“In our efforts to help students learn, I think we are often overlooking something that’s easy to implement, which is to use writing as a way to reinforce and foster the learning of content knowledge.  The idea that good writing is good writing has, in many ways, been debunked; it doesn’t hold up as you get closer to professional standards and professional life.”

 

 

 

Amidst the rush of graduate classes this past summer, I had the opportunity to meet, share writing with, and learn from Dr. Paul M. Rogers, Associate Chair of English at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.  He was ending his three year leadership role as the director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, and was finishing his fifth year as leader of the Invitational Summer Institute.  With NVWP as the impetus for this blog, Dr. Rogers, Paul as he prefers, was the first name that came to mind when I started considering people who might have excellent advice for teachers seeking to use writing in their classrooms.

One thread that emerged from our conversation was the idea of writing as a reciprocal tool, one in which content area teachers help students learn their curriculum, while bearing in mind that they also have a responsibility to instruct students how to write using the methodology specific to the subject they teach.  Paul explains, “For me, there are two basic principles behind writing in the content areas: there’s writing as a tool for learning, and there’s learning to write for specific professions.  As a tool, writing prior to doing something, writing while doing something, and writing after doing something, whether in science or math or history or English, taps into a unique mode of thinking and applies powerful learning strategies.  Professionally, writing becomes specific. Writing for science is much different than writing for journalism, for example.  In science, passive voice could be used quite frequently, because it doesn’t really matter who performed the experiment; what matters is that a process happened.  In that case, passive voice is completely appropriate, where in other cases you want to stay away from it.  When we think about teaching writing in the content areas, we have to consider these things. How do biologists write? What do they write? What are the genres that they write in? How do they use field notes? What is writing to a scientist?  What is writing to an historian?  What is writing to a philosopher?  As teachers, we know that students need to understand writing as a tool that gets used in particular ways in particular fields.”

Paul believes that content driven writing can begin as early as elementary school, and he suggests practice for young students through programs such as Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading, a research-based curriculum dedicated to essential science questions and literacy in the early grades.  He says, “In these lessons, the concepts are distilled to a level that allows elementary students to do the same kind of writing that the scientists would do.  It’s clear from the perspective of the spiral curriculum that these things can be taught to anyone at various ages, so I think there are ways of thinking about writing in different disciplines that are relevant even in those younger grades.”

While he acknowledges the limitations that teachers face in terms of implementing consistent writing practice in their classrooms, two of which are time and additional grading in their already packed workload, Paul has concerns that students are missing out on necessary writing instruction for success as they progress through school and beyond.  He tells a story about a colleague in another department who also worked outside of the university as a consultant.  His colleague expressed how important writing was to his professional life and said he spent half of his time writing for his consultant job.  When Paul asked how much time he spent teaching his students how to write within his field, his colleague confessed he simply didn’t have time to cover writing.  Paul says, “I was just struck.  Here it was, this differentiation that was helping him make a mark professionally, and there was no time to give his students access to the thing that was making the difference.”

When it comes to the limitations of grading writing, teachers sometimes fall into the trap of feeling like they have to grade every aspect of the piece.  Paul suggests that in the vein of writing to learn, much of the writing done in any classroom can be ungraded and informal, simply a tool for helping students grapple with material.  He says that using strategies such as minimal markings and writing for prediction or reflection are effective in helping students retain and analyze content, and he’s also a proponent of journaling and listing while learning content.

Commiserating, Paul says, “You get papers turned in and you wonder whether you need to correct every little error that you see.  You can’t correct every single thing; no one could even take it all in if you did.  Focus on a couple of things, and focus on what’s good and correct in the writing, too.  Here is where I think there are errors in terms of instruction in the content areas, places where we could demystify the grading process.  We could help people see good practice and what it looks like.”

He suggests that one way to do this is to build the capacity of professionals within education by bringing people together to share their ideas about best practices in writing.  “When people come to a program like NVWP, they surface what they do, and we all glean some of the hard earned lessons from our colleagues.  We do this collectively.  It’s getting together with other departments and talking with them about their writing concerns.  What are their group standards for writing?  What are their biggest priorities as a group?  They can talk and identify them together.  So, I think that this method of surfacing the expertise that’s already there can be very useful if you keep it from digressing into complaints about student writing, which is counterproductive and ubiquitous at the same time.”

You can watch an interview with Paul discussing the research behind writing in the content areas by checking out his interview on the PBS series, Reading Rockets.