Exploring Effective Writing Instruction Techniques

Welcome everyone. We are so excited and honored to have you joining us for this patent book study series with the amazing author Joan Sedita and her equally amazing book, The Writing Road. In just a moment, Andrea Bell will introduce the evening and we'll get started in just a moment. We're still letting some folks in. I'm Dr. Pam Kastner. I have the honor of serving as Patent State Lead for Literacy. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to my wonderful colleagues. Good evening, everybody, and welcome to this Patent Book Study Series, The Writing Rope with author Joan Sedita. My name is Andrew Bell, and I'm a member of the Patent Literacy Team. And joining me this evening are some colleagues, Patent Literacy Team members, along with Pam and myself. Nicole Kocko, Heather Farimba. If I missed others in this large group, please say hello in the chat. We have placed in the chat the link to the Padlet aligned to this book study series, and on this Padlet you will find the handouts for tonight's session, and previous sessions will be on there as we go through and related resources. Please place questions for Joan Sedita in the chat. At the conclusion of tonight's presentation we will have brief time to pose these questions to our presenter. Tonight, our focus will be chapter one, introduction to, sorry, I just lost, introduction to the writing rope and chapter two, what do we know about effective writing instruction? And I'm honored to introduce our esteemed guest, Joan Sedita. I am so sorry, I lost it again. Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy, a literacy professional development organization. Joan has been in the literacy field for over 40 years as a teacher, administrator, and teacher trainer. She has authored multiple literacy professional development programs, including the Key Comprehension Routine, the Key Vocabulary Routine, Keys to Beginning Reading. keys to content writing, keys to early writing, understanding dyslexia, and adolescent literacy readings. Beginning in 1975, she worked for 23 years at the Landmark School, a pioneer in the development of literacy intervention programs. As a teacher, principal, and director of the Outreach Teacher Training Program at Landmark, Joan developed expertise, methods, and instructional programs that address the literacy needs of students in grades K through 12. Joan was one of the three lead trainers in the master's for the Reading First program and was a letters author and trainer. Joan received her master's of education and reading from Harvard University and her BA from Boston College. And before we start, I just want to remind everybody to mute themselves and Joan. throw it to you. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you. Thank you, Andra and Pam and everybody at the Patan group for giving me this opportunity to talk about something that is like very dear to my heart. So welcome. This is the first in a series of five. I hope all of you who are on tonight can join me for the rest of them. And if you can't, these are all being recorded, which is wonderful. So just as a reminder, our meeting dates are pretty much Wednesday evenings like this. We're going to skip Thanksgiving week. So we have five of them. While this slide is up, if you don't have the book from Brooks yet and you want to purchase it, they are offering a discount code for anybody who joins in on this book study. So if you just go to the Brooks website to order and use the code that you see there, you'll get 10% off and free shipping. And also, I also want to point out, and those of you who do have the book, you know that if you look into the very first few pages, Brooks has developed for this book an electronic resource repository so that all of the various templates and printables and downloadables, which there are quite a few in this book, they've made them available in electronic format. So all you need to do is... go to the website. This information is at the front of your book and then use the code that you see on the screen, which is also in the front of your book. So So as we mentioned, what we're going to do tonight is cover the first two chapters of the book. And, you know, I often feel like something like this, it's not a true book study, right? In the sense that a real book study, you have a small group of people sitting around who've read a book together and they're sharing their ideas and their thoughts. And it's kind of hard to do that. I see we're up to over 300 right now. So, you know, a lot of this is really going to be me. debriefing and highlighting certain pieces from the book with you. And then of course, we'll save some time at the end for question and answer. But anyway, you can see how we're going to break the book out across the various meetings in the coming month or so. So let's dig in to chapter one, which is really an introduction to the book, but more importantly to the writing rope, which is really kind of at the center of the book, right? It's what this was about. built around. So at the risk of reading some things aloud here, I felt like there were some wording from the introduction in the book that really helps highlight for you why I wrote this book, like the purpose of it. So you can follow along. The ability to write is as essential to learning as the ability to read. And I have a quote from Graham and Perrin in one of the writing research reports. And we'll go over some of the findings from those reports in a few moments, because I think it sums it up very well. Writing is not just an option for young people. It's a necessity. Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and the basic requirement for participation in civic life and the global economy. All students need to become proficient and flexible writers. So we all know that it's important. important. I don't think anybody doubts that, right? But it's often neglected. I also wrote in the introduction, not only do students use writing to communicate, but writing also improves reading comprehension. And students who receive that opportunity to write in conjunction with their reading show much more evidence of critical thinking about reading. And many of the skills that are involved with writing also can reinforce things such as fluency and word reading skills. So, you know, one of the things I think it's a theme that flows through the book, but certainly the last several chapters where we focus on the critical thinking strand of the writing rope is really all about how students can use writing, if they're taught to be able to write, how they can use writing to support their learning. And that's why content teachers, teachers of any subject, can play a role in helping our students grow their writing skills. So why the writing rope? This is another quote from the book in the beginning. The literature and discourse related to literacy instruction tends to focus on reading, even though writing is just as important for student literacy achievement. Much has been written about the multiplicity of skills involved in reading, beginning with the five components necessary for skilled, fluent reading. So, you know, in our field. Those of us who are involved with literacy, you know, these days, it's very nice. But, you know, if we say, what are the five components of reading? You know, most folks in our field know what they are, you know, right? Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. But, you know, when it comes to writing, when any attention is paid to writing, as I have in the quote here, teachers are not sure what to include. Many educators who are very knowledgeable about reading instruction are not able to identify the components of skilled writing. And so that's really the kind of the goal and the purpose of the writing rope framework. So why this book and sort of how did it come about? It was noted early in the introduction about my history. I had the wonderful opportunity at the start of my career to work at a school. For just students with learning disabilities, dyslexia, the Landmark School in Massachusetts. I started there in the mid 70s when it was only a couple of years old and had the wonderful opportunity to every year work with over 500 students across all age spans who had difficulty with reading and writing. And that's where I first realized that writing does not come naturally to lots of people. And. It's through that work in the beginning years with students who struggled at a point when there wasn't very much research about what an effective instruction was that I really started thinking about what are the specific skills we need to teach these kids. And Even with some of my high school students realizing, my gosh, we have to go right back down to the individual sentence level and that our instruction needs to be explicit. So that's where I sort of began my journey with reading, but also writing. Where I work now, the company that I founded 15 years ago, Keys to Literacy, we go all over the country training teachers. And I'd say maybe eight, nine, 10 years ago. We started putting together some of our trainings around helping teachers know the best way to teach writing to students. And that led to a bunch of workshops and so on and so forth. And back about five years ago, I started feeling like we needed the equivalent of Hollis Scarborough's reading rope, right? That teachers, it's not, writing is not this monolithic thing, that it has some components. And. We need to teach them individually. We can talk about them the way we're going to do that now tonight and the way they're organized into chapters in the book. Right. But ultimately, it's about students building skills in all of these areas, all of these components. But then more importantly, being able to pull them all together and integrate them in order to to effectively write. For a while, I had this little metaphor that I used for a long time of a wagon wheel, thinking about these components as like spokes in a wheel. And, you know, we all know that if one or two of the spokes are broken, like the integrity of the wheel, it's just not going to hold everything up. But I wrote a blog post in 2019 where I sort of ditched the wagon wheel metaphor and decided to... kind of with a nod to the reading rope, use that metaphor. And then I wrote about it in a blog post and the IDA, International Dyslexia Association, picked up on the graphic and asked if they could put it in their series of infographics. And then one thing led to another. And a little over a year ago, Brooks Publishing asked me if I would write a book about the writing rope. They thought it would be five chapters, one for every. strand in the rope, but there's a whole lot more. So we ended up with more chapters. Who is it written for? Educators, obviously, who are seeking to learn about research-based and effective instructional practices. I think it's for educators who need some sort of a framework that they can use to help determine if the writing curriculum that they're using, does it cover everything that it should, right? If they're looking to vet programs to bring in around teaching writing, it gives a framework to sort of look at those programs and decide, is it covering all the components that it should, right? But I also feel like writing instruction in some ways is similar to comprehension and vocabulary instruction in that really the best way to teach it is for the teacher to have the background knowledge about effective practices that we can integrate into whatever it is we're teaching and whatever it is we're reading in the classroom. And so I believe that if teachers have that knowledge, they actually don't need a writing program. You know, and that's how I feel about teaching comprehension as well. So it's not a program. It's more literally a framework. Now the publisher... decided to have the target be grades four to eight. And I've had a lot of folks in some of the Facebook groups ask me, can some of this be used in the earlier grades or in high school? And the answer is absolutely yes. As you're reading the book, you'll see that some of the chapters around sentences and paragraphs, you can begin that work in the primary grades. In fact, some of the stuff around sentence combining and sentence elaboration, that stuff we can do through oral language with our youngest children. So it certainly can go down. And then for our older high school students, so much of what's in here can be appropriate for that as well. With this slide, I wanted to show you the original graphic that I, I'm, as a hobby, I'm, I'm a, I'm not a good artist, or I like to watercolor and draw. It's not good, but, but it's fun, right? And so one night when I was going to write the blog post about this to explain the strands in the rope, I kind of doodled and drew this little rope. It's not nearly as nice as the one that the folks at Brooks Publishing put together, but it is the original one. And, and it's funny, I had somebody the other day asked me, why the rope is joined like a spiral instead of braiding. And I honestly can't tell you, doesn't matter to me. All I know is that the strands have to work together tightly, like a good rope. So, but what I thought I would do is just do kind of hit the mountaintops of the strands in the rope, which happens in the beginning of the book. There's a couple of paragraphs about each one. And we'll use the nice colorful one that the graphic designers at Brooks Publishing. put together for me. What I do have at the bottom of this slide, though, is the link to that blog post that I mentioned. And if you want to read the actual blog post, just go, you know, you can visit it at the site where I have a monthly blog. So let's hit the mountaintops of each of the strands as I kind of walk you through my thinking about where I put certain things. I also will have folks say to me sometimes, oh, why did you put this under this strand? Or, you know, why is that over? I would have put it over here. And there's no, I mean, if you want to, if you want to think about things in a different way, you know, go ahead, be my guest. This is, this is, this represents my thinking. So, so the very first strand, the critical thinking, this is where I think most of the skills and strategies that are associated with writing to learn. fall, right? Or writing to sources. If you think about those high stakes assessments that we see on a lot of state tests where you're given a prompt, right? And several sources, they might be two written sources and a