Most educators acknowledge that literacy is important, but often
the focus is on reading because for a long time that is what achievement
tests measured.
In the last few years there has been more focus on
writing in classrooms and on tests, but many students still have
difficulty expressing their ideas on paper.
Often students struggle to begin writing, so some teachers have
shifted assignments to allow students to write about something they care
about, or to provide an authentic audience for written work. While
these strategies are important parts of making learning relevant to
students, they may not be enough on their own to improve the quality of
writing. Practice is important, but how can teachers ensure students are
practicing good habits?
Nell Scharff Panero taught high school English for 13 years before
going back to school to get her Ph.D. in educational leadership. She is
now the director of the Center for Educational Leadership at Baruch
College, part of City University of New York (CUNY). As a teacher she
was often frustrated that she didn’t have more concrete tools to teach
writing. Like many teachers, she taught her students to brainstorm, to
write outlines and thesis statements with details that backed them up,
but when students still struggled she didn’t feel she had the tools to
dig deeper.
“If language was breaking down at the level of the sentence, I didn’t
know how to break it down or what to do about it,” Scharff Panero said.
“And I didn’t know how to expect more.”
These experiences teaching ultimately led her to the work she
currently does, guiding teams of educators in an inquiry process to
identify specific, granular gaps in students’ ability to write. Peg Tyre
documented one school’s inquiry and implementation process at New Dorp
High School in her article “The Writing Revolution,” published in The Atlantic.
Despite initially pushing back, Tyre writes that through inquiry
teachers began to see that their students didn’t understand things like
how the conjunctions “but, because and so” work in sentences, and these
gaps were preventing them from expressing complexity in writing.
“I think what’s most counter-cultural, and not really in the
knowledge base, is how to develop students at the level of the sentence
and all the ramifications that has in terms of thinking and content,”
Scharff Panero said.
“There’s a belief that you immerse kids in it and they kind of figure
it out,” Scharff Panero said. And some kids can, especially if they
grow up in a language-rich environment without any of the common
barriers found in public school classrooms, like learning English as a
second language, special needs, trauma and poverty. The idea is that
models of good writing naturally transfer to students as they regularly
practice their own writing, but sometimes students don’t pick up on
crucial ideas that end up inhibiting them as they advance in school.
Indeed, many students in the public education system aren’t
“catching” what they need to know about writing - the most recent
National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test found
almost 75% of eighth- and 12th-graders in the U.S. wrote below
grade level and only 3% of U.S. students, across all
demographics, wrote at an “advanced” level.
“Some people can make it, but how do we learn more about how we can
teach it better, so everyone does better?” Scharff Panero asked.
The strategies New Dorp teachers used to fill gaps in students’ understanding came from Judith Hochman’s book Teaching Basic Writing Skills,
and they seem simplistic. To the average high school teacher, spending a
semester on sentence-level exercises that are heavily scaffolded seems
easy and boring.
But Scharff Panero said that when teachers try taking
instruction back to basics using what she calls “progressive mastery,”
they see big improvements in the quality of both thinking and writing,
and that students can meet high school expectations when teachers slow
down to show them how to write well.
The New Dorp turnaround inspired New York City to require the
approach at the 30 lowest-performing high schools in the district,
called Renewal Schools. Some of these schools are now beginning to see a shift, but only after some difficult discussions with staff.
“It was very much an attitude that we went in; we taught it; the kids
didn’t pay attention; they didn’t study; and they should have learned
it,” said Dan Scanlon, principal of John Adams High School. “A lot of people felt they were being blamed for their kids not learning something.”
Scanlon said it was difficult for his staff to acknowledge that
pointing fingers at students wasn’t going to improve performance.
Instead, the staff had to accept the reality of where their students
were at and try something new and different for most high school
teachers. Because John Adams has been a low-achieving school for a long
time and has been designated a Renewal School, teachers ultimately had
no choice. The whole staff got trained in the writing strategies, called
Writing is Thinking through Strategic Inquiry (WITsi), and learned how
to apply them to their content areas.
“We have better teacher practice because of their implementation of
WIT and that has improved performance on Regents exams,” said Joanna
Cohen, a vice-principal at John Adams. School administrators chose to
implement writing across the curriculum because they began to see that
many of the gaps in writing knowledge also pointed to fundamental
abilities to express relationships. Using “so” correctly in a sentence,
for example, indicates causality, an idea that’s just as important in
math and science as it is in more writing-intensive disciplines like
social studies and English.
