kids don't just pick up the conventions and grammar, the syntax of written language just on their own, just from reading. It often does need to be taught explicitly, but not in the abstract. It needs to be taught in the context of students' own writing. And so we haven't been doing enough of that. And it's hard when you ask students to write at length, to deal with grammar mistakes and things, and syntax errors in the context of students' own writing, because you may be getting page after page of error-filled prose, and that can be as a teacher, it's kind of overwhelming. Where do you begin? And for students, of course, it could be very discouraging to get a lot of red marks back on your written work. So, I think those are some of the problems that we've had.
PA:
Right. So, what's happened in the past, in a shift to what's happened in the present, would be two different approaches. But what it sounds like, Natalie, is we need to meet some kids somewhere in the middle, right? Make the abstract concrete, make it real for them as we still give that explicit, direct instruction in understanding grammar, but also practical application. Would you say that's a summation of what you've just said?
NW:
Yes. And there's one thing that I didn't mention. I think that is definitely the case. If a kid is writing a fragment of a sentence and she thinks it's a sentence, but it's missing a verb, then you don't even need to, especially if kids are young, you don't need to say, "You need to add a verb." But you can say, "Well, what are they doing? We don't know what they're doing." And that's a more functional approach. The other problem we've had with the way we've approached writing instruction though, is that we've really tried to teach it in isolation from the content of the curriculum. And so this more recent approach, which is sometimes called Writers' Workshop, where kids don't worry too much about the conventions, just write, they're often writing about their personal experience.

That's been the dominant approach until fairly recently. And more recently, there's been more emphasis on well we need to get kids to write more expository writing, more analytical writing, argumentative or persuasive writing. But often there'll be a separate writing curriculum with its own topics. And maybe just a couple of paragraphs, a few paragraphs of information about those topics. The kids may not have that much information to write about those topics in the writing curriculum, but also with both of these approaches, either writing about personal experience or opinion or writing about a separate topic in a separate writing curriculum, we're not using the power of writing to build the kind of knowledge we really want kids to acquire. So, one of the problems that we need to solve is really not that difficult. We have to ask kids to write about the content in social studies, in science, even in math, across the curriculum, because not only will that help them acquire writing skills, it's also going to help them acquire the knowledge in those subjects that we want them to acquire.
PA:
Oh, excellent. There are so many aspects of what you just said, Natalie, that are just warming my heart, writing in response to text and topics, the power and the knowledge gained through writing. Those are all things that are just making me very, very excited about what you're sharing with educators here. And when you think about the idea of those grammar concepts, taking a look at the functions of words, asking questions so they understand who or what did it, what did they do? What did they do it to? When, where, how, which one, how many, what kind? So, these are things that we want students to be able to understand when they're writing so that they can use the correct word, not necessarily labeling as a noun or a verb, but what's the function and how can it be used. I see wonderful application there. Well, Natalie, you mentioned some challenges you see with these approaches that we've just discussed. What method do you think would work better?
NW:
Well, I think one of the challenges that I didn't really go into is that writing, as I mentioned, I think is really difficult, more difficult than reading. It imposes a really heavy load on working memory. And we've been asking kids to write at length from really the get go. And if you're an inexperienced writer at any grade level, any age, it's quickly going to become overwhelming to write at length because you're juggling all sorts of things. If you're really little, you might be juggling letter formation and spelling, which of course is notoriously difficult in English, word choice, and organizing your thoughts and then the content you're writing about. And so one challenge here that needs to be addressed is how to make writing less overwhelming. Because if it's too overwhelming, kids are not going to get the knowledge-building benefits of writing. And they're also probably not going to learn to write well. And so the most effective way to modulate that cognitive load, we don't want to reduce it because you need to be expending some effort in order to be learning something. But to modulate that cognitive load, we should start writing instruction at the sentence level, if that's what kids need, no matter what grade level they're in. There are a lot of kids in high school who still have not learned to construct a good sentence, not because they can't, but because they haven't been explicitly taught how to do so. And not only is that going to impose a heavy cognitive load on them that's going to prevent them from really getting the benefits of writing. It's also going to prevent them from becoming good writers, because if you can't write a good sentence, you're unlikely to be able to produce a good paragraph or a good essay.

So, that is certainly one thing that I think any effective writing approach needs to do. It needs to start at the sentence level if that's what students need. It needs to embed writing instruction as much as possible in the content, the core content of the curriculum. And then thirdly, those grammar and conventions I was talking about, those need to be taught in the context of students' own writing. And as I mentioned, that's going to be easier if you're not asking students to write at length. So, it's going to be easier to do that if you're starting at the sentence level.
PA:
Great, Natalie. So, meeting students where they are with that explicit instruction. I heard that a number of times. We have to explicitly teach that writing. And I love your analogy of juggling. There are so many literacy skills we have to consider that students will need to juggle when writing and it is a more difficult, challenging literacy skill. I'd like to say it's the epitome of all literacy skills. Well, what's the relationship between writing and reading comprehension? Can you expound on that?
NW:
Sure. I'd say there are two connections or relationships. One is, as I mentioned, writing really helps sort of cement information in long-term memory. And it's known by cognitive psychologists the more general information you have in long-term memory, the more knowledge you've got, the better you are at understanding whatever you're trying to read. So, that's one relationship. But in addition to that, the language of written text is almost always more complex than spoken language. It's got its own vocabulary words like "despite" or "moreover," and its own complex syntax with lots of clauses and various other things that we just don't hear much in conversation.