video and students have to like search for particular evidence or information. Or this is the kind of thing, you know, like summary writing or in the classroom when the teacher is having posing questions and students write out answers. So these are the skills that really tax our cognition, right, our critical thinking. And there are a lot of them, and they can range from simple things like just showing students how to annotate a text if they're writing about that text. It can include things like note taking. For those of you who are familiar with my work, you know I'm a big fan of two column notes, which we explore in later chapters in the book. So... You know, this is like all of those skills that are tied to critical thinking. And the last several chapters in the book is where we get into that in detail. But another thing that I felt would be good tucked in under this strand is the stages of the writing process, which I have this little model for helping kids remember. It's think, plan, write, revise. You know, Common Core standards use slightly different language. a pair of researchers, Hayes and Flowers, back in the 60s and 70s, started trying to capture the stages of the writing process. So whatever terminology you use, this is the place where we want to make sure that kids are aware that there are stages and we can't skip any of them. And that the more effort we put into the thinking and the planning stages, the better our writing is going to be at the writing stage. the more we put emphasis on our revision, the better our writing is going to be. And a lot of that involves critical thinking, as well as a lot of strategies that you need in order to gather that information, again, like the note-taking, for planning the structure of your piece, which is where graphic organizers come in. So that's the critical thinking strand. The next one, I put it right under that because I think it just doesn't get enough enough emphasis, but it is in the end, the core, it is the basis of all writing. If we cannot write a good sentence, then everything else falls apart. And so the fancy word for that is syntax or syntactic awareness, which means building that awareness of the grammar that rules one's language, the order that we are allowed to put words in and sentences. But it's also about sentence elaboration. A lot of students, after they get beyond grade three, they keep writing in these very short, simple sentences. And so instruction that we give to purposely help students in an explicit way, expand their sentences, make them longer, make them more complex, right? So that's the syntax strand. The third, text structure, there's actually quite a few things that I put in under here, sort of levels, right? And if we start with the biggest, the broadest level, that would be the text structure of major types of writing or genres, right? If we borrow from the Common Core and a lot of other state standards, usually the first three standards, right, are about opinion or argument writing, informational writing, narrative. So what... what is the same and what's different about the structures? What do students need to know about how they're going to vary their organization from an informational piece versus an opinion piece, right? And that includes things like introductions. What are they? How do we write them? What are parts of introductions like hooks and leads? And how does an introduction where you're stating your claim in an argument different from... an introduction in an informational piece, or the beginning part of a narrative where we're introducing a character or a setting, right? So that's like one of the big, big text structures. Next down is paragraph, which to me, together with sentence level, is again, a basic building block of writing. And so many of our students, including our oldest, have no clue about what a paragraph is. They either, they just write and write and write, or maybe they'll skip a line every once in a while, but there's no rhyme or reason to it. And I truly believe that part of the issue with this is a comprehension issue as well, because the whole purpose of a paragraph, and we get into this in one of the later chapters a bit more, but the whole purpose of a paragraph is to say, all right, we're writing about some topic here. Like it's multi-paragraphs, but it's all about one topic. But what we need to do when we start to shift saying something about our topic, when it's time to move from one main point to another main point, what we need to do to shift for the reader to help them understand the organization of what we're trying to write is we need to create these breaks through paragraphs. And every paragraph should signal a new main idea. But there are many students who don't get that concept of what. a gist or a main ideas and how is that is different than the supporting details. So that's a lot of what happens around teaching students paragraph structure. The third thing that I tucked in under the text structure strand is patterns of organization. And that includes, you know, the five basics, description, sequence or chronology, cause and effect, compare, contrast, and then problem and solution. Now, these are patterns that depending on the purpose of our writing or the goal or the task, right, we might need to do something that describes more than we need to compare and contrast. And that can happen within a single paragraph. You can have more than one within a single paragraph, right? But you could also take one of these patterns of organization and have it drive an entire multi-paragraph piece. And then the last piece, which is very connected to the patterns of organization, right, are transition words or linking words. This is the smallest level of text structure that I have in here. And these are words or phrases that the writer uses to signal to the reader their structure and what they're trying to say through their composition. And often they're linked to certain patterns. So if we're doing first, second, last, that's. definitely going to connect with a sequence. If we use words like therefore and however, that's going to signal another pattern of organization. And, you know, it's interesting in my work over the years, especially with students who really struggle with writing and language-based issues, many of these students, these words are not part of their lexicon. They just, they don't think about them. They don't, when they speak, they don't use them. Really efficient writers. who writing comes fairly easy to, even when they're writing their first drafts, they're like pouring these transition words into their writing. So one of the things we need to do at the revising stage for students that don't, these don't come naturally to is that's part of the revision. Find opportunities that you can insert transitions. So that's the third strand. Writing craft up till now. All three strands are things that I believe that any teacher of any subject can play a role in teaching kids and the critical thinking strand in particular, but the tech structure also because One of the ways that we help kids learn how to use text structure, right, is to show them mentor models of text that they're reading. And so if you're a science, science or whatever the subject, whatever you're using to read, you can take a moment or two to have the kids unpack the structure and then flip it in terms of thinking about, all right, how do I apply that to my writing? So the first three, certainly any teacher can do. This fourth strand, the writing craft. does tend to be the purview of the English or the ELA teacher or the writing teacher. And what did I put under here? Certainly word choice. It's a real craft. These things are sometimes also referred to as writer's moves or techniques. This is where I decided to put awareness of task, audience, and purpose. Many of you may know that as the acronym TAP. Good writers, quality writers, right? They're always thinking. about those three things. And in particular, they're thinking about their audience, because being aware of your audience is going to help you make a lot of really important decisions. So, and a lot of that rests on the craft that you're able to use, which is also connected to literary devices. So decisions that get made around how you might use dialogue, or how you might use figurative language, there's a whole host of literary devices. So that's the writing craft. strand. And then the last one is the transcription. And in many respects, I really feel that a lot of initial instruction, but even for older students who struggle with spelling and handwriting or keyboarding, that a lot of this instruction can and should take place during a phonics block, you know, where we are teaching decoding and encoding at the same time. So that's the sort of fastest review of the writing rope that you'll probably ever get. And with this slide, I want to bring up something that for those of you that have the book, you'll see these throughout. When Brooks asked me to do this, I really felt like, yes, I do want to make sure I bring in links to the research, but I'm somebody that lives in the trenches, right? I mean, I've taught college courses, but I'm not a professor. I'm not a researcher. You know, I live... in the trenches helping teachers make connections, right? And so I asked if I could put these little connect to the classroom and they came up with that little visual for it throughout. And at first they weren't sure, but they said yes. And so what I'm going to do tonight and in our other meetings is sometimes when I wrap up a piece, I will just remind us of some of the connect to the classroom questions or reflection tasks that I've given you. So in this case, I pose the question, does the writing curriculum used in your school include instruction for all five components of the row? Which writing component do you feel most confident teaching? Which areas do you want to learn more about? I know we have a lot of people on tonight, but if any of you feel comfortable about jotting your responses in there, that would be great. I'm sorry, into the chat, so we can just see how you responded to that. With this slide, I just wanted to bring us back again to this topic of content teachers playing a role. This is a quote. I also forgot to mention, if you see page numbers down on the bottom of the slides, that just links to the page numbers in the book. So I have this little quote on page six. Content writing is a way to promote and deepen content learning. When students write about what they're reading and learning, they're thinking on paper. As they write, they concentrate on the information and ideas they're learning and make connections to their existing knowledge. Writing about content also helps students clarify and organize their thoughts and solidify the material they're learning and place that learning into their long-term memory. Now, you know, sometimes when I'm doing some training around this, I'll pause here and I'll ask everybody, I'll ask the question to you. How many of you write a list out before you go grocery shopping? Right. And yeah. And how about if you forget the list at home? Does it the fact that you wrote the list and, you know, some of us write, write, we just make a big list. Some of us get, you know, kind of organized and we group our list by the frozen foods in one one part of the list. Right. And the vegetables in another. Right. But it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is that whatever thinking we did on paper about what we need to buy in the store. It's sort of seared in our memory. So even if we don't have it any longer, it helps us think through what we need to buy. And it's a very simple example, but I think it gets to the heart of this notion. And this is why content teachers, we've got to convince them to play a role in this because we need them. There's too many kids that can't write. So, you know, like one period a day with ELA isn't going to do it. But also if we can convince them that if our students learn to write better, they're going to learn our content faster. Now, in this chapter, I also, in the area around content writing, share three kinds of content writing tasks. Quick writes. These are things that are done really quick, right? Think about this. If I'm in sixth grade and I have five main teachers, and if every one of them does three quick writes a week, I'm going to do 15 quick writes, which is going to build my fluency in writing. Then there's the content learning tasks. These are things that... take maybe one to three sessions. And by sessions, I mean either classroom time or maybe homework. And these are the things that content teachers really should be doing a lot of, having kids write summaries, having them take notes, you know, these sort of longer tasks. And then ultimately formal writing tasks, which is what we associate more with research. So, you know, what I find in my work in training teachers in schools is that... Most content teachers are afraid to bring in too much writing. They don't know how to teach it. They maybe aren't good writers themselves, right? They're afraid they're going to spend their weekends grading papers, right? But I think if we can convince them that these quick writes are something that are easy, they don't have to be graded, it's a great way to get more writing happening in our content classrooms. And so the... The... question posed in Connect to the Classroom here is how often do you assign things like quick writes, middle of the road content writing tasks, and then those formal tasks. All right, so with that, let's shift now and begin to get into chapter two. You know, as I was planning for tonight, these two chapters, they're really setting the stage. So we don't get to get into hands-on like activities and things that you can do that we get into in the later chapters. But I also think it's important for us to set the stage like this. And one of the first things that I do at the beginning of this chapter is make you familiar with the research that's out there. Now, it is absolutely true that we do not have nearly as much research as we do about effective reading instruction. But when I hear people say, oh, there's nothing or there's very little, that's not quite true. We do have, especially within the last 20 years, some things that have been done. And, you know, a lead researcher whose name you're going to see all over these is Steve Graham and his wife, Karen Harris. But he often tends to be the lead on these. But we have four major research