Dr. Graham also discusses several effective writing instructional strategies and one that I found to be the most useful in my own teaching is self-regulated strategy development. In this strategy, students would monitor their own writing process as they set their own goals and work towards meeting those goals. This resonates with my teaching, as my instruction always includes students working towards independence and the ability to monitor their own work progress. In completing writing assignments, I provide students with a checklist that helps them regulate and organize their tasks while double-checking to see if they had met all of the requirements in completing their written task. Also, I provide my students with the rubric for the task and provide them the time and opportunity to assess their written work based on the rubric that I would be using to assess their work. In doing so, students are able to see their written work from the teacher’s perspective and can analyze their work based on a concrete rubric that the teacher will use. Providing students the opportunity to self-regulate their writing process allows them to reflect on their progress and the final outcome while also providing them with the opportunity to make any revisions that they find necessary. In having students actively think about their writing process, they will gain the knowledge of how to construct a coherent and effective written work.

            Another writing instruction Dr. Graham explained that I heavily agreed with was grammar instruction. Because of the factor that grammar is no longer being explicitly taught to students in any grade level, majority of the students do not know how to write using proper grammar. Dr. Graham states that grammar can be taught in a similar format as sentence-combining strategy, where students take smaller sentences then combine them to construct more complex and longer sentences. Another method of teaching grammar is to provide sentence examples first, then analyze the sentence to come up with a grammatical rule for it. I find this strategy an effective way to teach grammar, as the students are receiving hands-on experience in dissecting the sentence structure on their own and then determining a possible rule that can apply to it. Although there is no longer a heavy emphasis on grammar instruction, grammar still remains an essential part of writing that holds one’s written work to a certain level of sophistication. Keeping this in mind, instructors of all contents should take grammar into consideration when grading written work and hold their students up to a certain standards as well. 

I am a strong advocate for and practice many of Graham’s recommendations for improving the skills of struggling writers.  Positive feedback is key.  When grading the writing of my students, my co-teacher and I use purple colored pens.  Red has a negative connotation and students are less likely to build the nerve to go through corrections or suggestions for improvement when their paper is scribbled up in red ink.  We always point out what they did well and what we hope they can expand on first and we present our comments in “glows” and “grows”.  You’d be surprise what a change in language can do.  We also provide our students with rubrics prior to instruction, so that they can fully review and engage with the standards and expectations of an assignment.  This way, when we grade their papers, we can reference the rubric when providing feedback.  Additionally, prior to any teacher grading, students are expected to do self and peer review before submitting written assignments.  Students review their work first using the rubric and list “glows” and “grows”, before writing a second draft.  Then their peers review their work, following the same process.  By the time students complete their third and final draft, they have reviewed feedback from themselves as well as their peers.  This ensures that by the time we review their work, they had ample time to provide the best writing piece possible and have already engaged fully not only with the task, but in providing constructive feedback for themselves and each other.  This practice increases student independence and self-maintenance of skills.

Students need to be set-up to produce goals, recognise when something makes sense or not, and finally, make modifications. The use of the KWL described in our text, Content Area Writing provides a good example for science. First, students write down anything they KNOW about say, Photosynthesis. This is basically getting them to identify any prior knowledge. They are always surprised that they know as much as they do. Normally, these answers may be one word or short phrases. Instead of censoring or editing the ideas too much, now turn them into what we want to KNOW about Photosynthesis. I did this in my class on the board and the students came up with excellent questions for their level and this stimulated curiosity. We kept a KWL chart in the front of the room and whenever we LEARNED something new, it was added to the L column. I used Entrance, Exit Tickets and Summaries and had the students add to the list over the course of topic. This evidence empowered students to build self-regulatory strategies or at least accept them as part of the process. 

Something I found to be very interesting was the idea that many teachers are not teaching this skill as well as they need to and they are not prepared to teach it. Dr. Graham says that Language Arts teachers are generally the ones who fell ready to teach writing and that they should then be responsible for the majority of teaching students to write. Other teachers need to then use it as a tool for learning in their content areas. Writing helps people to think about what that are learning. He also emphasizes the fact that students need lots of positive feedback, they need to feel good about what they are doing and this will help to encourage them to be good at it. I like the peer editing process in which he talks about students needing to find something positive to say about each others work and how that encourages them to want to include the things that get the positive comments. Something that I have seen work in math class, and could easily be transferred to writing is giving students the chance to grade each others work as well as their own work, given a rubric. I have found that students tend to be very thoughtful when trying to provide a grade or score and often describe the things they are looking for. I think that engaging in this process more will encourage students to be just as thoughtful during the process and not just after the fact.

   
 Quality writing instruction is largely dependent upon the teacher.  Teachers must come into the classroom prepared; all teachers should have writing benchmarks or guidelines.  Although not every student learns at the same pace, it will be incredibly difficult to teach any writing segment without a road-map of material you want to cover before, during, and after the writing process including flexible deadlines.  Once this road-map has been created, instruction can be altered to meet the needs of individual students, as stated by Dr. Graham during the podcast.  One way to alter instruction is through modeling.  Although all students can benefit from analyzing a quality piece of writing, for those who may be struggling through a certain step, giving them more examples of good writing can help more beneficial.  It will provide the necessary assistance needed to help them reach their goal of completing the writing assignment.  It will also provide examples of quality pieces of writing to emulate and help them think through the question “what makes this good writing”. 

