California Department of Education
Taking Center Stage – Act II

Teaching writing

According to researcher Douglas Reeves, writing improves reading comprehension and student performance in several academic areas, including social studies, science, and mathematics. He also asserts that writing, particularly when paired with analysis, editing, and rewriting, will improve students’ abilities to communicate and succeed on state and local writing tests.1

The California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) requires all students to demonstrate their writing ability. As a result, the middle grades become a gateway for preparing students with the writing skills they need to succeed in high school and beyond. The seventh-grade writing proficiency results from the California Standards Test provide eighth-grade teachers with an important tool for assessing student progress and targeting strategies intended to bring students up to grade-level proficiency before the transition to high school.

To help teachers improve student writing, the Alliance for Excellent Education released a report titled Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools (PDF; Outside Source). It calls for effective writing instruction in middle and high schools. The report describes 11 components of a writing program (schoolwide) that will help students learn to be effective writers:

  1. Writing strategies (brainstorming, writing, revising, rethinking, and editing a text)
  2. Summarization
  3. Collaborative writing (working together to plan, draft, revise, or edit a text)
  4. Specific product goals (having a well-written prompt)
  5. Word processing
  6. Sentence combining
  7. Prewriting
  8. Inquiry activities (analyzing concrete and immediate data to develop ideas for writing)
  9. Process writing approach (which includes writing activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities, writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing)
  10. Study of models
  11. Writing for content area learning2

In the Spotlight

Rancho Cucamonga Middle School (Outside Source), a 2006 On the Right Track school, Cucamonga Elementary School District. After only five students passed the seventh-grade writing proficiency test in 2002, teachers at Rancho Cucamonga developed what they called a “writing wheel” to help students learn writing skills and prepare for the seventh-grade writing proficiency test. In addition to regular classroom instruction in writing, three times a year the seventh-grade team devoted a two-day block to the writing wheel that covered persuasive essays, expository writing, and response to literature. They divided the seventh-grade class into two sections. Half of the class spent the first day on the multipurpose “writing wheel,” where teachers helped students learn a new genre. The other half of the seventh graders spent the day in mathematics projects and remediation.

In the morning, all the students working on the writing wheel received direct instruction in writing techniques related to one genre, such as expository writing or fictional critique. In the afternoon, the students used the techniques they learned that morning to write a paragraph.

The next day the student groups switched so that those who received mathematics remediation the previous day had their turn to learn the writing strategies. In the afternoon, the students returned to their individual language arts classes for intense guided practice. Teachers developed “recipes” so that students could follow an easy-to-remember formula for each genre of writing. The writing wheel is not an elective.

The teachers at Rancho Cucamonga found that the collegial dialogues and shared teaching of writing helped all of them to reinforce key writing skills in all subject areas throughout the year.

Santa Cruz County Office of Education. The Santa Cruz County Office of Education conducts yearly staff development sessions on the writing program, Step Up to Writing. The Step Up To Writing strategies support standards-based, state-adopted writing programs already in place in our local schools. These user-friendly strategies remove writing barriers as well as demystify the writing process for all students. The Internet provides many examples of Step Up to Writing materials. For example, a poster that includes science writing tips was posted by PS3 -- a project that grew out of the Bay Area Schools for Excellence in Education (BASEE).

Wiseburn School District (Outside Source). Working with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the Wiseburn School District staff created a rubric for the Seventh Grade Response to Literature writing assessment. The five-point rubric helps students and teachers see expected proficiency levels for conventions, word choice and sentence fluency, and ideas and organization. The attached rubric includes a chart for teachers to list student scores. During professional development exercises, teachers discuss exemplars showing how an essay was scored by a team of teachers.

The resources noted below will help middle grades teachers prepare their students as writers.

California Department of Education Resources

External Resources

  • The California Writing Project (Outside Source) has a central mission: to improve student writing and learning by improving the teaching of writing.
  • Mind maps are a visual “drawing” of the relationships between a central idea or theme and the supporting ideas that help to explain it. Mind mapping often helps guide students to develop a concept before they begin writing. The Internet has many sites that provide examples of mind maps, including a mind map study page (Outside Source) on the James Cook University Web site.
  • Reeves, Douglas B. Reason to Write: Help Your Child Succeed in School and in Life Through Better Reasoning and Clear Communication. New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2002.
  • Reeves, Douglas B. Reason to Write: Student Handbook. New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2002.
  • Resources for teaching English language arts to students with disabilities (Outside Source)

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English language arts instruction

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English language development

Footnotes
1Douglas B. Reeves, Reason to Write: Help Your Child Succeed in School and in Life Through Better Reasoning and Clear Communication. New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2002, p. 3.
2Steve Graham and Dolores Perin, Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools (PDF; Outside Source), Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education, 2007, pp. 4, 5.

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