Using writing across the contents is embedded into our beliefs about good instruction. Over time, teachers have incorporated writing throughout a student's day in a variety of ways. Students have taken notes, created poetry, written explanations of events, or created diagrams. Yet, as we continue down this path of elevating quality writing experiences across the contents, can we do more? Can we support students in sensing how people use writing for themselves as learners and to share their learning?
Yes, we can do more. We can do more by offering guidance, modeling and instruction for using writing more effectively 1) to help students learn and 2) to help students demonstrate their thinking.
When and why do I teach writing to learn?
In 2nd grade to 6th grade, students engage in a 10-15 day study of the writing that is used regularly across all contents (including science, social studies and math). Teachers use this opportunity to introduce and practice writing forms with students. Some forms of this writing include 1) using a graphic organizer to organize thoughts or 2) engaging in a quick write to summarize learning. The forms of writing that teachers explore within this unit of study involve developing student understanding of what this writing looks like, sounds like, how it can be organized, etc. In the end, our goal is for students to transfer and reapply this learning outside of the writing block. Teachers support this transfer and reapplication by continuing to model and discuss how learners use writing effectively in all content areas.
What are writing to learn critical attributes?
How do they support students as they think and write?
As teachers support the development of writers, we often use mentor texts to help students build awareness of the critical attributes of different genres. When students examine and write
informational writing, they begin by developing a sense of the genre's critical attributes. When students examine and
write to explain, they begin by developing a sense of the genre's critical attributes. Frequently, while teachers facilitate the learning of critical attributes, we develop anchor charts as a more permanent support to elevate critical attributes. As students engage in different types of writing (informational writing, write to explain, ...), they use these charts of critical attributes to remember and remind themselves what the writer is doing when deciding what to write and how to write it.
When students use writing to learn in all contents, our responsibility is to support students with this type of writing by continually elevating the critical attributes of writing to learn (as identified within the 6th grade Stage 1 Desired Results for the writing unit titled Learning to Write About Writing to Learn).
When Writing to Learn, thinkers and writers remember to:
Organize ideas, concepts, and information, using text structures such as definition, classification, compare/contrast, and cause/effect (critical attribute focus)
Include formatting (e.g., headings), graphics (e.g., charts, tables) (critical attribute focus)
Use accurate and precise language and domain-specific vocabulary to support a position, explain a process, or describe an object or event, including avoiding vague pronouns and ambiguous antecedents (critical attribute focus)
Support thinking with clear reasons and relevant evidence from learning, demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text, including technical words.
Use strategies for summarizing, such as deleting trivia and redundancy, substituting a general term for a list, and finding or creating a main/central idea statement.
Write summaries in various forms about learning across the day, capturing the ‘big ideas’ of the learning and identifying lingering questions for further inquiry, in forms such as a BULLETED LIST, GRAPHIC ORGANIZER, as PARAGRAPH, and be able to justify the use of the selected form.
- Connect learning by writing brief explanations of what was learned from reading, observations, and/or group work.
