Education Week - November 14, 2012 - S12

Robert McNelly shares his worksheet of a scene from The Lorax during a lesson in reading and writing at the Blue School, where children’s literacy lessons include exploring and rewriting scenes from the book.

powerful effect on helping her 6th grade students understand algebra concepts. Julie Mallia and a colleague from the English department, Don Pawloski, teamed up in spring 2009 to have students write 10-page “how to” books for the next fall’s 6th graders. Drawing both on math and on writing instruction, students had to explain concepts such as solving a problem with x. Many students reported understanding the math concepts better after writing the books, Ms. Mallia said, because their writing brought them face-to-face with the spots where their conceptual understandings were weak. And it opened up a valuable formative-assessment tool. “I was really surprised at how many students who were able to get the right answers realized in trying to write the books that they didn’t get the ideas behind them,” she said. “That gave me a chance to work with them and reteach what they didn’t understand.”

‘A Strong Tie’
Writing is poised to occupy a heftier role in the College Board’s Advanced Placement program. In 15 schools, the organization is piloting two courses that, if completed along with three other ap classes, will lead to a new “capstone” credential. A critical-reasoning course, taken during the junior year, includes a major research project that demands a 3,000-word group paper and a 1,200-word individual paper, said John Williamson, the project’s senior director. Students must also do a 15-minute written and multimedia presentation. The end-of-year exam will require three or four 500-word essays, he said. The senior-year course is in research-methodology, culminating in a 20-page paper. “There is a strong tie between reading and writing all the way through these courses,” he said. “When students write about what they read, they come to new understandings about it. And it’s bigger than just the writing; it’s about communicating your disciplinary understanding to different audiences.” Diana Leddy and Joey Hawkins, the teachers who developed the writing approach used with The Lorax, said the root of it is using writing to deepen understanding. “To be able to write well, you need to understand the material well, and to do that, you need to be a good reader,” said Ms. Leddy. She and Ms. Hawkins work as consultants, primarily in New England schools, and also for the New York City-based nonprofit Student Achievement Partners, whose founding partners co-led the writing of the English/language arts common standards. Ms. Leddy’s and Ms. Hawkins’ method reinterprets a tenet that has been central to many in literacy instruction. “It’s been an axiom that children should write about what they know,” Ms. Leddy said. “That can mean writing from personal

feelings, very low.” Increasingly, educators are seeing the need to make explicit connections between writing and reading and to teach genre-specific types of writing, said Barbara Cambridge, the policy director for the ncte. “Writing hasn’t always been taught, especially outside of English/language arts classrooms,” she said. “We know writing helps reading. But avid readers aren’t necessarily good writers. This stuff has to be taught.” That’s what Linda Denstaedt and her colleagues are trying to do as they craft K-12 curriculum units to reflect the standards in Michigan. At the core of their work at Oak Park High School is the “multidraft read,” aimed at teaching students to delve into reading like writers, she said, which strengthens both their reading and their writing. They read a text again and again,

first to make sense of it and note their questions, as the teacher works the room to help, Ms. Denstaedt said. A second round of annotating focuses on looking for elements of the genre and how it works. They read again to spot structural decisions the writer made to create meaning, she said. The students then use what they learned in their own writing. “All of this adds up to learning to read in layers, learning to read like a writer,” said Ms. Denstaedt, the co-director of the Oakland Writing Project, which is a consultant to Michigan on the project and is an affiliate of the Berkeley, Calif.based National Writing Project. “And you’re learning how to read better as you write.” Too often, she said, writing is “all about doing tasks, assignments. We get students doing reading, and maybe writing, but we’re not nec-

essarily helping them learn how to think their way through a text.” Schools in Westerly, R.I., found that better writing can offer new ways to demonstrate knowledge. Dismal state science scores led the district to focus on writing and an inquiry-based approach to science instruction, and it paid off. Only 49 percent of the 4th graders at State Street Elementary School scored proficient on the state science test in 2010, but 80 percent did in 2011. That number slid to 63 percent in 2012, said Principal Audrey Faubert, but she is still pleased with the improvement. “Maybe they learned the science concepts better because they had to explain things,” she said, “but I attribute it more to having a better way to show what they know, and that’s important, too.” A math teacher in Brighton, Mich., found that writing had a

experience. But our interpretation is that we can help them know something, and that opens up a lot of areas for them.” A memoir, a speech at a memorial service, and a college essay all offer testament to the need to know how to write from personal experience, said Ms. Hawkins. But “it’s a tremendous missed opportunity if all a kid writes about is what he knows.” Accordingly, when Ms. Leddy teaches The Lorax, she walks through the text repeatedly with students, discussing it from a different angle each time. When they’re through, students learn to write short “hand paragraphs,” with the thumb as the topic sentence—the Lorax cares for the Earth—followed by three examples of how he does that and a “pinky sentence” restating the interpretation. Catherine Snow, a literacy expert and professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass., welcomes the shift to text-based writing, saying that personal narrative has been overemphasized in most language arts classrooms. But the risk in focusing writing exclusively on text, she said, is that many students will not be interested enough in the reading to analyze it. The text-based skills can be taught, though, through topics and texts carefully chosen to engage students, Ms. Snow said. In a Harvard project being developed in several districts in Maryland and Massachusetts, 4th through 7th graders tackle topics that fire them up, such as whether Tater Tots should be served in the cafeteria, Ms. Snow said. Such questions drive them back to their readings to search for information they can use to build well-founded arguments, she said. n
Coverage of “deeper learning” that will prepare students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a rapidly changing world is supported in part by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, at www.hewlett.org. For a link to resources about writing, go to www.edweek.org/links.

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Education Week - November 14, 2012

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