meta-analyses reports that sum up that. that research. And I, and I strongly encourage you to, all you have to do is Google these and they'll come up and you can read these reports for free. And what's wonderful about them is they not only synthesize the research for you and put it into recommendations or sort of lists of what come up over and over again as effective writing, writing instructional practices, but some of them, especially the two IES reports, they'll actually kind of, they do these things where they say, and what are the, what are the. barriers that might come up? What are the issues that might come up? So they're very practical. What I'm going to do is in the next few slides, just hit the mountaintops of each of these, because I do think when I wrote this, I didn't want this to sound like a college textbook. I didn't want it to be off-putting the way if you read a research article can be, right? Because like I said, like I live in the trenches. I want teachers. I want this to be easy for them to make the connection to their classrooms. But I do believe we need to be aware of the research and of the new and changing research. So what I'm going to do is give you sort of, again, a very fast tour of some of these findings. So this is an Institute of Education Sciences report. They focused on all the research related to writing in the elementary grades. And what were the four outcomes or four major findings? Number one. We have to provide daily time for students to write. In order to get fluent, they just have to write a lot. Now, it's not enough. They're not going to just by writing a lot magically figure out how to write. We have to provide explicit instruction, but they do need to do more writing. And that's where things like those quick writes can come in handy. Number two, we need to teach students to use the writing process for a variety of purposes. That gets to that chapter and the strand. that has the critical thinking where I put in under there the think, plan, write, and revise. We need to let them know what those stages are, also that they're recursive. We sometimes run through them several times. And that we need to teach the very specific strategies that are needed at each one. So at the planning stage, we need to teach them strategies and graphic organizers to plan, for example. Third finding, and this gets to that transcription part of the rope, with the exception of the sentence construction, students have to become fluent with handwriting, spelling, you know, and or keyboarding as they get a little older. If our students after grade three are not fluent in their spelling and in their vehicle for getting it on the page, whether it's handwriting or, you know, through typing, they're going to spend so much energy on. on that part, the transcribing part, that it takes away from their energy for the critical thinking part, for their composing. And we know that there are lots of students who, because they can't spell a word, they don't use it. And that's really sad because they end up using less efficient, less colorful language in their writing. So we want to make sure that that becomes fluent. And then tucked into that one, they've also got sentence construction, which is about that syntax strand in the writing rope. And then the fourth one, a lot of things sort of fit in under here, but they describe it as creating an engaged community of writers. And this includes everything from making sure that we find opportunities at every stage of the writing process to enable students to collaborate with their peers and with the teachers. You know, part of the research about engagement and motivation in writing. This is one of the things that we know can make a difference. If you think that writing is like a social act, we're trying to communicate. And so if we have an opportunity to let kids work with each other, it's going to be more motivating. But this also includes things like making sure that the students, especially the younger ones in elementary grades, view their teacher as a writing partner. So if we can find situations where we're doing shared writing tasks, where the students are working together and we're all deciding what do we want our topic sentence to be, and the teacher writes it out on the board and we interact that way. It's also creating a safe space because writing, a lot of people don't feel comfortable about it, right? And so making sure that it's a place that we celebrate writers and that we all know we can improve our writing. So that was the first IES report. The next was the secondary. And here's their major findings. Number one, explicitly teach appropriate writing strategies. And this needs to be at every stage of the writing process. So this can include everything from how do you use a transition word in a descriptive paragraph, something very specific. It could be how do you write an introduction to an opinion piece? It could be how do you use a graphic organizer to plan the structure of your piece? How do you take two column notes? So it could be any one of the large number of skills and strategies that I mentioned in this book. But what I find interesting, they use this language using a model practice reflect instructional cycle. And that's really the first time I've ever seen that. To me, that represents what many of us know as Pearson and Gallagher's gradual release of responsibility, right? Which, which. many people now think about as the I do, we do, you do it. So the big, big finding in the secondary meta-analysis, we have to explicitly teach these strategies using an I, we, you approach. Second, that we must be integrating writing and reading to emphasize key writing features. And it's this thing of let's, it's a yin and a yang, right? They go together, like encoding and decoding go together. And so If we can have students notice the features in the text they're reading, how did they use a heading? How did they insert a graphic, right? That ends up influencing their writing. But as you'll find in one of the next reports I'm going to share with you, it also ends up the writing supporting the reading. And then finally, the third one is use assessments of student writing to inform instruction and feedback. And you know what? This. What this is emphasizing to me is that every student has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. And I think this is another way that you can use the strands in the writing world, right, to be able to look at students writing and say, all right, what strands are they falling down in? Is it the syntax? Is it the paragraph structure? Is it the skills that are involved connecting what they're comprehending from their sources into their writing? And that... I think as students get a lot older, it's like a Swiss cheese metaphor where these kids all have different little holes in their Swiss cheese, but each child's holes are a little different. And so we need to look to their actual writing to inform our instructional decisions. Now, another important report, this is one of the earliest ones, was called Writing Next. It came after Reading Next. And in this case... What they did is looked at all the research related to what were the most effective instructional practices that improve the writing of grades four to 12. They not only identified them, there were 11, but they also listed them in order of most effective. So those that had the highest the highest efficacy come first. Now, I just want to point out a few things that that are in this list because they find their way into chapters in the book. So let's look at the second one, summarizing. This is an unbelievably powerful tool for growing writing skills. But for those of you who are familiar with the National Reading Panel, it also turns out to be one of those four or five major comprehension strategies that really improve comprehension. So I often like to say if I was alone on a stranded island and there was only one skill I could teach, it would be summarizing because it helps reading as well as writing. Let's look at sentence combining down there at the bottom of the first list. This is something that I talk a lot about and give suggestions for how we use sentence combining to build syntactic awareness. Look at the process writing approach in the next. The stages of the writing process are so important. Study of models, the use of mentor models, and then finally writing for content learning. The last report that I'll highlight for you is writing to read. And what this found, it looked at how does writing support reading? And it turns out it supports all levels of reading as well, including fluency and phonics, right? And decoding, but definitely affects the reading comprehension. And when we have students write personal reactions to text, there's those summaries again, note taking, right? This is also going to improve their comprehension. And a lot of the parts of this book. that are connected to the critical thinking strand of the writing rope address this. Another thing that I just want to make sure we review that's in this chapter is the role of executive functions, or actually I should say the role of weaknesses in executive functions, and how we need to be aware of that when we're teaching students to write. This is a visual. that you see from Virginia Berninger and her colleagues. This is one a little bit later, but they began with this model or framework. They called it the simple view of writing. And the idea was to highlight that role of working memory and executive functions. Some of their later writing like this in 2006, they began referring it to the not so simple view. Doesn't matter to me what you call it. What matters is that we keep in mind that for a lot of our students, especially those who maybe are diagnosed as having ADHD, right, or working memory issues, we've got to be aware that this is going to impede some of their writing. So in this model, you've got text generation up at the top. That's all really, if you think about the skills and strategies that are in the writing rope and in the book, including transcription, which they set aside over here. The executive functions, though, the one point I want you to take away with this is, well, we have to... be aware of this. These are not, executive functions are not skills we can teach. They're cognitive processes, right? So if you have weak working memory, there isn't a pill you can take to make that go away. And there isn't a skill you can, it's not a skill you learn, right? What I will say, however, is if you're doing explicit instruction of many writing strategies, right? Very often, those same things we're doing to improve the writing are the things that become scaffolds for students with weak executive functions. So graphic organizers, writing templates, you know, how-to sheets, lists of transition words, teaching them note-taking so that they can hold the information on the paper if their working memory is not strong. So those are a few of the takeaways. There's a little bit more in the book about executive functions. This quote I put in there. Because for me, it sort of sums up this need to remember the executive functions. And I often feel like by the time I get to the end of this paragraph that I'm exhausted just thinking about all the things we have to do to write. And I don't know how we can write. So anyway, but obviously some of us figure out how to do it. So as the quote says, while negotiating the rules and mechanics for writing, the writer must maintain focus on factors such as organization, form and features. purposes and goals, audience needs and perspectives, and evaluation of the communication between the author and reader. Self-regulation of the writing process is critical. The writer must be goal-oriented, resourceful, reflective. Skilled authors'writing is flexible, it's goal-directed, it's scaffolded by a rich source of cognitive processes and strategies, right? for planning text production and revision. So there's an awful lot we have to juggle. And I think that's all the reason more that thinking about this as strands in the rope, that ultimately we've got to help kids integrate all this because a set of skills in isolation, it's not enough. One of the other, the last things I want to go over before we have a few moments for some question and answer. The other thing that's in this chapter, I Identify seven teaching principles that I keep weaving back through as we move through the other chapters. The gradual release of responsibility. We mentioned that before. I mentioned the explicit instruction, right? Differentiating lots of scaffolds, opportunities for collaboration, using mentor models, right? Increasing how much students write. So... And what I've got here is a little picture of what those seven teaching principles look like in the book. But this is an example of one of those things that Brooks has made available in an electronic format in case you want to download that. I thought that a way to end this would be to just share a little bit more about mentor models. Because this comes up throughout all the chapters as well. So if we're talking about teaching kids how to use transition words, well, let's show them a few passages where an author used transitions in a really swell way that we want the kids to view and to imitate, right? If we want them to learn how to write a hook to a narrative lead, right, you know, in an introduction, well, let's show them some examples of that. So what this is about is really... recognizing that the way most of us learn to write or get better at our writing, right, is to emulate others. And I'll use another everyday example for you for this. So if you're in a car accident and you need to, you're at the police station and you need to fill out an accident report. If you've never written one before, what do you do? How many of you say, can I take a look at a few other reports so I can see how they're written? And then you see how they're written and you emulate them. Or if you've ever had to write a letter of recommendation for somebody, right? Or fill out a grant proposal. And that's the idea here. We learn by looking at how others do this. Now, the problem with mentor models for a lot of folks is they get the concept, but they're not explicit enough. And so what happens is they might say, look at this great example of this article that was written. This is the way of... good informational piece should be written. So now I want you to start writing like this. That's meaningless to students. If on the other