And if kids are going to be able to understand written text on their own, they need to become familiar with that sophisticated language and syntax of written text. One way to familiarize them with it is through reading aloud from complex texts that they may not be able to read yet themselves. But even more powerful is to teach them to use that kind of vocabulary and that kind of syntax in their own writing, teach them how to construct a sentence with a subordinating conjunction, etc. If they can do that themselves, they're going to be in a much better position to understand that kind of structure, that syntax, that vocabulary, when they encounter it in their reading.
PA:
That practice of actually creating will help them when they encounter these types of complex sentences in writing.
NW:
Yeah.
PA:
When students learn to write well, do we see improvement in other areas as well? For example, content-area classes, motivation, and speaking and listening skills. Are any of those impacted?
NW:
Absolutely. As I mentioned, when students write about the content they're learning in any subject area that enhances their learning, it boosts their learning. And there are studies that support that. So, science, math, social studies, all of that. Writing about that content is going to boost learning. And then certainly motivation. Teachers have told me, "Oh, my students just hate to write. And the teachers at my school hate to teach it." One of them said, "We'd rather jump off a building." And I think the problem there is often, it's not that kids don't want to write. It's that they haven't been explicitly taught how to do it. And once you show them how to construct a sentence and how to put a paragraph together, what I've heard is that reluctant writers often become eager writers. And that of course has also to do with the content of the curriculum.

One problem, especially at the elementary level, is there really isn't much content in the curriculum. And so kids don't have much to write about because we've been focusing more on reading comprehension skills and strategies, and the topics might change from day to day. But if you do spend at least a couple of weeks on a topic and do that in an engaging way, that often also really increases the motivation to write because kids are excited about what they're learning and they want to write about it. And then speaking and listening skills. Definitely I think there's a carryover there. It's kind of a two-way street. I think you kind of need to start with speaking and listening. So, for example, when you're introducing a new writing strategy, it's important to do that orally and collaboratively. And again, that has something to do with cognitive load.

If kids are trying to do it on their own, it could become overwhelming. And especially if they're writing, trying to write while they're experimenting with a new strategy. But listening and speaking are easier. They impose less of a cognitive load. So, that frees up more space and working memory to take in new information. And that could be content information, but it could also be a new way to put a sentence together. So, how to use an apositive, for example, which is a phrase describing a noun. We want to do that orally first. And we also want to embed that in content that students are familiar with, so that also can modulate the cognitive load.

But then in addition to that direction, going from speaking and listening to being able to do these things in writing, once kids do learn to construct complex sentences, etc., in their own writing, that often will carry over into their spoken language and their spoken language will become more sophisticated as well. This is something that teachers will say once they've tried this different kind of approach. And it also has to do with kids' self-concept and their self-confidence. When you explicitly teach a kid to express themselves coherently in writing, they feel more powerful, that they can do this. And I think it really has the power to change their concepts of who they are and what they can do and what they deserve from life.
PA:
So, beginning with the oral can help lead to building those reading skills and opportunities to express themselves.
NW:
Yeah.
PA:
So, I'd like you to provide some examples of writing activities. You have done that throughout our conversation together, but just to be a little bit more explicit about those writing activities that build writing skills and knowledge simultaneously.
NW:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of different activities and I think what people may be familiar with, if they're familiar with any kind of sentence-level activity, is what's often called sentence combining, where you give kids maybe three simple sentences and ask them to combine those into one longer sentence. And there are different ways they can do that. They could use conjunctions, they can use various techniques. And that has been researched and it's been found to be effective at helping students construct more complex sentences. But what it doesn't do is really build knowledge in a powerful way because it's giving kids all the information. If you give them three sentences, they don't need to really retrieve anything from long-term memory and put it in their own words. So, there are other kinds of sentence-level activities that haven't yet been researched the way sentence combining has been, but which I really hope there will be some research done on them because these other kinds of sentence-level activities can both teach writing skills and also build knowledge and build analytical abilities at the same time, helping kids connect bits of information.

So, for example, even something as basic as the difference between a complete sentence and a sentence fragment can be used as a way of building knowledge, as well as sentence-level skills, mechanical skills. So, what you can do rather than just providing the definition of a sentence, it's got a subject and a verb and it expresses a complete thought, which is probably going to be too abstract for a lot of students. You can give students a list of phrases, groups of words that are not punctuated and have them as a first step distinguish between the ones that are complete sentences and the ones that are fragments. And repeating that kind of activity and giving feedback, that helps kids absorb at a kind of gut level the difference. What is a complete sentence? Which is really pretty complicated. I mean, it seems basic, but there are high school students and beyond who don't really have that firmly in their heads.

And then once they've identified which are the sentences and which are the fragments, first they capitalize and punctuate the sentence, which is an important thing to know. But the knowledge building comes in when they need to turn the fragments into complete sentences. And to do that, they have to draw on knowledge they have in long-term memory. They have to retrieve that and they have to put it into their own words. So, for example, and as I mentioned, this can and should be embedded in any curriculum content. So, let's say you're teaching kids about maps in social studies. So, you could have a list of those groups of words. They identify the sentences. They identify which ones are the fragments, and then they have to fix the fragment. So, let's say you have a fragment that just says, "Shows the cardinal directions." Well, a kid would think, well, what is it that shows the cardinal directions?

Oh, a compass rose. And then they turn that into a complete sentence by writing, "A compass rose shows the cardinal directions." And that's reinforcing that knowledge. It's also helping kids understand what distinguishes a sentence from a fragment. And just one other activity I'll mention that can be very powerful is giving kids a sentence stem in the beginning of a sentence and asking them to complete it in three different ways with three different conjunctions, "because," "but," and "so." And each of those conjunctions is going to require kids to retrieve a different kind of information from long-term memory, put it in their own words. And it's also not all kids even pick up using those simple conjunctions just from their reading. And as I mentioned, this could be embedded in any content. So, let's say it's math class. Well, you could give kids a sentence stem like "Fractions are like decimals."

