Six Keys to Improving Students' Writing

                “Writing is a core skill for living, not just for school,” says New Hampshire teacher/author Penny Kittle in this exceptionally helpful Educational Leadership article. “Writing sharpens our vision, tunes us in to what matters, and helps us think through what we must live through. We write to express what we know and see and believe, and we have the power to determine exactly how readers will hear our work: where sentences will glide and where they’ll stop… We want students to know this and to write with clarity, voice, and authority.”

But too many teachers “act like scolds,” says Kittle, “red pens in hand, stamping out sin and punishing errors.” Too many students come to regard writing like a trip to the dentist, rush through their writing, and ignore the corrections and comments their teachers spend so much time making. “It’s time to stop scolding and start teaching,” she says. “At the center of teaching writing craft is what is at the center of all good instruction: the student. We don’t teach semi-colons; we teach students how to use them well. This is a subtle, but essential difference.” Here are her suggestions:

    • Independent reading – “Students become better writers when they read voraciously, deeply, and often,” says Kittle. “It is Leo Tolstoy and Sherman Alexie and Billy Collins and shelves of young adult literature consumed like the last deep breath you take before a dive. When books reach students, students reach for books.” She pushes her high-school students to read at least 25 books a year, constantly conferring, matching them with the right book, and asking them to find especially well-written passages to add to the “book graffiti board” on one wall of the classroom. She believes wide reading should be a whole-school effort.

• Providing topic choice – “Students who choose what they write about bring passion and focus to the task of writing,” says Kittle. “Ask them to argue for changes they believe in. Give them audiences throughout the school and the world.”

• Daily revision – Kittle has her students reread and listen to their writing each day, “sharpening ideas and images while shaping our sentences to be clear and smooth… All writers need a gathering place for thinking that allows for the mess of the first draft… Mistakes have to be OK as we struggle to get ideas on the page.” This takes place in a low-stakes environment and helps students pay attention to details as well as style and content. “Yet the mastery of mechanics is an illusion,” she says; “errors increase when we are unsure of what we are trying to say.”

• Sentence study – Kittle has her students imitate interesting sentences, “noticing how punctuation works in a sentence and then practice using it as they craft their own sentences.” One student called her over and asked, “Mrs. Kittle, I need punctuation that is bigger than a comma. What are my options?” Doing this kind of problem-solving in class helps students “see punctuation as a tool they can use, not just something they can name,” she says. “They become the independent writers we desire.”

• Combining sentences – Having students take three or four simple sentences and create a single complex sentence is excellent practice, says Kittle.

• Modeling the writer’s craft – “I write in front of my students, demonstrating the decisions I make to clarify and tune sentences,” she says. “I model the composition of essays, letters, and stories that matter to me, that I am deeply invested in crafting… I allow my students to watch me struggle. Passion is contagious.”

Kittle shares this YouTube video of one of her students discussing how he developed as a writer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shODcaAI5aU

For more information refer to the article, “Teaching the Writer’s Craft” by Penny Kittle in Educational Leadership, April 2014 (Vol. 71, #7, p. 34-39).

What Works to Improve Vocabulary & Comprehension ?

In a recent article in Reading Research Quarterly, Rebecca Silverman, Jeffrey Harring, Brie Doyle, Marisa Mitchell, and Anna Meyer (University of Maryland/College Park) and Patrick Proctor (Boston College) report on their study of vocabulary and comprehension instruction in 33 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms (the schools were in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, were racially diverse, and 74 percent of students were eligible for free and reduced-price meals). By observing teachers during the school year and looking at students’ before-and-after assessment results, the researchers were able to see which teaching practices seemed to have the biggest impact on students’ literacy gains:

Vocabulary

-    Explicitly teaching definitions of words was associated with gains in vocabulary achievement.

-    Instruction that helped students see relations among words was also associated with vocabulary improvement, probably because it gives students leverage when they encounter new words.

-    Instruction devoted to syntax and morphology was also associated with vocabulary gains. “These findings suggest that if students are taught to break down words into meaningful word parts and to analyze how words are used in various syntactic contexts, they may be able to learn new words, improve language proficiency, and perhaps ultimately, use those skills to comprehend text,” say Silverman, Harring, Doyle, Mitchell, and Meyer.

-    The authors were surprised that getting students to think about words in different contexts was associated with negative effects on vocabulary achievement. They theorized this may have been because teachers weren’t handling these teaching moments well – for example, one teacher defined the word delivery and then talked about how she had ordered pizza the night before. The discussion veered into students’ favorite foods and the teacher never brought it back to the application of the word delivery in that context.

-    Instruction devoted to literal comprehension was associated with negative results in students’ vocabulary acquisition. Again, the authors believe this was because teachers were using low-level techniques with literal comprehension, mostly the Initiate/ Respond/Evaluate model in which the teacher asks a question, a student responds, and the teacher says whether it’s right or wrong and moves on – not more-effective techniques such as the who/what/when/where approach, guiding students to find answers to literary questions in texts.

Comprehension

-    Teachers’ attention to inferential comprehension – getting students thinking about what is implied in a passage – was associated with positive gains in student comprehension.

-    Instruction in comprehension strategies was associated with positive gains for bilingual students but not for monolinguals.

-    In general, however, bilingual students performed less well in vocabulary and comprehension than monolingual students, and the authors note that the teachers they observed did not do enough differentiating to help bilingual students – for example, using cognates, translation, gestures, pictures, and videos.