HOW PROGRESSIVE MASTERY WORKS
The WIT activities are not a set curriculum meant to be used exactly
the same way by every teacher. Instead, Scharff Panero explained that
teachers are trained in the strategies and then use their own discretion
to introduce different approaches, according to their instructional
goals.
For the program to work well, it’s important for teachers to be
able to pick out and focus on writing structures that indicate a way of
thinking, no matter the discipline. For example, distinguishing general
ideas from specific statements is a crucial skill that comes up when
students write paragraphs that include a topic sentence, along with
supporting sentences that back up the topic sentence.
When the idea of distinguishing general from specific is the focus of
the lesson, the teacher can approach it in a different way. For
example, in the Hochman Method used at New Dorp and studied by Scharff Panero, teachers
started by giving students a paragraph and asking them to pick out the
general statement, the topic sentence and specific statements, the
supporting detail. Starting with the model before asking students to
write their own topic sentences helped reinforce the bigger idea of the
difference between general and specific.
The idea behind progressive mastery is to protect students from what
confuses them until they have mastered each individual component. With
that in mind, the freshman high school students Scharff Panero studied
focused on the level of the sentence, as well as note-taking strategies,
for a whole semester. They looked at examples, identified different
kinds of sentences and the details within them, filled in word stems,
learned to expand sentences and how to combine them.
A scaffolded activity focusing on the differences between but, because, and so in a sentence. (Nell Scharff-Panero/"Progressive mastery through deliberate practice: A promising approach for improving writing")
Many of these activities are “closed” in that they have a right or a
wrong answer that indicates both how well students understand the
writing structure, as well as the content involved. Scharff Panero is
aware that many educators believe writing in this didactic way inhibits
creativity and free expression, but she says students need to understand
the rules of writing before they can break them. And, she pushes back
against the idea that this approach is dumbing down expectations,
arguing that short, sentence-level exercises can contain a lot of rigor
and show deep thought.
“My feeling is that if you believe, as I do, that they’re missing
foundational skills, then if all you do is increase the rigor without
closing the skill gap, then you’ll just make the divide bigger,” she
said. Asking students to read longer and more challenging texts, and to
write longer essays without first showing them in concrete ways how to
build up to that level, defeats the purpose in her mind.
After mastering sentences, teachers move on to how to build a
paragraph. They teach students how to write quick outlines using a
specific note-taking strategy that can then provide an easy guide for
writing. Many of these ideas are familiar to English teachers, but the
difference with the progressive mastery or WIT strategies is how
teachers break down each aspect of writing.
Many high school teachers
haven’t been taught to teach this way, and while they know how to write
themselves, they may not be thinking clearly about the scaffolded steps
required to accurately summarize or build on an idea. As simple as they
sound, these writing strategies are meant to fill in those gaps.
An example of a sentence expansion activity. (Nell Scharff-Panero/"Progressive mastery through deliberate practice: A promising approach for improving writing")
JOHN ADAMS HIGH SCHOOL
It was frustrating, but John Adams teachers had to face the reality
that their kids needed them to step back and explicitly teach things
like how to effectively use conjunctions in a sentence. While it’s
natural that the English department expected to be reading and analyzing
literature, its teachers soon realized that if they didn’t help their
students master writing, they’d never get there.
“We weren’t really sure how well it was going to work because we
thought it was really low level for high school,” said Loribeth
Libretta, an English teacher at John Adams. She’s been using the WIT
strategies for five years now and has seen the difference it has made
for students. She remembers one shy freshman boy who lacked confidence
and most writing skills. Now, he’s a junior in her class and she says
it’s a joy to read his well-developed paragraphs that flow together and
express high-level thinking. He’s also become much more confident as a
learner.
“Ideally they should have learned this in elementary and junior high
school,” said Lauren Salamone, who teaches sophomores Global History.
“That’s your automatic reaction, but it’s not the reality.”
There’s a lot of writing on the New York Regents Global History exam,
which requires students to answer several document-based questions as
well as two essays covering a lot of content. Salamone didn’t resist the
writing strategies because she could see early on that her students
didn’t have the skills to write at the level required of them. And, to
her surprise, her students were grateful to learn the code to good
writing.
“They just kind of naturally grabbed on,” Salamone said. “They didn’t
really question at all. If anything they found the benefit in it.”