And then they have to complete it with these three different ways. So, they could write, "Fractions are like decimals because they are all parts of wholes." For "but" they could write, "But they're written differently." And for "so" they could write, "Fractions are like decimals so they can be used interchangeably." And all of these activities are laying the groundwork for more complex, not only sentence-level construction, but also for length-year writing. And so for example, once kids have the conjunction "but" down, and that's going to be more difficult than "because." It's asking for contrasting information, change of direction, then you could go on to "Although fractions are like decimals," which again is a construction that we often don't hear in conversation. So, you're introducing them to that subordinated conjunction and that language of written text.
PA:
Natalie, just listening to you share these practical examples of how to improve writing instruction has really warmed my heart. And I know I said that before, but it's warmed even more. Often as educators, we look at the end goal, right? What do we want our students to be able to do? Write a multiparagraph essay, but beginning at that sentence level, right? Starting there to build students up. Building that knowledge as you talked about, that working memory, that information that students are learning into that long-term memory, reinforcing through writing. Thank you for those practical, simple strategies that can be applied in any content area. Thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Natalie. Please tell our listeners how they can learn more about you and how they can follow you on social media.
NW:
Well, they can find me at my website, nataliewexler.com and they can contact me through the website. Also, I'm on Twitter. My handle is @NatWexler and I also have a free Substack newsletter called Minding The Gap, which they are welcome to subscribe to.
PA:
Thanks, Natalie. It's been a pleasure having you. Thank you for joining us.
NW:
Thanks very much, Pam. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Pam Austin:
This is Pam Austin bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you.
Narrator:
This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/edview360. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.

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How Explicit Writing Instruction Can Compensate for Gaps in Background Knowledge

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Narrator: Welcome to EDVIEW360. Natalie Wexler: It's not that kids don't want to write. It's that they haven't been explicitly taught how to do it. And once you show them how to construct a sentence and how to put a paragraph together, what I've heard is that reluctant writers often become eager writers.

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Video Courses

Developed with expert contributor Dr. Margie Gillis of Literacy How, this course provides a research-based framework for teachers to ensure that their students become competent writers in early elementary school. Teachers will learn the processes and skills their students need in order to write fluently. They will also learn methods for effective writing instruction.

Provides a

Certificate of Training Learn More

K-3 educators

K-3 administrators

K-3 stakeholders

By the End of This Course You'll Be Able To

Teachers will learn about the processes and skills needed for fluent writing.

Teachers will be able to identify the most impactful instructional practices to ensure that their writing instruction is meaningful, engaging and effective for their students.

Teachers will be able to implement the basics of effective writing instruction in their classrooms.

Learn at Your Own Pace

You don't have to finish the course all in one sitting. In fact, we recommend you take this course a little bit at a time, incorporating what you've learned in the classroom.

Earn IACET CEUs

In order to pass and receive IACET CEUs for this course, you will first need to complete all the lessons, then complete the end of course assessment with a score of 80% or higher.

Free Guided Resources

As you go through a course, we'll introduce you to free resources that will help you implement what you're learning.

Never Learn Alone

Have a question on what you're learning in the course or how to use a resource? Reach out to the Cox Campus community for advice or to lend a helping hand to others.

1. Writing Lesson 1: Introduction to Teaching Writing

In this lesson you will learn about the complex factors behind your students' writing development.

2. Writing Lesson 2: How to Teaching Writing

In this lesson, you will learn the HOW of teaching writing with a research-based approach.

3. Writing Lesson 3: What to Teach

In this lesson, you will get a handle on the essential writing skills you need to teach.

4. Writing Lesson 4: Writing Instruction in Practice

In this lesson, you will think through how to implement research-based writing instruction in your classroom.

5. Teaching Writing to K-3 End of Course Assessment

In this lesson, you will take the end-of-course assessment. You must score 80% or higher to pass the assessment and receive your certificate of completion.

"I get excited with teachers when we observe students using Tier 2 words spontaneously in their conversations."

Pre-K Coach, Consultant, & Speech-Language Pathologist

"I have learned so much to take back to my classroom. I'm using these learning experiences to help strengthen the language of each child and I see a difference each day in the children's language."

"I enjoy learning new ways to interact with children and to help them become the best they can be and be able to succeed in life to the fullest."

What is Cox Campus?

The Cox Campus is the digital outreach platform for the Rollins Center for Language & Literacy. Our team is composed of experienced teachers, early learning and language experts, neuroscientists, school leaders, speech language pathologists and authorities in adult learning and curriculum design to give all children access to the Science of Reading to change the odds for all children.

What do I get when I sign up for Cox Campus?

When you sign up for the Cox Campus, you'll get access to interactive, video-based courses, hundreds of free printable resources, virtual workshops and webinars from early childhood development experts, and a community of child-pacing professionals and families.

Who should join the Cox Campus?

The Cox Campus is for all child-facing adults to work to improve child outcomes and positively impact learning. We have courses and content designed for educators, school district leaders, medical professionals, childcare providers, families, and more.

How much is the Cox Campus?

Everything on the Cox Campus is available at no cost - ever. Thanks to generous partner investments and grant funding, the Cox Campus creates online courses and resources for child-facing adults so literacy is a reality for every child.

How are the courses and resources created?