hand, we can pick a very specific, maybe it's a text structure, maybe it's something about style and language or a move or a technique. That's what we want our mentor models to focus on. And so I thought, oh, also within the book, and you've got a picture here of something that's right in the book. I've listed examples of very specific things that you might use mentor text for. But what I wanted to do is show you some examples at both the earliest grade levels and the upper, right? So this is an example. Actually, this is not in the writing rope book. This is in another book I wrote that goes with my keys to early writing training for primary grades. But you can begin doing this with first and second graders, right? So. I want you to see if you can figure out what was the writer's moved or writer's craft that all three, these are three different mentor examples, all three of them use. What's the same? And we're getting close on time, so I'm going to give you the answer if you haven't figured it out. There's actually two going on. The big one is they're using bubbles to have their characters speak, right? Another one that's used in a couple places is they play around with the shape or the size or the color of some of the words to make them stand out. So now this is an example where you could say to your students, even your youngest ones, all right, in your drawing, I know you are trying to show that these two characters are saying something to each other. How can you mimic this? this example. But now let me show you one in an upper grades. So there's something called a nonfiction lead or a hook, and there are many different kinds. I've just listed three of them for you here, right? Using a quote, posing a question, or sharing a fascinating fact or detail. Now, keep those three in mind. And as you look at the two examples on the screen, they're both introductions to and their mentor text about high school dropouts, right? High school dropout rate. Which one do they use in the first example? And again, because we're running a little short on time, they are using, right? They're using a quote. They're quoting a student. On the second one, what they're using, and again, we have a choice, quote, question, fascinating fact. They are giving lots of fascinating facts. So now what I might do if I was doing this explicitly with my students is say, look. You've just seen two examples here. I want you to rewrite your introduction, but I want you to either use a quote or some fascinating facts. So that's about all I wanted to say about that. And I'm going to end this now. So we still have a few minutes for question and answers. While we're doing this, I wanted to leave this link up for you. If you find yourself in a situation where you have a small group of colleagues and you want to do a book study for the writing rope, but. the more traditional type where you're sharing things back and forth. I have developed a set of questions for a self-guided book study. And basically you've got the link there. You just go to my Keys to Literacy website. On the front page, I have a picture of the book. You click that and it'll bring you to the study guide. So I think with that... Pam or any one of you, anybody want to start throwing out some questions to me that you've been seeing in the chat? Yes. Here we go, Joan. Yeah. Some really great questions. So let's start here. As an ELD teacher, how can we use the writing rope with our level one ELs? I think you mean English language learners. Yeah. Well, you know, look, we know that English language learners. benefit from the same research-based instructional practices for teaching, reading, and writing as all students do, right? We also have to remember that all Ls, they're not a monolithic group either, right? Some of them, they all have different needs. But, you know, one of the things that I often see with English language learners is their syntactic awareness is not as well developed. Let's use an example. You know, if... if in English we put our adjectives in front of our, our noun. So if I say the flat brown desk in a romance language, I would say the desk flat Brown, but that doesn't sound right to our, right. Our English awareness of, of English syntax. So I think a lot of the things that are in the sentence chapter, the syntax chapter are going to be especially beneficial for, for English language learners. I think that's a really good point. But I mean, basically everything else. Well, I think the stuff, the piece in there about transitions, because I think those words don't come as naturally as well. But everything else around, you know, English language learners have just as much to say in the composing, right, stage of it. And so they're going to benefit from the same explicit instruction in the strategies for organizing their thoughts before they write, taking notes, using graphic organizers. having an awareness of text structure. I think a lot of the other things throughout the book will be helpful as well for them. Okay, so next question. What about typing? My school is basically totally digital, at least in the English classroom. I know handwriting is connected to the brain and learning, but is typing, writing okay? We do daily do nows where our kids write, but they are typing. All essays and graphic organizers are done digitally too. We also use actively learn for. all reading and text annotations. Yeah. There are a lot of things that are tucked into that question. You know, and there's a lot of controversy out there about should we, how much attention should we put to handwriting? When do we move kids on to keyboarding? And if it's handwriting, should it be cursive or should it be print? You know, I mean, and for a lot of these questions, there are no set answers. There is a section I have in the book about this, where I review some of the research around this. Graham talks a bit about this. Berninger's been doing that research on that a long time. You know, just a few highlights that I could say. I mean, Whether it's handwriting or keyboarding, let's remember that transcription strand, right? That kids are not fluent in some transcribing form, right? Whether it's handwriting or the keyboarding as they get older and they're developmentally able to do two-hand keyboarding, right? Because that's the other thing. Our younger children, they can do the hunt and peck, but developmentally, they're not able to until somewhere around six or seven that you can really get. get proficient at that. But whether it's the handwriting or the keyboarding, if we're not fluent in it, then all our attention is going to be taken up on that. It's very similar. I forgot to mention this earlier, but it's very similar to me, like what happens with decoding. If kids beyond grade four are not fluent with their ability to decode words on the page, what happens? They have to put so much attention to that, that it takes away from comprehension. And it's the same thing. Um, so we do need to make sure they're proficient. Um, you also see lots of situations where, uh, students are doing handwriting throughout the school, the school days and weeks, right? But then all of a sudden the high stakes test comes and they have to do it all using, um, keyboarding and, and same thing. Now they're not able to share with you what their composing abilities are. So it's, it's a tough one and there's a lot of controversy surrounding it. There are a number of questions around that. And there's also a question about technology and the impact it's had on writing, both informal and with texting. So any quick thoughts on that? And then I'll continue with just a few more questions. Yeah, well, I mean, there's so many ways that we use technology. Right. And all you have to do is look at your our own lives. Right. You know, when I write books now, it's so much easier because there's word processing. You know, I can cut and paste and I can drag things and. And so it allows me to focus again on my composing and my critical thinking and how I want to craft my sentences and not getting bogged down in that I can't write fast enough. You know, I happen to be a fast typer. So I think for all of us, there are certain advantages. There's also the angle of the adaptive technology. Right. So for students who who have a real difficult time for for lots of reasons. Right. Actually, with the transcribing, will we now have speech to text? So I think there's a lot of advantages to it. There are questions around that too as well. So could mentor models be exemplar writings from students or only from professionals? Oh, that's a great question. And the answer is they could be from anything. So yes, save your student work, right? Obviously, white out the names, you know, we don't want to. But, you know, it also, a couple of other things I want to say that it's not, shouldn't just be the finished product. So if you're trying to teach students how to maybe use, take notes to gather some evidence, give them mentor models of well-written notes. But you can also sometimes show some not so well-written things and unpack them and say, what's missing? Put or put two mentor models together, one that's written well, one that's not. Have the kids analyze what's the difference. The Swiss cheese metaphor is always a great one. And so there's a question about for students who have similar needs. to group them in skills groups or try to meet with them one-on-one? What's your suggestion? Well, I mean, gosh, this, that's a big question. I, you know, there's a lot of research out there about, you know, is one-on-one tutoring better than a one-on-three or five? And, you know, I don't have that all at my fingertips right now, but I think in general, we know that if students are grouped with similar needs, then oftentimes I think they're referring to intervention here. You know, that oftentimes that tutoring can be just as effective with three students or four students where it gets dicey as if they all have different holes in their Swiss cheese. And I think there's, as it relates to writing, the advantage of working with smaller groups rather than one-on-one also is you get that ability for them to be collaborating, which is also another important thing. A question about mentor models and rubrics. How are they the same? How are they different? Do they have specific features? Well, mentor models are just our text, right? And when we use them, oftenly, if we're going to be doing it explicitly, we unpack it, right? We think aloud, we analyze it. But in some respects, that's the same thing that we need to do when we're revising our own work or a peer's work, right? We're looking at it and we're analyzing it. I think maybe the connection that the questioner is making here is that how might you use rubrics to evaluate or analyze a piece of writing? I'm actually not a very big fan of rubrics. in terms of them being a tool that one could use to give students feedback. Rubrics, I get why they need to be used. You know, if you're doing scoring on a state assessment or you need some consistency. But I much more prefer checklists of the type, there are several of them in the book, but where a student, a teacher can give feedback about very specific things. Did you use transitions? Did you use enough of them? How well were they written? And then you could give a score of, you know, I'm getting really good at it. You know, still a big Swiss cheese hole, right? That's giving very much more directed feedback to students than rubrics, which tend to be really more for the adults. Thank you. One last question, because I know we're a bit over, but I think it's an important one. Someone wrote to us who's a middle school teacher and her students, many of them are dyslexic and have dysgraphia. And they have great ideas. And so the question was, how often is it okay for them to use assistive technology to do that? And how often should they be writing? So let me read it specifically. I think I didn't do that so well. All the students I work with have dyslexia and some have dysgraphia as well at the middle school level. They have great ideas that I want them to be able to share. How often is it okay to allow them speech to text? And should I have them physically write as well? I like all of the above, right? And let's use an analogy or a connection to reading. You know, we know that especially dyslexic students, right, but that there are a lot of students that leave second and third grade and their decoding is not strong. They don't have, they're not fluent. But would we hold them back and say, so we're never going to let you access good, rich quality text to develop your vocabulary and your syntax and work on comprehension because you can't read the words yet. So what do we do? We use adaptive technology or we find other. And it's the same thing with the writing. Why would we hold somebody back from being able to express themselves, to compose, to share their ideas, to use composing to help them learn and master the material that they're learning? Right. Simply because they can't spell the words or they have dysgraphia and they can't get that transcription out there. So I think I think we absolutely have to do that. Now, does that mean we give up on teaching spelling or we give up on having them get better at keyboarding? No, we can do both things at once. But that's the sad part of this, that so many people don't write because they're embarrassed about what their handwriting looks like or that they're slow in keyboarding or that they don't know how to spell words. And we have to let them know that we value the composing part of writing. Much, much more than the transcription skills. Thank you for that, Joan. And on that, I think we're going to say good night for such a wonderful evening. We learned so much and so appreciate all the questions from everyone who put them into the chat. And if we missed any of yours, what we'll do is we'll put them onto the Google Doc that we have, and we'll share them with Joan and can look at them next week too. Our next session is next Wednesday evening, November 16th, 7 p.m. Eastern. I want to give a big shout out as well to the patent literacy team. And we had, I think, over 360 people. And so we always say thank you so much. We know your teachers and parents and advocates and so much more. And here you are after a long day, continuing to learn and join us. We are truly, truly grateful. And we look forward to seeing you next Wednesday. Thank you so much. Yes, same for me. Thank you. Good night, everybody. Thank you, Joan.