-    Instruction that targeted context clues, text elements, decoding, and fluency were not associated with gains or losses in comprehension or vocabulary achievement – probably because the researchers didn’t observe much instruction in these areas. It may also have been because teachers told students to “sound it out” or “read it with fluency” without giving detailed and explicit instruction on how to do each, and also because they weren’t giving differentiated instruction to students who needed help in these areas.

The study did not draw any clear conclusions on the relationship between students’ vocabulary and comprehension achievement, and the authors call for further research in that area. Attention to these instructional practices can easily be implemented in any K-12 classroom to assist with students acquisition of vocabulary and comprehension skills. 

“Teachers’ Instruction and Students’ Vocabulary and Comprehension: An Exploratory Study with English Monolingual and Spanish-English Bilingual Students in Grades 3-5” by Rebecca Silverman, Patrick Proctor, Jeffrey Harring, Brie Doyle, Marisa Mitchell, and Anna Meyer in Reading Research Quarterly, January/February/March 2014 (Vol. 49, #1, p. 31-55).

Adjusting Math Language to the Common Core State Standards

In an October (2013) Kappan article, Valerie Faulkner (North Carolina State University) presents a number of changes in the way elementary mathematics is conceived in the Common Core. Implementing the new standards means letting go of a lot of old habits. Hopefully, this information will be helpful to you as you continue to implement the instructional shifts in your practice as we fully implement the Common Core State Standards.

• Old habit to eliminate: Defining equality as “same as.”

The problem: This is mathematically incorrect and leads to misconceptions.

New habit to adopt: Defining equality as “same value as.”

For example, 3 + 4 tells a different math story than 4 + 3, but they yield the same value of 7.

• Old habit to eliminate: Calling digits “numbers.”

The problem: Failing to distinguish between digits, numbers, and numerals

New habit to adopt: Clearly distinguishing between numerals and numbers (which are essentially the same) and digits.

For example, 73 is a numeral that represents the number value 73 and has two digits – 7 and 3.

• Old habit to eliminate: “Addition makes things get bigger.”

The problem: When negative numbers are introduced, the old habit has to be debugged.

New habit to adopt: Addition is about combining.

• Old habit to eliminate: “Subtraction makes things get smaller.”

The problem: As with addition, negative numbers make this wrong.

New habit to adopt: Subtraction is about difference.

• Old habit to eliminate: When borrowing, saying, “We don’t have enough ones so we need to go to the next place.”

The problem: Students don’t understand that in the number 10, there are ten ones, but in the decimal system, we don’t “see” them.

New habit to adopt: “We can’t see the ones we need, and we need to find those ones.”

• Old habit to eliminate: “You can’t take a big number from a little number.”

The problem: The statement is intended to help elementary students deal with borrowing, but it’s mathematically inaccurate and leads to problems later on.

New habit to adopt: “We could take a larger number from a smaller number, but we would get a negative number. You will learn about these later, but right now we will learn to solve this problem using all positive numbers.”

• Old habit to eliminate: “Let’s ‘borrow’ from the tens place.”

The problem: This doesn’t prepare students for more-difficult borrowing and fractions.

New habit to adopt: Use “regrouping,” “trading,” or “decomposing” instead.

• Old habit to eliminate: Multiplication “makes things bigger.”

The problem: This is true only when using positive whole numbers and will confuse students later on.

New habit to adopt: Teach the three structures of multiplication: repeated addition; finding how many unique possibilities there are when matching one set with another; and finding a total amount or area when two sides are known.

• Old habit to eliminate: Division “makes things smaller.”

The problem: As with multiplication, this is not true a lot of the time.

New habit to adopt: Teach the different structures of division: repeated subtraction of groups; answering the question “how many for each one?”; and finding a side when an area and another side are known.

• Old habit to eliminate: “Doesn’t go into” (for example, 7 doesn’t go into 3).

The problem: Even elementary school children understand intuitively that sometimes cookies need to be split up when they don’t divide up exactly.

New habit to adopt: Prepare students for later learning by using accurate mathematical language. A teacher might say, “We could divide 3 by 7, but the result won’t be a whole number. When you begin working with fractions, you will solve problems like this regularly. Here we want to consider numbers that divide into other numbers without creating fractional parts or leftover pieces.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Saying “and” means decimal point.

The problem: In common parlance and math parlance, “and” generally means to combine, add to, or augment. Insisting on using “and” only when there’s a decimal buries the opportunity to have a discussion that focuses on considering unit sizes and different ways to form a number.

New habit to adopt: Don’t create false rules for language. In other words, it’s not a big deal to call 145 “one hundred and forty-five.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Canceling out – for example, “These eights cancel out.”

The problem: Students don’t notice how often properties are used and how important they are.

New habit to adopt: Explicitly use and discuss the idea behind simplifying. A teacher might say, “Here I have an 8 divided by an 8, and we know that anything divided by itself equals 1. So you can see here that we have simplified this expression without changing its value.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Referring to “the answer.”

The problem: If the goal is to find answers, there’s a tendency to forget the most important part: How did we do that? Why did we do that? How did you know that?

New habit to adopt: Use “the model” or “the relationships” or “the structure” or “justify your answer.”

• Old habit to eliminate: Guess-and-check as a strategy.

The problem: While this sometimes involves using number sense, it’s not logical or mathematical and doesn’t prepare students for more difficult challenges.

New habit to adopt: Teach systematic math representations – bar models, for example – to teach students to think like mathematicians.

“Why the Common Core Changes Math Instruction” by Valerie Faulkner in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2013 (Vol. 95. #2, p. 59-63).