As a science teacher, Jennifer McHugh was skeptical of the schoolwide
writing strategy. She didn’t see why she should use valuable class time
to teach writing when students wouldn’t need that information to pass
the Regents test in her class. But, she complied with the program
because she had to, and has come around to how the writing strategies
improved her students’ scientific thinking as well.
Asking students to use “but, because and so” about the science they
are learning has given students new tools and perspectives to discuss
what they know. And, McHugh has found that the writing exercises help
her see where students have gaps in their knowledge. For example, if a
student uses “but” incorrectly in a sentence, it’s likely he or she
doesn’t understand the relationship between the two things yet.
“It helps with their critical thinking skills because they’re
thinking from multiple perspectives,” McHugh said. She’s seen her
students grow over the year and they earned better Regents scores as
well.
What started out as a writing program has become a way to scaffold
content and improve teacher performance at John Adams. Teachers are
consistently asked to dive into the data in their classrooms and try to
understand where the gaps are and how they can be filled. The inquiry
that staff did to find the gaps and develop strategies to fill them is
ongoing. This work is pushing them to think more critically about how
they teach as well.
Scharff Panero believes education researchers need to do more
explicit studies on best practices to teach writing, and sees her paper
as a starting point for that work. Research has already shown that
improving writing also improves thinking, content knowledge and speaking
skills.
She’s not convinced the WIT strategies that she helped develop
for New York City’s Renewal Schools are the only way to see pronounced
growth in students’ writing abilities. It could just be that identifying
and actively trying to fill gaps in writing, no matter how it’s done,
is enough.
She’s also skeptical that a software program could find and remediate
weaknesses in writing. The processes she has witnessed are very
human-based, requiring a teacher’s expertise. Principal Scanlon also
thought it might be hard for a computer program to yield the same
results. He pointed out that software can give a teacher a lot of data,
but how he or she uses that data is much more important. He believes
that requiring teacher teams to do cycles of inquiry into their
students’ skills, while providing them with support and ideas for
closing gaps, serves the important purpose of helping teachers grow,
too.
Author
Katrina Schwartz
Katrina Schwartz is a journalist based in San Francisco. She's
worked at KPCC public radio in LA and has reported on air and online for
KQED since 2010. She's a staff writer for KQED's education blog
MindShift.
Doctoral researchers may get feedback from supervisors or reviewers about writing less detail - too much here, be more concise - or conversely more, unpack this or more information needed here.
Both types of comment mean you haven’t got the detail and length right.
So how do you know when enough detail is enough? And how long is just
right?
Writing at the appropriate depth and length is an important scholarly
discipline. I mean discipline in both senses here - writing to the
right word length and at the appropriate level of detail is an important
part of what we do as scholars. And it does mean we must
self-consciously manage what we write.
Achieving the right length and depth in any piece of writing is not a
matter of rules, but of intention, format, convention and expectations.
Understanding how these come together will allow you to write to the
right depth and length. I’ll just say that again. It’s not about rules. It’s about judgment.
I’m going to take each of those things - format,
conventions, expectations and intentions - and briefly note some of the
key issues involved.
Format
There is clearly a trade-off between
length and depth. The shorter the piece of writing, the less detail you
can provide. But that doesn’t mean that your analysis and major points
change when you move from long to short.
Think about this as a bit like looking at a
portrait of someone - when you stand up close you can see a lot of
detail, but as you move further away, the more the key features stand
out. By the time you are standing a fair distance away, you can only see
the outline of the face and the features. But the nose is the nose is
the nose, regardless of whether you are up close or far away. Or perhaps
as in the picture below, you can see that you don’t need the detail to
see a bird, and if you know birds, to see it as a pigeon.
This is how it is with writing. You might
write the key moves of your argument as three sentences in a paragraph,
as three paragraphs, or as three long sections. The focus of each of
your three sentences in the one paragraph shapes the ‘topic sentence’ of
each paragraph and the heading and opening and closing paragraph of
each section. But they are basically still the same thing. Like the
bird. Or a nose on the face of a portrait.
You don’t change your argument just
because you write short or long. It’s detail that is added, nuance, and
evidence. Adding detail to your basic argument moves, thus making them
longer, is the logic of working from an abstract, a Tiny Text, when
writing a paper or thesis.
Conventions
Whether we are writing a
journal article, a conference abstract or paper, or a thesis we
generally work with an explicit word limit. The word limit is usually a
range, up to and around a particular number of words.
So the word limit on a thesis might be 80
to 100 thousand words. The range is explicit. You get to choose how many
words within range. A journal article might be up to 6000 words.