Self regulated strategy development was one of the writing instructions that was mentioned in Writing Next.  One thing i found interesting and true is that students will learn strategies but not realize when they are useful to be applied. It is important for students to be able to know when they can use strategies. It is stated that students can learn this through discussion. I guess that is why there is more discussion math. 

In the podcast interview Dr. Graham provides very important lessons about pedagogy. He specifically discusses techniques strategies to help teachers improve their writing instruction. This post will discuss Dr. Graham’s approach to providing feedback, issues with grammar instruction, and sentence-combining.

Providing positive feedback is a powerful practice. Dr. Graham suggests that teachers recognize and develop a positive/encouraging way of providing feedback on written pieces. This positive feedback has the ability to engage students into the discussion on how to improve their writing. In this sense, feedback should be specific and actionable. Instead of using a red pen, which intuitively leads teachers to mark errors, perhaps using a green pen would lead teachers to provide suggestions for the learner on how to improve the piece of writing.

Dr. Graham also discusses ways on how to improve Grammar Instruction. This instruction tends to be assessed on a de-contextualized situation (for example, fill-in-the-blank or picking the correct answer type of questions). And this type of instruction, according to research, does not carry over to their writing. Dr. Graham recommends turning Grammar Instruction on its head by starting from the example (or de-contextualized situation) to the definition. Following, there is scaffolded instruction on application and then students use it in text on their own. While there is not much evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy, Dr. Graham believes that this has the potential of being more effective than the traditional approach.

When discussing Sentence-Combining instruction Dr. Graham points out a vital idea of education: “[i]t’s important to realize that there is considerable variation in what is effective for other people”. Teachers must continually realize that students have different learning styles and are gifted with multiple intelligences. In this sense, it is important to differentiate instruction to allow for multiple points of entry. Sentence-combining, the practice of combining two or more basic sentences into a compound sentence, has a positive, moderate effect on writing (Graham & Perin, p. 18). Dr. Graham emphasizes that teachers provide scaffolded assistance through modelling so that students can apply it back in the text.

These strategies and techniques for writing instruction are also important to prepare students for post-secondary life. They appear actionable and I will definitely have used some of these and will attempt to use and focus on others in the future.

References

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing
of adolescents in middle and high schools – A report to Carnegie Corporation of New
York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Graham, S. Podcast Interview with Dr. Steve Graham.

http://www.readingrockets.org/podcasts/experts/transcripts/graham/

He also stresses the importance of positive feedback. If we are able to point out the positive aspects of a student’s writing it actually encourages the students to continue to write. As oppose to giving negative feedback which will set them back. It is crucial to not tell a student that we do not like their work or a certain part of their work. Instead it is better to have the student explain the content. We allow students to advocate for themselves and also provide to us a reasoning behind why they chose to write what they wrote. 

I agree with Dr. Graham on this because, a student may not necessarily like what we tell them to read or write about but they still have to do the assignment. So, we should not ostracize them for the content they chose to write about. We can give them an opportunity to explain to us why they chose that topic which then will help us gauge what they were trying to convey by writing about this topic and how it relates to the assignment. Limiting them from writing certain things through negative feedback can discourage the student from writing in the future. 

In order to prevent this from happening with our students, Dr. Graham suggests a variety of techniques to strengthen writing instruction. I was interested in his discussion of providing student feedback in particular, as these suggestions can be applied to all different content areas, not just literacy courses. As Dr. Graham mentions at the beginning of the video, writing is very personal - more so than many other things we produce. Our writing is meant to demonstrate our own ideas and beliefs. Thus, we “want to be very careful about saying negative things about the content of what kids write.” Instead of saying, “I don’t like this part,” we can say, “I don’t know exactly what you meant there, can you tell me?” The feedback we provide can make or break a student’s confidence with their writing skills. 

As a math teacher this year, I want to be very careful to frame my feedback to students in a positive way as well, particularly for my struggling students. I think Dr. Graham’s comments on the sensitivities struggling students may have about their writing can apply to any skill in any content area. For such a stigmatized subject like math, students have a particular propensity to disengage when they struggle. I hope that ensuring that my comments highlight the positives in student work and ask for clarity rather than berate them for inaccuracy will allow students to feel more supported to challenge themselves. 

               Dr. Graham went on to discuss several effective instructional strategies, one of which is positive feedback.  He discusses that positive feedback is highly effective for struggling writers and there’s considerable evidence that pointing out positive features is beneficial to effective writing. It is very important the type feedback that we give students especially those who have learning disabilities or those who simple do not get it. It’s not about ignoring the things that need improvement in students writing, but more about picking one or two things at a time that we can focus attention on. Approaching students writing in a more positive way can encourage them to participate in discussions which will great benefit them in writing better.

               Reflecting back on Dr. Graham’s video on the several effective instructional strategies discussed, there is much evidence that reveals that they are all effective, however, at the end of it all it is the individual teacher that makes the biggest difference in the writing instruction. My goal as an educator is to be that teacher that will have a great impact on students’ writing no matter what level they are at.