We're still letting some folks in. I'm Dr. Pam Kastner. I have the honor of serving as Patent State Lead for Literacy. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to my wonderful colleagues.

Good evening, everybody, and welcome to this Patent Book Study Series, The Writing Rope with author Joan Sedita. My name is Andrew Bell, and I'm a member of the Patent Literacy Team. And joining me this evening are some colleagues, Patent Literacy Team members, along with Pam and myself.

Nicole Kocko, Heather Farimba. If I missed others in this large group, please say hello in the chat. We have placed in the chat the link to the Padlet aligned to this book study series, and on this Padlet you will find the handouts for tonight's session, and previous sessions will be on there as we go through and related resources.

Please place questions for Joan Sedita in the chat. At the conclusion of tonight's presentation we will have brief time to pose these questions to our presenter. Tonight, our focus will be chapter one, introduction to, sorry, I just lost, introduction to the writing rope and chapter two, what do we know about effective writing instruction? And I'm honored to introduce our esteemed guest, Joan Sedita. I am so sorry, I lost it again.

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy, a literacy professional development organization. Joan has been in the literacy field for over 40 years as a teacher, administrator, and teacher trainer. She has authored multiple literacy professional development programs, including the Key Comprehension Routine, the Key Vocabulary Routine, Keys to Beginning Reading.

keys to content writing, keys to early writing, understanding dyslexia, and adolescent literacy readings. Beginning in 1975, she worked for 23 years at the Landmark School, a pioneer in the development of literacy intervention programs. As a teacher, principal, and director of the Outreach Teacher Training Program at Landmark, Joan developed expertise, methods, and instructional programs that address the literacy needs of students in grades K through 12. Joan was one of the three lead trainers in the master's for the Reading First program and was a letters author and trainer.

Joan received her master's of education and reading from Harvard University and her BA from Boston College. And before we start, I just want to remind everybody to mute themselves and Joan. throw it to you.

Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you. Thank you, Andra and Pam and everybody at the Patan group for giving me this opportunity to talk about something that is like very dear to my heart. So welcome. This is the first in a series of five.

I hope all of you who are on tonight can join me for the rest of them. And if you can't, these are all being recorded, which is wonderful. So just as a reminder, our meeting dates are pretty much Wednesday evenings like this.

We're going to skip Thanksgiving week. So we have five of them. While this slide is up, if you don't have the book from Brooks yet and you want to purchase it, they are offering a discount code for anybody who joins in on this book study. So if you just go to the Brooks website to order and use the code that you see there, you'll get 10% off and free shipping.

And also, I also want to point out, and those of you who do have the book, you know that if you look into the very first few pages, Brooks has developed for this book an electronic resource repository so that all of the various templates and printables and downloadables, which there are quite a few in this book, they've made them available in electronic format. So all you need to do is... go to the website.

This information is at the front of your book and then use the code that you see on the screen, which is also in the front of your book. So So as we mentioned, what we're going to do tonight is cover the first two chapters of the book. And, you know, I often feel like something like this, it's not a true book study, right? In the sense that a real book study, you have a small group of people sitting around who've read a book together and they're sharing their ideas and their thoughts.

And it's kind of hard to do that. I see we're up to over 300 right now. So, you know, a lot of this is really going to be me. debriefing and highlighting certain pieces from the book with you. And then of course, we'll save some time at the end for question and answer. But anyway, you can see how we're going to break the book out across the various meetings in the coming month or so.

So let's dig in to chapter one, which is really an introduction to the book, but more importantly to the writing rope, which is really kind of at the center of the book, right? It's what this was about. built around. So at the risk of reading some things aloud here, I felt like there were some wording from the introduction in the book that really helps highlight for you why I wrote this book, like the purpose of it.

So you can follow along. The ability to write is as essential to learning as the ability to read. And I have a quote from Graham and Perrin in one of the writing research reports. And we'll go over some of the findings from those reports in a few moments, because I think it sums it up very well.

Writing is not just an option for young people. It's a necessity. Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and the basic requirement for participation in civic life and the global economy. All students need to become proficient and flexible writers.

So we all know that it's important. important. I don't think anybody doubts that, right?

But it's often neglected. I also wrote in the introduction, not only do students use writing to communicate, but writing also improves reading comprehension. And students who receive that opportunity to write in conjunction with their reading show much more evidence of critical thinking about reading. And many of the skills that are involved with writing also can reinforce things such as fluency and word reading skills.

So, you know, one of the things I think it's a theme that flows through the book, but certainly the last several chapters where we focus on the critical thinking strand of the writing rope is really all about how students can use writing, if they're taught to be able to write, how they can use writing to support their learning. And that's why content teachers, teachers of any subject, can play a role in helping our students grow their writing skills. So why the writing rope?

This is another quote from the book in the beginning. The literature and discourse related to literacy instruction tends to focus on reading, even though writing is just as important for student literacy achievement. Much has been written about the multiplicity of skills involved in reading, beginning with the five components necessary for skilled, fluent reading.

So, you know, in our field. Those of us who are involved with literacy, you know, these days, it's very nice. But, you know, if we say, what are the five components of reading?

You know, most folks in our field know what they are, you know, right? Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. But, you know, when it comes to writing, when any attention is paid to writing, as I have in the quote here, teachers are not sure what to include.

Many educators who are very knowledgeable about reading instruction are not able to identify the components of skilled writing. And so that's really the kind of the goal and the purpose of the writing rope framework. So why this book and sort of how did it come about?

It was noted early in the introduction about my history. I had the wonderful opportunity at the start of my career to work at a school. For just students with learning disabilities, dyslexia, the Landmark School in Massachusetts.

I started there in the mid 70s when it was only a couple of years old and had the wonderful opportunity to every year work with over 500 students across all age spans who had difficulty with reading and writing. And that's where I first realized that writing does not come naturally to lots of people. And.

It's through that work in the beginning years with students who struggled at a point when there wasn't very much research about what an effective instruction was that I really started thinking about what are the specific skills we need to teach these kids. And Even with some of my high school students realizing, my gosh, we have to go right back down to the individual sentence level and that our instruction needs to be explicit. So that's where I sort of began my journey with reading, but also writing. Where I work now, the company that I founded 15 years ago, Keys to Literacy, we go all over the country training teachers.

And I'd say maybe eight, nine, 10 years ago. We started putting together some of our trainings around helping teachers know the best way to teach writing to students. And that led to a bunch of workshops and so on and so forth.

And back about five years ago, I started feeling like we needed the equivalent of Hollis Scarborough's reading rope, right? That teachers, it's not, writing is not this monolithic thing, that it has some components. And. We need to teach them individually.

We can talk about them the way we're going to do that now tonight and the way they're organized into chapters in the book. Right. But ultimately, it's about students building skills in all of these areas, all of these components.

But then more importantly, being able to pull them all together and integrate them in order to to effectively write. For a while, I had this little metaphor that I used for a long time of a wagon wheel, thinking about these components as like spokes in a wheel. And, you know, we all know that if one or two of the spokes are broken, like the integrity of the wheel, it's just not going to hold everything up. But I wrote a blog post in 2019 where I sort of ditched the wagon wheel metaphor and decided to...

kind of with a nod to the reading rope, use that metaphor. And then I wrote about it in a blog post and the IDA, International Dyslexia Association, picked up on the graphic and asked if they could put it in their series of infographics. And then one thing led to another.

And a little over a year ago, Brooks Publishing asked me if I would write a book about the writing rope. They thought it would be five chapters, one for every. strand in the rope, but there's a whole lot more. So we ended up with more chapters. Who is it written for?

Educators, obviously, who are seeking to learn about research-based and effective instructional practices. I think it's for educators who need some sort of a framework that they can use to help determine if the writing curriculum that they're using, does it cover everything that it should, right? If they're looking to vet programs to bring in around teaching writing, it gives a framework to sort of look at those programs and decide, is it covering all the components that it should, right?

But I also feel like writing instruction in some ways is similar to comprehension and vocabulary instruction in that really the best way to teach it is for the teacher to have the background knowledge about effective practices that we can integrate into whatever it is we're teaching and whatever it is we're reading in the classroom. And so I believe that if teachers have that knowledge, they actually don't need a writing program. You know, and that's how I feel about teaching comprehension as well.

So it's not a program. It's more literally a framework. Now the publisher...

decided to have the target be grades four to eight. And I've had a lot of folks in some of the Facebook groups ask me, can some of this be used in the earlier grades or in high school? And the answer is absolutely yes. As you're reading the book, you'll see that some of the chapters around sentences and paragraphs, you can begin that work in the primary grades. In fact, some of the stuff around sentence combining and sentence elaboration, that stuff we can do through oral language with our youngest children.

So it certainly can go down. And then for our older high school students, so much of what's in here can be appropriate for that as well. With this slide, I wanted to show you the original graphic that I, I'm, as a hobby, I'm, I'm a, I'm not a good artist, or I like to watercolor and draw.

It's not good, but, but it's fun, right? And so one night when I was going to write the blog post about this to explain the strands in the rope, I kind of doodled and drew this little rope. It's not nearly as nice as the one that the folks at Brooks Publishing put together, but it is the original one.

And, and it's funny, I had somebody the other day asked me, why the rope is joined like a spiral instead of braiding. And I honestly can't tell you, doesn't matter to me. All I know is that the strands have to work together tightly, like a good rope.

So, but what I thought I would do is just do kind of hit the mountaintops of the strands in the rope, which happens in the beginning of the book. There's a couple of paragraphs about each one. And we'll use the nice colorful one that the graphic designers at Brooks Publishing. put together for me. What I do have at the bottom of this slide, though, is the link to that blog post that I mentioned.

And if you want to read the actual blog post, just go, you know, you can visit it at the site where I have a monthly blog. So let's hit the mountaintops of each of the strands as I kind of walk you through my thinking about where I put certain things. I also will have folks say to me sometimes, oh, why did you put this under this strand?

Or, you know, why is that over? I would have put it over here. And there's no, I mean, if you want to, if you want to think about things in a different way, you know, go ahead, be my guest.

This is, this is, this represents my thinking. So, so the very first strand, the critical thinking, this is where I think most of the skills and strategies that are associated with writing to learn. fall, right? Or writing to sources. If you think about those high stakes assessments that we see on a lot of state tests where you're given a prompt, right?

And several sources, they might be two written sources and a video and students have to like search for particular evidence or information. Or this is the kind of thing, you know, like summary writing or in the classroom when the teacher is having posing questions and students write out answers. So these are the skills that really tax our cognition, right, our critical thinking.