All the resources and courses on Cox Campus are created based on the latest research and science in early childhood development. Childhood development experts at the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School create all of the content based on strategies they implement in real classrooms.

How often is new content released?

New courses, resources, and teaching guides are released frequently. All of the content on Cox Campus is designed to help teachers, families, and community leaders with challenges they may be facing right now.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Developed with expert contributor Dr. Margie Gillis of Literacy How, this course provides a research-based framework for teachers to ensure that their students become competent writers in early elementary school. Teachers will learn the processes and skills their students need in order to write fluently. They will also learn methods for effective writing instruction.

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Sometimes it looks like children's writing evolves naturally: from a few squiggles, to random strings of letters, to increasingly conventional writing, and eventually progressing to well-crafted essays. But just like learning to read, learning to write is not a natural process. To ensure that all students become skilled writers, we need to provide systematic, explicit instruction, combined with many opportunities for them to write and to receive feedback.

To write well, students must develop a broad set of skills.

Basic writing skills: These include spelling, capitalization, punctuation, handwriting and keyboarding, and sentence structure (e.g., learning to eliminate run-ons and sentence fragments). Basic writing skills are sometimes called the "mechanics" of writing.

Generating text: Text generation involves putting our thoughts into words, what might be thought of as the "content" of writing. Text generation includes word choice (vocabulary), elaboration of detail, and clarity of expression.

Planning and editing: Especially after the earliest grades, good writing involves planning, revising, and editing your own work. These skills are indispensable in becoming a good writer, and increasingly so as students advance into the middle and secondary grades.

Writing knowledge: Writing knowledge includes an understanding of discourse and genre - for example, understanding that a narrative is organized differently than an informational text. Students also need to learn that they are writing for an audience so they need to convey meaning clearly to the people who will be reading their work.

Becoming a strong writer involves learning, practicing and coordinating all of these skills. Writing may be the most difficult thing our students learn in school because it requires them to apply what they have learned as readers (phonics, vocabulary, text structure), plus additional skills (planning, considering audience, handwriting, revising, etc.) to generate their own work. But just as explicit and sequential instruction can help ensure that all students learn to read, the same is true for writing. To enable our students to write well, we need to help them by explicitly teaching the components of effective writing.

Letter of completion

Reading Rockets does not offer CEUs for this self-study course. After completing this module and successfully answering the post-test questions, you'll be able to download a Letter of Completion.

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Sometimes it looks like children's writing evolves naturally: from a few squiggles, to random strings of letters, to increasingly conventional writing, and eventually progressing to well-crafted essays. But just like learning to read, learning to write is not a natural process.

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Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Joan Sedita:

There is this relationship between reading and writing. And what I found in writing this and in the professional development work that I do, that many of the components that we need to teach to students, skills, strategies, are things that also support usually their reading comprehension. So, when you think about one of the strands, which is text structure, students need to know about text structure to organize their writing, but it also, if they know about text structure, it gives them clues to making meaning when they're reading. When you think about sentences and syntax, developing those skills help them write better sentences, but it also helps them parse the meaning out of really long, complex sentences when they're reading. And then of course in phonics, there's the decoding part of phonics, and then there's the encoding where the spelling part is. So, it's like a yin and a yang, and you almost can't separate them.

Narrator:

You've just heard from Joan Sedita, author of the popular book, The Writing Rope: A Framework for Explicit Writing Instruction in All Subjects. Ms. Sedita is our guest today on EDVIEW360.

Hannah Irion-Frake:

Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. I'm Hannah Irion-Frake, an educator from Pennsylvania, and I'm excited to be your host today as we talk with Joan Sedita, author of the popular book The Writing Rope: A Framework for Explicit Writing Instruction in All Subjects. I had the pleasure of reading The Writing Rope as soon as I could get my hands on it, and it is an amazing and much-needed resource for all teachers of writing. As a classroom teacher, I found this book to be really straightforward and easy to understand and put into practice. I am so honored to be here talking with Joan Sedita today.

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of The Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker, and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences. Her book is getting a lot of attention and we welcome the chance to speak with her about writing, reading, and ways to teach writing to elementary students. We are so glad to have you with us today, Ms. Sedita. We're excited to discuss the importance of writing instruction. Let's get started.

JS:

Thank you so much, Hannah, and also to EDVIEW360 for giving me this opportunity to talk about something that I love to talk about, and that's how we teach writing.

HF:

Awesome. So, we'll get right into it. Many listeners may already be familiar with The Reading Rope framework, but tell us, why did you create The Writing Rope framework?

JS:

Yeah. Well, the ability to write is just as essential to learning as the ability to read, but unfortunately, schools don't allocate sufficient instructional time or resources for writing instruction. Right? And many educators, including those who know a lot about reading instruction, have limited knowledge about effective writing instruction. If you ask most teachers who play any role in teaching reading, if you say, "What are the components of reading," they can at least name the basic five, often referred to as the Fab Five. They were identified by The National Reading Panel 20 years ago: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. And many of these same educators can describe all the skills that are represented in the strands in Hollis Scarborough's Reading Rope that must be integrated at the same time in order to support skilled reading. But when you ask these same educators to say, "What are the components of effective writing instruction," they're not sure.

Too many just view it as this monolithic task. "We're going to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. And it's huge. It's just as huge as reading, but it's just really hard for people to unpack what writing instruction means. So, I really felt like that we needed a framework to help teachers understand the complexity of writing and that it also has multicomponents. For a long time, I used to use the metaphor of a wagon wheel, talking about the spokes in the wheel as the different components of writing. And if any spoke in a wagon wheel is broken or is not strong, what does it do to integrity of the whole wheel? But over the years where Hollis's Reading Rope metaphor has become so well known, I decided that probably that rope metaphor would make sense for writing as well. So, that's why I ended up switching to that. I just thought it would more readily resonate with educators because they could make that connection. So, that's basically why I created it and why I made it a rope.