 

There are many strategies, approaches and methods to teach better writing that can be done in a school-wide manner and include everything from Goal Setting to Reciprocal Teaching, and other self-regulating practices. To me, this all ties into the idea of motivation: If we are not motivated to do difficult tasks, the tasks become almost insurmountable. On the other hand, when we are motivated we can make unprecedented progress compared to the alternative. Graham uses a personal example of this, with his daughter improving her spelling dramatically through the use of a spelling videogame that she was very involved in and motivated to use. I think that, regardless of what tools and strategies teachers use in the classroom, this idea of motivation should be prevalent and scaffolded in from the ground-up. This not only should reflect in lesson plans, but also in attitude and language during any discourse of the matter. I think that no amount of pedagogy can replace the intrinsic learning abilities that exist within all students when they are interested and motivated.

I think that this concept of positive feedback applies to teacher-training and teacher education as well. Granted, negative feedback is much less likely to exist or have a comparable negative impact on a macroscopic level, but it is still worth considering how we can implement this positive attitude in teachers early on. Graham mentions the National Writing Project (https://www.nwp.org/) as an excellent source for information and training, and the fact that it is continuously growing, expanding and changing the current status quo is evidence that this practice is effective not only for young students: Graham describes this organization as “Positive, having a can-do attitude, and very forward-thinking.” 

Dr. Graham’s perspective on self-regulated strategy development is that we should be teaching our students strategies that will allow them to organize their behaviors, which will in turn help them successfully accomplish academic tasks across content areas. This strategy emphasizes the need to teach students when, where are how to use these strategies. This is called “strategy knowledge”. The way to go about teaching strategy knowledge is by goal setting. Students should be able to go out and set goals where they are applying what they learn. Afterwards, it is important to meet with the student to discuss whether or not they were able to implement the strategies successfully so that it can be determined whether or not they need to modify it. Goal setting is a fundamental part of self-regulated strategy development so that the student and teacher are able to measure how successfully it is being implemented so the necessary modifications can be made.

Grammar is often difficult to teach and is often overlooked in many ELA curriculums. Dr. Graham discusses two very different approaches. One approach is a traditional and straight forward method. For this approach, the teacher defines the part of speech and give some examples. Next, the teacher prompts the students to come up with their own examples. Once they have done that, they practice and do various types of skills. The issue with this practice is that even if the students prove mastery during drills, they often have a difficult time applying it to their own writing. Another grammar instruction strategy is to teach kids by giving them smaller sentences and teach them how to combine them and make complex sentences and once they show they can successfully implement that strategy, teach them to apply it to their writing so that the quality of their grammar usage and writing improve. Another technique is to do the traditional method backwards. To do this the teacher would prompt the students to generate examples first (Dr. Graham’s example has the students come up with describing words for a dog). Once the students understand what [describing] words are, the teacher puts a name to it. In Dr. Graham’s example, an adjective. The issue with this practice is that there is not a lot of evidence to support its effectiveness.

 

Writing Next

Dr. Steve Graham is a teacher who devoted his life to teaching writing and learning how to improve his practice. After spending most of his life investigating and teaching students how to read he decided to change his focus because he realized that not many people were actually investigating the reason why students are unable to write well.  Even though he was never a strong writer, Graham went on to to research the qualities of a good writer. He struggled with writing when he was in  primary school but was able to improve his writing skills after meeting his 5th grade teacher who helped his writing improve. Graham's daughter also was a struggling writer until she began playing the video game Xena. She liked the game so much that she was able to improve her spelling level three grades after just two months. Graham, amazed with his daughter's progress, decided to dive deeper into the world of writing and developed important strategies for teaching writing across content areas. He also laid out the importance of instilling these skills  into all of our students. 

Dr. Graham argues that writing should be focused on and  taught across all content areas. It should be a school wide approach implemented in all school especially in high school. One of the biggest challenges with this approach is that not all teachers know how to teach writing or incorporate writing instruction into their content classes. In a US study where researchers surveyed several thousand teachers across the nation, they found that over 72 percent of teachers had little or no preparation in college to teach writing. These numbers are alarming but can be fixed by having teachers take classes on writing, building their writing skills, and preparing teachers across all content areas in college/gradschool. If we fail to effectively teach reading to our students, it can cause lasting effects on them. Graham explains that poor writing can put a student at risk of failing school, lowers their chances of going to and succeeding in college, and decrease the likelihood of them getting a good paying job. In school students are constantly graded as assessed on their written work and if they are already below grade level in writing, the it will make it harder help that student catch up and pass their classes. This in turn affects their chances on going to a  competitive school because their grades may not be good enough to get in. If the student does decide to apply for college, they usually have to  write essays and give in samples of their writing. Poor writing will eventually prevent from getting a higher paying a job because most of those jobs require a certain level of writing that the student may not be able to produce. Poor writing can negatively  affect multiple aspects of a student's life and that is why Graham pushed for a school wide approach to writing instruction.   

Reference 

http://www.readingrockets.org/podcasts/experts/transcripts/graham