And there are a lot of them, and they can range from simple things like just showing students how to annotate a text if they're writing about that text. It can include things like note taking. For those of you who are familiar with my work, you know I'm a big fan of two column notes, which we explore in later chapters in the book.

So... You know, this is like all of those skills that are tied to critical thinking. And the last several chapters in the book is where we get into that in detail.

But another thing that I felt would be good tucked in under this strand is the stages of the writing process, which I have this little model for helping kids remember. It's think, plan, write, revise. You know, Common Core standards use slightly different language. a pair of researchers, Hayes and Flowers, back in the 60s and 70s, started trying to capture the stages of the writing process.

So whatever terminology you use, this is the place where we want to make sure that kids are aware that there are stages and we can't skip any of them. And that the more effort we put into the thinking and the planning stages, the better our writing is going to be at the writing stage. the more we put emphasis on our revision, the better our writing is going to be.

And a lot of that involves critical thinking, as well as a lot of strategies that you need in order to gather that information, again, like the note-taking, for planning the structure of your piece, which is where graphic organizers come in. So that's the critical thinking strand. The next one, I put it right under that because I think it just doesn't get enough enough emphasis, but it is in the end, the core, it is the basis of all writing.

If we cannot write a good sentence, then everything else falls apart. And so the fancy word for that is syntax or syntactic awareness, which means building that awareness of the grammar that rules one's language, the order that we are allowed to put words in and sentences. But it's also about sentence elaboration.

A lot of students, after they get beyond grade three, they keep writing in these very short, simple sentences. And so instruction that we give to purposely help students in an explicit way, expand their sentences, make them longer, make them more complex, right? So that's the syntax strand. The third, text structure, there's actually quite a few things that I put in under here, sort of levels, right? And if we start with the biggest, the broadest level, that would be the text structure of major types of writing or genres, right?

If we borrow from the Common Core and a lot of other state standards, usually the first three standards, right, are about opinion or argument writing, informational writing, narrative. So what... what is the same and what's different about the structures?

What do students need to know about how they're going to vary their organization from an informational piece versus an opinion piece, right? And that includes things like introductions. What are they?

How do we write them? What are parts of introductions like hooks and leads? And how does an introduction where you're stating your claim in an argument different from... an introduction in an informational piece, or the beginning part of a narrative where we're introducing a character or a setting, right? So that's like one of the big, big text structures.

Next down is paragraph, which to me, together with sentence level, is again, a basic building block of writing. And so many of our students, including our oldest, have no clue about what a paragraph is. They either, they just write and write and write, or maybe they'll skip a line every once in a while, but there's no rhyme or reason to it. And I truly believe that part of the issue with this is a comprehension issue as well, because the whole purpose of a paragraph, and we get into this in one of the later chapters a bit more, but the whole purpose of a paragraph is to say, all right, we're writing about some topic here. Like it's multi-paragraphs, but it's all about one topic.

But what we need to do when we start to shift saying something about our topic, when it's time to move from one main point to another main point, what we need to do to shift for the reader to help them understand the organization of what we're trying to write is we need to create these breaks through paragraphs. And every paragraph should signal a new main idea. But there are many students who don't get that concept of what. a gist or a main ideas and how is that is different than the supporting details. So that's a lot of what happens around teaching students paragraph structure.

The third thing that I tucked in under the text structure strand is patterns of organization. And that includes, you know, the five basics, description, sequence or chronology, cause and effect, compare, contrast, and then problem and solution. Now, these are patterns that depending on the purpose of our writing or the goal or the task, right, we might need to do something that describes more than we need to compare and contrast.

And that can happen within a single paragraph. You can have more than one within a single paragraph, right? But you could also take one of these patterns of organization and have it drive an entire multi-paragraph piece. And then the last piece, which is very connected to the patterns of organization, right, are transition words or linking words.

This is the smallest level of text structure that I have in here. And these are words or phrases that the writer uses to signal to the reader their structure and what they're trying to say through their composition. And often they're linked to certain patterns.

So if we're doing first, second, last, that's. definitely going to connect with a sequence. If we use words like therefore and however, that's going to signal another pattern of organization.

And, you know, it's interesting in my work over the years, especially with students who really struggle with writing and language-based issues, many of these students, these words are not part of their lexicon. They just, they don't think about them. They don't, when they speak, they don't use them.

Really efficient writers. who writing comes fairly easy to, even when they're writing their first drafts, they're like pouring these transition words into their writing. So one of the things we need to do at the revising stage for students that don't, these don't come naturally to is that's part of the revision.

Find opportunities that you can insert transitions. So that's the third strand. Writing craft up till now. All three strands are things that I believe that any teacher of any subject can play a role in teaching kids and the critical thinking strand in particular, but the tech structure also because One of the ways that we help kids learn how to use text structure, right, is to show them mentor models of text that they're reading. And so if you're a science, science or whatever the subject, whatever you're using to read, you can take a moment or two to have the kids unpack the structure and then flip it in terms of thinking about, all right, how do I apply that to my writing?

So the first three, certainly any teacher can do. This fourth strand, the writing craft. does tend to be the purview of the English or the ELA teacher or the writing teacher.

And what did I put under here? Certainly word choice. It's a real craft.

These things are sometimes also referred to as writer's moves or techniques. This is where I decided to put awareness of task, audience, and purpose. Many of you may know that as the acronym TAP. Good writers, quality writers, right? They're always thinking.

about those three things. And in particular, they're thinking about their audience, because being aware of your audience is going to help you make a lot of really important decisions. So, and a lot of that rests on the craft that you're able to use, which is also connected to literary devices.

So decisions that get made around how you might use dialogue, or how you might use figurative language, there's a whole host of literary devices. So that's the writing craft. strand.

And then the last one is the transcription. And in many respects, I really feel that a lot of initial instruction, but even for older students who struggle with spelling and handwriting or keyboarding, that a lot of this instruction can and should take place during a phonics block, you know, where we are teaching decoding and encoding at the same time. So that's the sort of fastest review of the writing rope that you'll probably ever get. And with this slide, I want to bring up something that for those of you that have the book, you'll see these throughout.

When Brooks asked me to do this, I really felt like, yes, I do want to make sure I bring in links to the research, but I'm somebody that lives in the trenches, right? I mean, I've taught college courses, but I'm not a professor. I'm not a researcher. You know, I live... in the trenches helping teachers make connections, right?

And so I asked if I could put these little connect to the classroom and they came up with that little visual for it throughout. And at first they weren't sure, but they said yes. And so what I'm going to do tonight and in our other meetings is sometimes when I wrap up a piece, I will just remind us of some of the connect to the classroom questions or reflection tasks that I've given you.

So in this case, I pose the question, does the writing curriculum used in your school include instruction for all five components of the row? Which writing component do you feel most confident teaching? Which areas do you want to learn more about?

I know we have a lot of people on tonight, but if any of you feel comfortable about jotting your responses in there, that would be great. I'm sorry, into the chat, so we can just see how you responded to that. With this slide, I just wanted to bring us back again to this topic of content teachers playing a role.

This is a quote. I also forgot to mention, if you see page numbers down on the bottom of the slides, that just links to the page numbers in the book. So I have this little quote on page six.

Content writing is a way to promote and deepen content learning. When students write about what they're reading and learning, they're thinking on paper. As they write, they concentrate on the information and ideas they're learning and make connections to their existing knowledge.

Writing about content also helps students clarify and organize their thoughts and solidify the material they're learning and place that learning into their long-term memory. Now, you know, sometimes when I'm doing some training around this, I'll pause here and I'll ask everybody, I'll ask the question to you. How many of you write a list out before you go grocery shopping?

Right. And yeah. And how about if you forget the list at home? Does it the fact that you wrote the list and, you know, some of us write, write, we just make a big list.

Some of us get, you know, kind of organized and we group our list by the frozen foods in one one part of the list. Right. And the vegetables in another.

Right. But it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is that whatever thinking we did on paper about what we need to buy in the store.

It's sort of seared in our memory. So even if we don't have it any longer, it helps us think through what we need to buy. And it's a very simple example, but I think it gets to the heart of this notion.

And this is why content teachers, we've got to convince them to play a role in this because we need them. There's too many kids that can't write. So, you know, like one period a day with ELA isn't going to do it. But also if we can convince them that if our students learn to write better, they're going to learn our content faster.

Now, in this chapter, I also, in the area around content writing, share three kinds of content writing tasks. Quick writes. These are things that are done really quick, right?

Think about this. If I'm in sixth grade and I have five main teachers, and if every one of them does three quick writes a week, I'm going to do 15 quick writes, which is going to build my fluency in writing. Then there's the content learning tasks. These are things that...

take maybe one to three sessions. And by sessions, I mean either classroom time or maybe homework. And these are the things that content teachers really should be doing a lot of, having kids write summaries, having them take notes, you know, these sort of longer tasks. And then ultimately formal writing tasks, which is what we associate more with research.

So, you know, what I find in my work in training teachers in schools is that... Most content teachers are afraid to bring in too much writing. They don't know how to teach it.

They maybe aren't good writers themselves, right? They're afraid they're going to spend their weekends grading papers, right? But I think if we can convince them that these quick writes are something that are easy, they don't have to be graded, it's a great way to get more writing happening in our content classrooms.

And so the... The... question posed in Connect to the Classroom here is how often do you assign things like quick writes, middle of the road content writing tasks, and then those formal tasks. All right, so with that, let's shift now and begin to get into chapter two. You know, as I was planning for tonight, these two chapters, they're really setting the stage.

So we don't get to get into hands-on like activities and things that you can do that we get into in the later chapters. But I also think it's important for us to set the stage like this. And one of the first things that I do at the beginning of this chapter is make you familiar with the research that's out there.

Now, it is absolutely true that we do not have nearly as much research as we do about effective reading instruction. But when I hear people say, oh, there's nothing or there's very little, that's not quite true. We do have, especially within the last 20 years, some things that have been done.

And, you know, a lead researcher whose name you're going to see all over these is Steve Graham and his wife, Karen Harris. But he often tends to be the lead on these. But we have four major research meta-analyses reports that sum up that. that research.

And I, and I strongly encourage you to, all you have to do is Google these and they'll come up and you can read these reports for free. And what's wonderful about them is they not only synthesize the research for you and put it into recommendations or sort of lists of what come up over and over again as effective writing, writing instructional practices, but some of them, especially the two IES reports, they'll actually kind of, they do these things where they say, and what are the, what are the. barriers that might come up? What are the issues that might come up?

