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The Teaching of Writing
Adapted from a Letter from Principal Cathy Howard, Barron Park Buzz, January 30, 2004
As a school and as a district, we place a high value on literacy and writing. The PAUSD English-Language Arts program offers integrated instruction in all dimensions of language arts. Student writers benefit from opportunities to read, hear and discuss good literature as models for writing in every genre, as well as specific techniques and conventions. In a kindergarten class last week, I observed students discussing different versions of the folk take “The Mitten,” and then writing in their journals about their favorite part. The teacher worked with them on “stretching the sounds” in each word (phonics applied to writing) and on remembering the spelling of common words like “the.” In a third-grade class, the teacher read a story by William Steig and then focused on replacing general words in their own writing (e.g., “said,” “nice,” “good,” “stuff”) with more specific and concrete words and phrases.
Writers must be responsible for meeting the needs of readers; this includes following the conventions for written text (spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc). These conventions must be taught, and once taught, teachers reinforce their use in both exercises and writing. Recently, I watched second graders correcting a variety of errors in a sentence, and fifth graders revising, editing, and correcting their own writing on the computer. Our Special Day Class students are working on learning and forming their letters.
We have high expectations for quality writing, and we teach students to work toward those expectations by focusing on six traits or aspects of writing: ideas and content, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and mechanics or conventions. A fourth-grade lesson on “Ideas and Content” in a memoir unit helped student writers develop a controlling idea with selected supporting details. First graders working on “Word Choice” handled and observed leaves to brainstorm rich and specific sensory details.
The best way to assess student writing is to evaluate their actual writing. The PAUSD uses the Educational Records Bureau (ERB) Writing Assessment Program (WrAP). In this test, each fourth- and fifth-grade student must plan, draft, and write an essay on an assigned topic. The essays are scored by professional readers on a six-point scoring rubric, and are compared with those written by students from suburban public and private schools across the country. We recently received the scores for the ERB WrAP our students took last fall. While our student population is considerably more diverse than that of PAUSD as a whole, both our mean raw scores and our subscores on each of the six traits are either the same as, or slightly higher than, the district average. At school, we have already begun studying the assessment results to help us target our writing instruction and provide better support and increasing challenges for our student writers.