HF:

I can definitely relate to that as a classroom teacher. I love Scarborough's Reading Rope. I have it posted in my classroom. And I will very soon have The Writing Rope, I think, posted right next to it because it does give such an excellent metaphor for all the pieces and helps us keep the big picture in mind while also looking at the strands that go into good writing instruction, for sure. So, there is so much attention out there right now around the science of reading. Why is the same attention just starting to follow suit for writing instruction? Or do you think it is?

JS:

That's a great question. Given how essential writing is, it's always surprised me that people have not paid it the attention that it needs. I think ever since The National Reading Panel put out the report and then we had a period of time through the No Child Left Behind funding, Reading First initiative, a ton of focus was placed on reading, and it should have been. It really shed a light on the reading issues that we have in the United States, but I think a result of that is all this funding and attention that was put on reading. And it was again, well needed, attentional time spent, especially in core reading in the beginning years of school. I think what happened as a result is that the writing got sidelined in an attempt to find more time to teach reading.

There's so much that has to be taught. And you've had schools trying to find at least 90 minutes, many 120 minutes, which is important. But I think in that quest to find more time for reading instruction, whatever writing instruction was happening, I think, got set aside. So, that's part of, I think, what happened. There's also been so much more funding and attention paid toward reading research, which is great, but it doesn't mean we don't have anything about writing. Oh, a lot of times, people will say like, "What's the research? There isn't any out there." And there actually is. We do have a pretty robust collection. Steven Graham is often playing a hand in some of the meta-analysis reports that are out there. We had not too long ago, I think it came out in about 2010, we had Writing Next come out and then we had Writing to Read. And more recently, there are two Institute of Education Science Research guides, one for elementary and one for high school. And those both really summarize the research.

What I think is nice about these guides and reports is they're based on meta-analyses. And so, you don't have to go searching for a lot of different individual studies. If you're a researcher, you want to do that, but not if you're a classroom teacher. So, they summarize it for us. And I think now that these have become available, I think that people are turning their attention more to that. One other thing that I'm actually surprised that it hasn't had more of effect, and that is when the Common Core State Literacy Standards came out. And I know that a lot of states since then have modified them and adopted their own, but if you look at them, most of them are similar. And they have 10 writing standards, just like there's 10 reading standards. And I really thought that with these standards and then especially as more states started assessing students around their writing using prompts where they have to write based on evidence and information from sources, I really thought that would maybe push the needle, but that's even taken a long time.

As to the end of your question, "Or is it", I do think I am starting to see a sea change. In my work and the work with my colleagues at Keys to Literacy, we're out training teachers all over the country, and I am starting to see more requests for, "And what about writing?" So, I think that's a really good sign. It's also why I wrote The Writing Rope book because there's just not as much out there as there is for reading. And I felt that by doing a book like this that summarize the framework, it would make it easier for teachers to start to feel like they could address writing. And just one other point that reminds me of, I also think part of the reason writing maybe isn't getting the same attention is that it's hard. It's hard to write yourself. It's hard to teach kids.

I've been in training sessions. I'll never forget one where we were training some high school teachers on content writing instructional practices. And it was beginning of the day, and this one physics teacher stood up and she turned to her colleagues and she said, "Well, listen, I know we're going to be here learning about writing, and I'm sure this woman is going to make me do some writing today. And I'm going to tell you right now, I'm a horrible writer and I'm going to be embarrassed to show you my work. And that's why I'm teaching science and not English." And I just thought that was so telling. When you're in front of a group of teachers and you say, "What are you reading today or this week," everybody can raise their hand on that. And if you say, "What are you writing," it's a scary proposition. So, I think that has something to do with it as well.

HF:

That definitely resonates with me. I know that for many years, I always thought of reading and writing as being two very separate subjects. They didn't overlap very much. And I think that's a common assumption out there in public education still today, especially when you get into the secondary level. It's its own class that it happens in another room. So, I definitely think that that is accurate, that it's things are starting to shift and change. And I do love that about your book, is that there is such a buzz out there about the science of reading. And there's teachers who are saying, "Yes, give me more. I want to learn more," and there isn't anything as user-friendly about writing. But now, I feel like there is because your book is an excellent road map.

JS:

Oh. Well, great.

HF:

For how writing can fit in the classroom. Yeah.

JS:

Thank you. Actually, I'm going to pick up on something you said. There is this relationship between reading and writing. And what I found in writing this and in the professional development work that I do, that many of the components that we need to teach to students, skills, strategies, are things that also support usually their reading comprehension. So, when you think about one of the strands, which is text structure, students need to know about text structure to organize their writing, but it also, if they know about text structure, it gives them clues to making meaning when they're reading. When you think about sentences and syntax, developing those skills help them write better sentences, but it also helps them parse the meaning out of really long, complex sentences when they're reading. And then of course in phonics, there's the decoding part of phonics, and then there's the encoding where the spelling part is. So, it's like a yin and a yang, and you almost can't separate them.

HF:

Absolutely. They really are reciprocal processes, for sure. So, our next question dives a little bit more into that. How can The Writing Rope be used by teachers and other professionals?