So they're very practical. What I'm going to do is in the next few slides, just hit the mountaintops of each of these, because I do think when I wrote this, I didn't want this to sound like a college textbook. I didn't want it to be off-putting the way if you read a research article can be, right? Because like I said, like I live in the trenches. I want teachers.

I want this to be easy for them to make the connection to their classrooms. But I do believe we need to be aware of the research and of the new and changing research. So what I'm going to do is give you sort of, again, a very fast tour of some of these findings.

So this is an Institute of Education Sciences report. They focused on all the research related to writing in the elementary grades. And what were the four outcomes or four major findings?

Number one. We have to provide daily time for students to write. In order to get fluent, they just have to write a lot. Now, it's not enough. They're not going to just by writing a lot magically figure out how to write.

We have to provide explicit instruction, but they do need to do more writing. And that's where things like those quick writes can come in handy. Number two, we need to teach students to use the writing process for a variety of purposes. That gets to that chapter and the strand.

that has the critical thinking where I put in under there the think, plan, write, and revise. We need to let them know what those stages are, also that they're recursive. We sometimes run through them several times.

And that we need to teach the very specific strategies that are needed at each one. So at the planning stage, we need to teach them strategies and graphic organizers to plan, for example. Third finding, and this gets to that transcription part of the rope, with the exception of the sentence construction, students have to become fluent with handwriting, spelling, you know, and or keyboarding as they get a little older. If our students after grade three are not fluent in their spelling and in their vehicle for getting it on the page, whether it's handwriting or, you know, through typing, they're going to spend so much energy on.

on that part, the transcribing part, that it takes away from their energy for the critical thinking part, for their composing. And we know that there are lots of students who, because they can't spell a word, they don't use it. And that's really sad because they end up using less efficient, less colorful language in their writing. So we want to make sure that that becomes fluent.

And then tucked into that one, they've also got sentence construction, which is about that syntax strand in the writing rope. And then the fourth one, a lot of things sort of fit in under here, but they describe it as creating an engaged community of writers. And this includes everything from making sure that we find opportunities at every stage of the writing process to enable students to collaborate with their peers and with the teachers. You know, part of the research about engagement and motivation in writing. This is one of the things that we know can make a difference.

If you think that writing is like a social act, we're trying to communicate. And so if we have an opportunity to let kids work with each other, it's going to be more motivating. But this also includes things like making sure that the students, especially the younger ones in elementary grades, view their teacher as a writing partner.

So if we can find situations where we're doing shared writing tasks, where the students are working together and we're all deciding what do we want our topic sentence to be, and the teacher writes it out on the board and we interact that way. It's also creating a safe space because writing, a lot of people don't feel comfortable about it, right? And so making sure that it's a place that we celebrate writers and that we all know we can improve our writing.

So that was the first IES report. The next was the secondary. And here's their major findings.

Number one, explicitly teach appropriate writing strategies. And this needs to be at every stage of the writing process. So this can include everything from how do you use a transition word in a descriptive paragraph, something very specific. It could be how do you write an introduction to an opinion piece?

It could be how do you use a graphic organizer to plan the structure of your piece? How do you take two column notes? So it could be any one of the large number of skills and strategies that I mentioned in this book. But what I find interesting, they use this language using a model practice reflect instructional cycle.

And that's really the first time I've ever seen that. To me, that represents what many of us know as Pearson and Gallagher's gradual release of responsibility, right? Which, which.

many people now think about as the I do, we do, you do it. So the big, big finding in the secondary meta-analysis, we have to explicitly teach these strategies using an I, we, you approach. Second, that we must be integrating writing and reading to emphasize key writing features.

And it's this thing of let's, it's a yin and a yang, right? They go together, like encoding and decoding go together. And so If we can have students notice the features in the text they're reading, how did they use a heading?

How did they insert a graphic, right? That ends up influencing their writing. But as you'll find in one of the next reports I'm going to share with you, it also ends up the writing supporting the reading. And then finally, the third one is use assessments of student writing to inform instruction and feedback. And you know what?

This. What this is emphasizing to me is that every student has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. And I think this is another way that you can use the strands in the writing world, right, to be able to look at students writing and say, all right, what strands are they falling down in? Is it the syntax?

Is it the paragraph structure? Is it the skills that are involved connecting what they're comprehending from their sources into their writing? And that...

I think as students get a lot older, it's like a Swiss cheese metaphor where these kids all have different little holes in their Swiss cheese, but each child's holes are a little different. And so we need to look to their actual writing to inform our instructional decisions. Now, another important report, this is one of the earliest ones, was called Writing Next.

It came after Reading Next. And in this case... What they did is looked at all the research related to what were the most effective instructional practices that improve the writing of grades four to 12. They not only identified them, there were 11, but they also listed them in order of most effective.

So those that had the highest the highest efficacy come first. Now, I just want to point out a few things that that are in this list because they find their way into chapters in the book. So let's look at the second one, summarizing. This is an unbelievably powerful tool for growing writing skills.

But for those of you who are familiar with the National Reading Panel, it also turns out to be one of those four or five major comprehension strategies that really improve comprehension. So I often like to say if I was alone on a stranded island and there was only one skill I could teach, it would be summarizing because it helps reading as well as writing. Let's look at sentence combining down there at the bottom of the first list.

This is something that I talk a lot about and give suggestions for how we use sentence combining to build syntactic awareness. Look at the process writing approach in the next. The stages of the writing process are so important. Study of models, the use of mentor models, and then finally writing for content learning. The last report that I'll highlight for you is writing to read.

And what this found, it looked at how does writing support reading? And it turns out it supports all levels of reading as well, including fluency and phonics, right? And decoding, but definitely affects the reading comprehension. And when we have students write personal reactions to text, there's those summaries again, note taking, right? This is also going to improve their comprehension.

And a lot of the parts of this book. that are connected to the critical thinking strand of the writing rope address this. Another thing that I just want to make sure we review that's in this chapter is the role of executive functions, or actually I should say the role of weaknesses in executive functions, and how we need to be aware of that when we're teaching students to write.

This is a visual. that you see from Virginia Berninger and her colleagues. This is one a little bit later, but they began with this model or framework. They called it the simple view of writing.

And the idea was to highlight that role of working memory and executive functions. Some of their later writing like this in 2006, they began referring it to the not so simple view. Doesn't matter to me what you call it.

What matters is that we keep in mind that for a lot of our students, especially those who maybe are diagnosed as having ADHD, right, or working memory issues, we've got to be aware that this is going to impede some of their writing. So in this model, you've got text generation up at the top. That's all really, if you think about the skills and strategies that are in the writing rope and in the book, including transcription, which they set aside over here.

The executive functions, though, the one point I want you to take away with this is, well, we have to... be aware of this. These are not, executive functions are not skills we can teach.

They're cognitive processes, right? So if you have weak working memory, there isn't a pill you can take to make that go away. And there isn't a skill you can, it's not a skill you learn, right? What I will say, however, is if you're doing explicit instruction of many writing strategies, right? Very often, those same things we're doing to improve the writing are the things that become scaffolds for students with weak executive functions.

So graphic organizers, writing templates, you know, how-to sheets, lists of transition words, teaching them note-taking so that they can hold the information on the paper if their working memory is not strong. So those are a few of the takeaways. There's a little bit more in the book about executive functions. This quote I put in there. Because for me, it sort of sums up this need to remember the executive functions.

And I often feel like by the time I get to the end of this paragraph that I'm exhausted just thinking about all the things we have to do to write. And I don't know how we can write. So anyway, but obviously some of us figure out how to do it. So as the quote says, while negotiating the rules and mechanics for writing, the writer must maintain focus on factors such as organization, form and features.

purposes and goals, audience needs and perspectives, and evaluation of the communication between the author and reader. Self-regulation of the writing process is critical. The writer must be goal-oriented, resourceful, reflective. Skilled authors'writing is flexible, it's goal-directed, it's scaffolded by a rich source of cognitive processes and strategies, right? for planning text production and revision.

So there's an awful lot we have to juggle. And I think that's all the reason more that thinking about this as strands in the rope, that ultimately we've got to help kids integrate all this because a set of skills in isolation, it's not enough. One of the other, the last things I want to go over before we have a few moments for some question and answer. The other thing that's in this chapter, I Identify seven teaching principles that I keep weaving back through as we move through the other chapters.

The gradual release of responsibility. We mentioned that before. I mentioned the explicit instruction, right?

Differentiating lots of scaffolds, opportunities for collaboration, using mentor models, right? Increasing how much students write. So...

And what I've got here is a little picture of what those seven teaching principles look like in the book. But this is an example of one of those things that Brooks has made available in an electronic format in case you want to download that. I thought that a way to end this would be to just share a little bit more about mentor models.

Because this comes up throughout all the chapters as well. So if we're talking about teaching kids how to use transition words, well, let's show them a few passages where an author used transitions in a really swell way that we want the kids to view and to imitate, right? If we want them to learn how to write a hook to a narrative lead, right, you know, in an introduction, well, let's show them some examples of that.

So what this is about is really... recognizing that the way most of us learn to write or get better at our writing, right, is to emulate others. And I'll use another everyday example for you for this. So if you're in a car accident and you need to, you're at the police station and you need to fill out an accident report. If you've never written one before, what do you do?

How many of you say, can I take a look at a few other reports so I can see how they're written? And then you see how they're written and you emulate them. Or if you've ever had to write a letter of recommendation for somebody, right? Or fill out a grant proposal.

And that's the idea here. We learn by looking at how others do this. Now, the problem with mentor models for a lot of folks is they get the concept, but they're not explicit enough. And so what happens is they might say, look at this great example of this article that was written.

This is the way of... good informational piece should be written. So now I want you to start writing like this. That's meaningless to students.

If on the other hand, we can pick a very specific, maybe it's a text structure, maybe it's something about style and language or a move or a technique. That's what we want our mentor models to focus on. And so I thought, oh, also within the book, and you've got a picture here of something that's right in the book.

I've listed examples of very specific things that you might use mentor text for. But what I wanted to do is show you some examples at both the earliest grade levels and the upper, right? So this is an example.