JS:

Another excellent question. I think the framework can be used in several ways. First of all, it's meant to remind all educators about those multiple components, that writing isn't this monolithic thing and that every component is important. But I think because they're woven together as a rope, it's also meant to remind teachers that while we can talk about each item discreetly, we can offer instructional suggestions for individual parts of The Writing Rope. Ultimately, they all need to be integrated by students, and that comes with practice writing a lot. So, I think firstly, it's meant to be used as a reminder that there are all these components. Second, and it's kind of in line with that, I can see how the framework is used. And we're already seeing lots of educators, teachers, but also administrators use it this way, to take stock of their curriculum for teaching writing, their instructional practices.

And if they have writing programs or if they're thinking about purchasing a writing program, to look and say, "Are we covering everything we need to? Is our curriculum maybe really heavy on the types of writing and the structures for informational and narrative and argument, but we're neglecting sentences, which is, it's the building block?" So, the idea is that you can use it as a way to take stock of what you're doing. If you look at The Writing Rope, there's the visual and there are the strands. But within each strand, I've identified some subtopics. And I think it's almost like a list, an outline. If you go down each section of the rope and then into the subtopics, and ask yourself, "Are we providing writing instruction for skills or strategies or techniques for every item that's on here?" Because if we aren't, if we're missing something, then it's a little bit like Swiss cheese sometimes. It's got little holes here and there.

And so, I meant it as a way, as a tool, a framework to help determine that. I also wanted to emphasize...I wanted people to see it as a framework to show that writing instruction is not just the purview of English teachers or ELA teachers, that content-area teachers play an unbelievable role in supporting writing. Now, they might not be teaching spelling or other transcription skills, or they might not be teaching some of the grammar-related terminology, but when it comes to things like text structure and critical thinking for writing for sources, I really feel like every teacher can play a role in it. So, that's how I meant it to be used.

HF:

Definitely. I couldn't agree more. I think that really speaks to how The Writing Rope can be such a powerful tool for teachers in developing their knowledge as professionals. So, let's dive a little bit deeper into The Writing Rope itself. Could you walk us through the five components of The Writing Rope framework?

JS:

Sure. And I'll summarize them starting at the top, and we'll work our way down. At the top, the first strand is critical thinking. Now, what did I think should go under this strand? A whole lot of skills that are needed in order to generate the ideas that kids and students are going to be writing about, especially if they're doing any sort of creative writing. So, it's gathering their thoughts, but much of the writing we do in school, the academic writing, is related to something we're learning. So, it's also the tools that we need to gather information from our sources. This could include note taking. For those folks who know my work, they know I'm a real strong proponent of two-column notes.

It even includes some skills that some might say have to do more with reading comprehension. But if you're reading an article and you're watching a video, two sources about a subject, and then you're going to be writing a response to a prompt, whether it's in the classroom or a high-stakes test prompt, if you don't know how to search and find the relevant information and maybe annotate your source and then lift it out into the notes. But then you've got notes, it's just a collection. So, then how do you organize all that? So, a lot of the skills that have to do with writing about what we're learning and what we're reading and what we're watching.

The other thing that I put under here is the stages of the writing process. They've been around for a while. Hayes and Flowers started studying this in the 1960s, trying to identify what are the stages in the writing process that successful writers use? And then if we knew what those were, maybe we can begin to teach those to students. And people describe them in different ways. It's organizing, drafting, writing, then revising. There's a little acronym that we developed here at Keys to Literacy to help kids remember that. We call it The Process Writing Routine. And the T is for Thinking, the P in process is for Planning, the W in Writing is for writing, and then the last is your Revision. But this involves critical thinking. There's so much that has to happen, especially at the thinking and planning before you write. So, that's what's under the critical thinking strand.

The next one down is syntax or sentence. And this is where issues related to the grammar and syntactic awareness come in, developing students' ability to have a good sense about what a good solid sentence looks like, but then also to elaborate our sentences. So, oftentimes as students move from fourth into fifth and beyond, they still write these very short, stilted sentences. And we start to say, "So, what strategies and techniques can we teach them for elaborating their sentences?" And then of course, punctuation comes into this. So, it's all about the sentence level, which to me is a major building block for writing. If you don't get the sentences right, it's going to be really hard to get anything longer beyond that.

The third strand in the rope is text structure, and there's quite a few things I put under here. I tucked in under here. Let's start with the broadest level. And if we draw from what the Common Core often identified as the three main types of writing. So, we've got our narrative, our informational and our opinion/argument. Opinion for the earlier grades, more formal argument for the upper. Those three major genres, or types, a lot of students don't know the difference. What is the purpose for each? Within those major types of writing, we have things...And these are very aligned to some of the substandards in the Common Core writing standards. Things like introductions, and conclusions, and body development. And the body is going to be developed really different for an informational piece. It's going to be big ideas and sub ideas. Narrative, it's going to be driven by order of events. And our opinion and argument, it's going to be organized around reasons and supporting evidence and maybe a counterclaim in a rebuttal. So, the broader structures of text.

Next down is paragraph. And I think along with sentences, paragraph structure is another one of those major building blocks. And we have many older students who still don't get the concept of a paragraph. They just keep writing or they indent every once in a while because they're supposed to, but they don't really have a sense that it's all about main ideas. When we shift from one main idea to another, it's about the same topic, but we're saying something different about that topic, it's time to start a new paragraph, and a lot of our students don't understand that. Another thing that's tucked in under here are patterns of organization. So, what do I mean by that? There are some major patterns. We've got description or explanation, we've got sequence, we've got cause and effect, compare, contrast, problem, solution.