Actually, this is not in the writing rope book. This is in another book I wrote that goes with my keys to early writing training for primary grades. But you can begin doing this with first and second graders, right? So.

I want you to see if you can figure out what was the writer's moved or writer's craft that all three, these are three different mentor examples, all three of them use. What's the same? And we're getting close on time, so I'm going to give you the answer if you haven't figured it out.

There's actually two going on. The big one is they're using bubbles to have their characters speak, right? Another one that's used in a couple places is they play around with the shape or the size or the color of some of the words to make them stand out.

So now this is an example where you could say to your students, even your youngest ones, all right, in your drawing, I know you are trying to show that these two characters are saying something to each other. How can you mimic this? this example. But now let me show you one in an upper grades. So there's something called a nonfiction lead or a hook, and there are many different kinds.

I've just listed three of them for you here, right? Using a quote, posing a question, or sharing a fascinating fact or detail. Now, keep those three in mind.

And as you look at the two examples on the screen, they're both introductions to and their mentor text about high school dropouts, right? High school dropout rate. Which one do they use in the first example?

And again, because we're running a little short on time, they are using, right? They're using a quote. They're quoting a student. On the second one, what they're using, and again, we have a choice, quote, question, fascinating fact. They are giving lots of fascinating facts.

So now what I might do if I was doing this explicitly with my students is say, look. You've just seen two examples here. I want you to rewrite your introduction, but I want you to either use a quote or some fascinating facts.

So that's about all I wanted to say about that. And I'm going to end this now. So we still have a few minutes for question and answers.

While we're doing this, I wanted to leave this link up for you. If you find yourself in a situation where you have a small group of colleagues and you want to do a book study for the writing rope, but. the more traditional type where you're sharing things back and forth.

I have developed a set of questions for a self-guided book study. And basically you've got the link there. You just go to my Keys to Literacy website.

On the front page, I have a picture of the book. You click that and it'll bring you to the study guide. So I think with that...

Pam or any one of you, anybody want to start throwing out some questions to me that you've been seeing in the chat? Yes. Here we go, Joan.

Yeah. Some really great questions. So let's start here.

As an ELD teacher, how can we use the writing rope with our level one ELs? I think you mean English language learners. Yeah. Well, you know, look, we know that English language learners. benefit from the same research-based instructional practices for teaching, reading, and writing as all students do, right?

We also have to remember that all Ls, they're not a monolithic group either, right? Some of them, they all have different needs. But, you know, one of the things that I often see with English language learners is their syntactic awareness is not as well developed. Let's use an example. You know, if...

if in English we put our adjectives in front of our, our noun. So if I say the flat brown desk in a romance language, I would say the desk flat Brown, but that doesn't sound right to our, right. Our English awareness of, of English syntax.

So I think a lot of the things that are in the sentence chapter, the syntax chapter are going to be especially beneficial for, for English language learners. I think that's a really good point. But I mean, basically everything else.

Well, I think the stuff, the piece in there about transitions, because I think those words don't come as naturally as well. But everything else around, you know, English language learners have just as much to say in the composing, right, stage of it. And so they're going to benefit from the same explicit instruction in the strategies for organizing their thoughts before they write, taking notes, using graphic organizers. having an awareness of text structure. I think a lot of the other things throughout the book will be helpful as well for them.

Okay, so next question. What about typing? My school is basically totally digital, at least in the English classroom.

I know handwriting is connected to the brain and learning, but is typing, writing okay? We do daily do nows where our kids write, but they are typing. All essays and graphic organizers are done digitally too.

We also use actively learn for. all reading and text annotations. Yeah. There are a lot of things that are tucked into that question. You know, and there's a lot of controversy out there about should we, how much attention should we put to handwriting?

When do we move kids on to keyboarding? And if it's handwriting, should it be cursive or should it be print? You know, I mean, and for a lot of these questions, there are no set answers. There is a section I have in the book about this, where I review some of the research around this.

Graham talks a bit about this. Berninger's been doing that research on that a long time. You know, just a few highlights that I could say.

I mean, Whether it's handwriting or keyboarding, let's remember that transcription strand, right? That kids are not fluent in some transcribing form, right? Whether it's handwriting or the keyboarding as they get older and they're developmentally able to do two-hand keyboarding, right?

Because that's the other thing. Our younger children, they can do the hunt and peck, but developmentally, they're not able to until somewhere around six or seven that you can really get. get proficient at that. But whether it's the handwriting or the keyboarding, if we're not fluent in it, then all our attention is going to be taken up on that. It's very similar.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but it's very similar to me, like what happens with decoding. If kids beyond grade four are not fluent with their ability to decode words on the page, what happens? They have to put so much attention to that, that it takes away from comprehension. And it's the same thing. Um, so we do need to make sure they're proficient.

Um, you also see lots of situations where, uh, students are doing handwriting throughout the school, the school days and weeks, right? But then all of a sudden the high stakes test comes and they have to do it all using, um, keyboarding and, and same thing. Now they're not able to share with you what their composing abilities are. So it's, it's a tough one and there's a lot of controversy surrounding it. There are a number of questions around that.

And there's also a question about technology and the impact it's had on writing, both informal and with texting. So any quick thoughts on that? And then I'll continue with just a few more questions. Yeah, well, I mean, there's so many ways that we use technology.

Right. And all you have to do is look at your our own lives. Right. You know, when I write books now, it's so much easier because there's word processing. You know, I can cut and paste and I can drag things and.

And so it allows me to focus again on my composing and my critical thinking and how I want to craft my sentences and not getting bogged down in that I can't write fast enough. You know, I happen to be a fast typer. So I think for all of us, there are certain advantages.

There's also the angle of the adaptive technology. Right. So for students who who have a real difficult time for for lots of reasons. Right.

Actually, with the transcribing, will we now have speech to text? So I think there's a lot of advantages to it. There are questions around that too as well. So could mentor models be exemplar writings from students or only from professionals? Oh, that's a great question.

And the answer is they could be from anything. So yes, save your student work, right? Obviously, white out the names, you know, we don't want to.

But, you know, it also, a couple of other things I want to say that it's not, shouldn't just be the finished product. So if you're trying to teach students how to maybe use, take notes to gather some evidence, give them mentor models of well-written notes. But you can also sometimes show some not so well-written things and unpack them and say, what's missing?

Put or put two mentor models together, one that's written well, one that's not. Have the kids analyze what's the difference. The Swiss cheese metaphor is always a great one. And so there's a question about for students who have similar needs. to group them in skills groups or try to meet with them one-on-one?

What's your suggestion? Well, I mean, gosh, this, that's a big question. I, you know, there's a lot of research out there about, you know, is one-on-one tutoring better than a one-on-three or five? And, you know, I don't have that all at my fingertips right now, but I think in general, we know that if students are grouped with similar needs, then oftentimes I think they're referring to intervention here.

You know, that oftentimes that tutoring can be just as effective with three students or four students where it gets dicey as if they all have different holes in their Swiss cheese. And I think there's, as it relates to writing, the advantage of working with smaller groups rather than one-on-one also is you get that ability for them to be collaborating, which is also another important thing. A question about mentor models and rubrics.

How are they the same? How are they different? Do they have specific features? Well, mentor models are just our text, right? And when we use them, oftenly, if we're going to be doing it explicitly, we unpack it, right?

We think aloud, we analyze it. But in some respects, that's the same thing that we need to do when we're revising our own work or a peer's work, right? We're looking at it and we're analyzing it.

I think maybe the connection that the questioner is making here is that how might you use rubrics to evaluate or analyze a piece of writing? I'm actually not a very big fan of rubrics. in terms of them being a tool that one could use to give students feedback.

Rubrics, I get why they need to be used. You know, if you're doing scoring on a state assessment or you need some consistency. But I much more prefer checklists of the type, there are several of them in the book, but where a student, a teacher can give feedback about very specific things. Did you use transitions?

Did you use enough of them? How well were they written? And then you could give a score of, you know, I'm getting really good at it.

You know, still a big Swiss cheese hole, right? That's giving very much more directed feedback to students than rubrics, which tend to be really more for the adults. Thank you.

One last question, because I know we're a bit over, but I think it's an important one. Someone wrote to us who's a middle school teacher and her students, many of them are dyslexic and have dysgraphia. And they have great ideas.

And so the question was, how often is it okay for them to use assistive technology to do that? And how often should they be writing? So let me read it specifically. I think I didn't do that so well. All the students I work with have dyslexia and some have dysgraphia as well at the middle school level.

They have great ideas that I want them to be able to share. How often is it okay to allow them speech to text? And should I have them physically write as well? I like all of the above, right?

And let's use an analogy or a connection to reading. You know, we know that especially dyslexic students, right, but that there are a lot of students that leave second and third grade and their decoding is not strong. They don't have, they're not fluent.

But would we hold them back and say, so we're never going to let you access good, rich quality text to develop your vocabulary and your syntax and work on comprehension because you can't read the words yet. So what do we do? We use adaptive technology or we find other.

And it's the same thing with the writing. Why would we hold somebody back from being able to express themselves, to compose, to share their ideas, to use composing to help them learn and master the material that they're learning? Right.

Simply because they can't spell the words or they have dysgraphia and they can't get that transcription out there. So I think I think we absolutely have to do that. Now, does that mean we give up on teaching spelling or we give up on having them get better at keyboarding? No, we can do both things at once. But that's the sad part of this, that so many people don't write because they're embarrassed about what their handwriting looks like or that they're slow in keyboarding or that they don't know how to spell words.

And we have to let them know that we value the composing part of writing. Much, much more than the transcription skills. Thank you for that, Joan.

And on that, I think we're going to say good night for such a wonderful evening. We learned so much and so appreciate all the questions from everyone who put them into the chat. And if we missed any of yours, what we'll do is we'll put them onto the Google Doc that we have, and we'll share them with Joan and can look at them next week too. Our next session is next Wednesday evening, November 16th, 7 p.m.

Eastern. I want to give a big shout out as well to the patent literacy team. And we had, I think, over 360 people.

And so we always say thank you so much. We know your teachers and parents and advocates and so much more. And here you are after a long day, continuing to learn and join us. We are truly, truly grateful. And we look forward to seeing you next Wednesday.

Thank you so much. Yes, same for me. Thank you. Good night, everybody. Thank you, Joan.

Transcript for:Exploring Effective Writing Instruction Techniques

Transcript for:
Exploring Effective Writing Instruction Techniques