These are different organizational structures. Sometimes you might have a paragraph that's just all one, we're just describing, or we're just doing a compare, contrast. Sometimes within the same paragraph, you might integrate two. The other thing that goes hand in hand with this, which is the last sub-bullet under text structure, and that's linking words or transition words and phrases. These are little golden words that they're just so valuable. And many of our students who struggle with writing because they have low levels of language, they don't come naturally, and yet they're what you need to make connections between sentences and paragraphs. And very often, linking and transition words are tied to certain patterns of organization. So, if you're doing a chronology, you might have first, next, last. If you're doing compare and contrast, you might use the word, however. So, there's an awful lot that I put here under text structure.

The fourth is writing craft. And this is where word choice comes in, awareness of vocabulary, but all within the context of an awareness of what's referred to as TAP, which stands for Task, Audience, and Purpose. When you are writing, you really need to keep the TAP and especially the audience in mind because the way you write to a certain audience will be different than the way you write to another, and that includes your word choice. In the writing craft is also where I put things like literary devices. And this can begin really early with young children just thinking about how you might use dialogue between characters. But as students move up into the grades, it can include a lot of other literary devices. I would say this about the first four that I've summarized. This last one, writing craft, does tend to be more the purview of the writing teacher, or the English, ELA teacher, whereas critical thinking certainly and text structure, any teacher of any subject plays an important role with that, and I also think with sentences.

The last strand is transcription skills, and this includes spelling and handwriting/keyboarding. Now, we really would like for most students, before they enter to grade four, to have sufficient phonics knowledge about the English orthographic system and about how letters map to sounds, which is what is the basis for a lot of English spelling. There's morphology involved, but we'd like students to have spelling pretty much under their belt, maybe not for the longest eight-syllable, scientific words, but so that they don't have to really focus on spelling while they're composing. But unfortunately, a lot of students enter fourth grade and beyond, and spelling is not automatic. And that really becomes problematic. And I think it's the same with handwriting or keyboarding.

Now, these fall under transcription because they're things we need to literally transcribe on the page, the words we want to say. They're not critical thinking though. The critical thinking is the composing part of writing. But if we have students who are struggling with the spelling and the handwriting, they are putting so much attention to that, that there isn't much left to focus on the composing. It's not that different than what happens with reading. If kids are still struggling with fluency to decode the words, it takes away from the energy to make meaning. So, those are the five strands in the rope. And as we said before, we can talk about each one separately and we can share instructional practices within each strand, but ultimately, students have to integrate them all at the same time in order to successfully write.

HF:

Absolutely. And I think that's what makes this Writing Rope framework so helpful for teachers in the classroom, is it shows them all the pieces and the little parts that go into it, but then emphasizes the big picture and how it all comes together for sure. So, knowing all these pieces and all the parts of The Writing Rope is definitely one piece of the puzzle. That's the teacher knowledge part that we spoke about. But then I'm always thinking about, as a classroom teacher, how this works in my own classroom. So, how can teachers plan and deliver the comprehensive, explicit, and evidence-based writing instruction in the classroom?

JS:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, The Writing Rope tells you the what, but your question has to do with the how.

HF:

Yes.

JS:

And I'm going to come back to the basic tenets of explicit, systematic instruction, which benefits no matter what we're teaching. I mean, we hear about it a lot with reading, but it applies to writing, but it applies to anything. If you're teaching a soccer team how to kick the ball down the field, explicit, systematic instruction. So, I think that the first thing that teachers need to be thinking about is any skill or strategy or technique that makes up the different strands of the rope, we've got to explicitly teach kids. We cannot commit what I call a suicide. That's not a real word, but it's when teachers assume that students have basic foundational skills. They assume they have transcription skills. They assume they know how to write a sentence. They assume that when they're writing an argument piece. They know how to state their position or their claim. And I think the older students they get, the more we commit a suicide.

So, we can't assume that they have foundational skills. And when we teach these skills or strategies or techniques, we want to do it in a very explicit way. In the Writing book, and in much of the PD that makes up the work I do in schools, there are seven teaching principles that I identify in the beginning of the book that I want teachers to be keeping in mind throughout. The first is Pearson and Gallagher's gradual release of responsibility, which many folks these days recognize as the I, We, You, gradually releasing where the teacher is going to explicitly explain a skill or strategy, model it using think aloud, then shift to the, We Do it stage where there's a lot of guided practice, students work collaboratively, they work individually until they get to the independent stage.

So, that's the first one. The second is explicit instruction of specific writing skills at every stage of the writing process. And that, by the way, is one of the findings that comes up in the Writing Next and the Writing to Read reports of meta-analyses of research, that we need to explicitly teach strategies, not just for writing, but also for thinking and planning and revising as well. Third, differentiate our instruction. Not all students are going to follow the same path through I, We, You. We want to provide lots of scaffolds. And that's one of the things I've tried to do in the book, is provide examples of scaffolds. One of the things I like about what the publisher, Brookes Publishing, enabled me to do is they have a website where a lot of the templates and handouts that you could use with students, those are available electronically, and I really wanted to make sure that teachers had the tools that they needed. So, scaffolds.

Another one is opportunities for peer collaboration at all stages of the writing process. We know from research that well, look, let's face it, writing is a communicative thing, or we want students to believe that, that it's not just something you do and the only person who reads it is your teacher and gives you a grade. It is a way to communicate. And so one of the things we've learned is that when students have an opportunity to collaborate with their peers, also with the teacher, while at the thinking stage, while they're thinking about what they're going to say, at the planning stage, how are they going to organize it, at the writing stage, you work together to craft a sentence or a paragraph, and then certainly at the revision stage where we're revising for content, but then also for things like spelling and punctuation and that sort of thing.

And we know from the research that when students have opportunities to collaborate, it makes them much more motivated and engaged in the writing process. So, that's another one. Another is the use of mentor texts as models. We all learn by emulating how others write. I often use this as an example. Not too long ago, I was in a car accident, and I needed to complete an accident report at the police station, and I had never done one before. So, what do you think the first thing I asked for was, "Can I see a few examples?" And then once I saw how others wrote them up, I figured, "OK, now I get it." And that's true for all of us. So, if there's a particular technique, you're maybe trying to show kids how to use transition words or how to maybe elaborate a sentence, show them examples in mentor text.

So, that was another one of the principles. And then finally, just increasing the amount the students write in all subjects. They can be short, little quick writes, they can be longer writing tests that are spread out over time, but we want students writing all day long, every day, every week. So, those are the seven principles. I think that explicit instruction, and I'll come back to it again, I think we want to be really explicit and use models to show students how to incorporate transitions, those small little words. So, I think the idea is that the Writing book and many of the other writing books that I've written as part of some of my trainings, the Keys to Content Writing, Keys to Early Writing, the idea with all of them is take what we've learned from the research about effective instruction, let's make sure we define what those components are, which is what The Writing Rope does. But then now, let's make that connection to the classroom from research to practice. And what does that look like in instructional activities and things that we can do day to day?

HF:

Awesome. Thank you. I think those are really great principles, especially for teaching writing, but even just in general for all teaching. The importance of explicit instruction is just, it can't be overlooked, for sure. This next question is illustrated so clearly in your book, The Writing Rope, but would you please explain to listeners the difference between learn to write and write to learn?

JS:

Yes. And that is so similar to a phrase that's attributed to the Great Jean Shaw, right? Learning to read versus reading to learn.

HF:

Yes.

JS:

And I think the difference between these two phrases emphasizes that distinction between explicit instruction of writing skills, and then on the flip, teaching students how to use those writing skills, how to apply them in combination to write for the purpose of communicating or learning. And the first strand in The Writing Rope that focuses on teaching skills, strategies, such as the note taking that I mentioned, that's really about what they need in order to write to learn. They're writing about something they're reading or they're watching or that they've learned in their content classroom. And that's the ultimate goal of our writing in school, is to help us learn. And that's why I called it the critical thinking strand. On the other hand, so if you're writing a summary of something or you're writing a reflection, a journal reflection about maybe characters in a story, or maybe it's something really short, it's a little five-minute quick write about a science experiment that you did.

The problem is without the sufficient instruction and practice that's really important in developing the learning to write skills, so about text structure, about how to write a quality sentence, how to do paragraph structure. Without that, it's really hard to then start writing to learn because you're putting so much energy toward the skill itself. So, I also think that the writing to learn part of the rope is the thing that I hope to grab content teachers to say, "You can play a role in writing." Yes, it's the writing teacher and the English and the ELA teacher who's going to do the learning to write stuff, but you play a really important role as well.

HF:

Yes, I love that distinction. I think it's helpful when we talk about reading and very helpful when we talk about writing as well.

JS:

Yeah.

HF:

Definitely. So, what tools and resources can help teachers who are committed to teaching writing, following this Writing Rope framework, following your framework?

JS:

Well, first, I think educators should familiarize themself with the research findings. And I mentioned some of them. All you need to do is an Internet search for Writing Next, Writing to Read, or the two Institute of Ed Science reports. Their titles are Teaching Elementary School Students to be Effective Writers. And then in the upper, it's Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively. Just do an Internet search of these titles, and it'll get you those guides and reports. You don't need to read anything more than that, but I think it is important to be armed and equipped to know what the latest research says. We don't want teachers to be teaching writing based on the way someone taught it to them, or maybe some theory that somebody has come up with. We really want it to be grounded in research as much as possible.

So, I think that's the first place to start, but I think there are a lot of resources out there that are free that teachers can start to tap into. It could be something very specific, like a list of transition words, or it could be something longer, recorded webinars. There are an awful lot of materials like that that I've made available over the years. The Keys to Literacy website, has a free resources section. And during the pandemic, I did quite a lot of webinars about various topics that either Keys did or other organizations. And they're all archived there, and they're free. Take advantage of them. There are printables and downloadables that people can use as well. Besides The Writing Rope book itself, there are two other books I've written that provide really practical, instructional suggestions: Keys to Content Writing, Keys to Early Writing. But besides the materials that I've made available out there to folks, there are lots of other good people doing work around writing. Just start doing Google searches and reading up and trying things out.

HF:

Thank you so much for pointing us in the right direction for resources. I know I'm taking notes of things I want to go explore myself as well. So, I want to thank you so much for joining us today, Ms. Sedita. It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you. Please tell our listeners how they can learn more about you.

JS:

I'd say go to the Keys to Literacy website, just do an Internet search of that. My bio is there, and all of the works that I've done, and a lot of the free things I've written and put together over the years. That's probably the best way to connect with me and learn more about my work.

HF:

Excellent.

JS:

In fact, Hannah, I want to again thank you and also the EDVIEW360 to give me this opportunity to talk about The Writing Rope.

HF:

Thank you again. It has been such an honor to chat with you today.

Narrator:

This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/edview360. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts, and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.

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The Writing Rope | A Framework for Evidence-Based Writing Instruction

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Writing is a task as complex and multifaceted as reading—but it’s often taught as a single skill. Our podcast guest is Joan Sedita, the successful author of the popular book, The Writing Rope. Her book and the innovative framework she created weaves multiple skills and strategies into five fundament…