But that doesn’t mean you have to write exactly 6000 words. The
convention is something around 6000 - so 5,600 to about 6,300 or so
would usually be acceptable.
You can see from this example that a word limit is not an exact rule, but rather is something like - don’t
write too much less than this and don’t write too much more. Too much
less and we will think that you haven’t got enough to say. Too much over
and we’ll think that you don’t know how to write things concisely
(writing too much or too little for a journal article also create
problems with publishers’ page limits). But there can be some
variation. It’s always wise to check the length of papers in the journal
you are submitting to, so do try to ascertain the range of flex you
have within the set word limits.
Expectations
Expectations are often derived from
conventions. A journal reviewer will expect to see a particular length
of section about research design for example. They will expect a certain
proportion of the paper devoted to discussion and conclusion. Their
expectations are specific to the conventions of the particular journal
and to the discipline.
Reviewers often address questions of
detail. They generally won’t tell the writer how many words they have to
make up or cut out, but they might say something like the conclusion is truncated or there is insufficient discussion of … or the paper glosses over … Or conversely, there is a very detailed report of x which could be presented in a table or some other form … or the balance between literature review and results seems somewhat out of kilter. These type of comments are clues that the writer has misjudged the tradeoff between depth and length.
Particular kinds of readers also have
specific expectations. Some scientific and technical journal readers and
reviewers expect that the writer will demonstrate technical expertise -
they expect sufficient detail about this aspect of the research. A
history reader might expect to see particular attention paid to sources.
Other readers might expect more elaboration of evidence or more
literature work. These expectations are not necessarily about word
length but rather about the nature, focus, and emphasis of detailed
material that is provided.
Intentions
Despite format, conventions and
expectations, you also have some say in how much detail, nuance,
evidence and elaboration you provide, and about what.
If you think the conventions of the
journal are somewhat restrictive you may want to challenge them. So, if
your readers expect cursory details about your methods, but you think
that is a weakness in the field, you may want to provide what you think
is the depth i.e. detail that you think that readers/writers ought to
aspire to. If you think that readers of a particular journal always
encounter the same literatures, then you may want to deliberately pay
more attention to the diverse resources you draw on, in order to make
this point. And this may take more words and require more depth than is
usually the case.
However, bear in mind that reviewers are
likely to adhere to conventions and so the way that you chose to
exercise your intentions may need some explanation.
So back to the beginning. Deciding how many words and how much detail is not about following rules. It would be easy if it was. You could just learn them and do it. Alas. It’s about judgment.
Understanding the ways in which format, conventions, and expectations
come together around length and depth is about learning the mores of
your particular scholarly community. This is often opaque. It takes
time. You often find out how much detail is appropriate when you break
the conventions and expectations and are told, no matter how politely,
that you have either waffled on too much or have been too cryptic.
And it’s also about exercising your power as author, working out what
is required and then deciding what you want to do about it. You can
choose to bend the format and the conventions, but be careful where you
do this and in whose company. Some readers and reviewers are more
tolerant of, or even excited by, this than others.
Your supervisors obviously are one source of help. See those feedback
comments as long term helpful advice about the hidden conventions and
expectations. But getting a more experienced writer to read through what
you have written before you finalise your paper is also helpful.
Researching a journal or a set of conference abstracts is similarly
worthwhile.
And simply understanding that depth and length are in an ambiguous
relationship and need to be thought about can also be of some use. Well
that’s my hope!
I’m a relative newcomer to UK academia, having moved here after 20 years teaching at New York University
and the University of California.
I had a very interesting conversation
the other day with a senior academic who recently travelled in the
reverse direction, from the UK to the US.
He’s astonished by what he is experiencing. After a quarter of a
century socialised into the English academic world, he keeps asking
people in his new job the following question: “Can I do this?” Their answer? “Why are you asking us? Just do it.”
He can’t believe this after the extraordinarily hierarchical nature
of English academic life, where departmental meeting agendas are set by
management and monitored by bureaucrats; where faculty participation in
search committees and mentoring is subject to scrutiny and “training”; where curricula are established by bureaucrats and imposed on faculty; where there is uncritical adoration of student evaluations, despite the spuriousness of such alleged “science“; oh - and where even supervisors’ interactions with graduate students are under scrutiny.
The history of excellent research universities around the world can
be seen as a complex, contradictory, but nevertheless distinctive
struggle over many centuries for autonomy from church, state and
capital. That struggle is entering a new phase - where governmental
control and commercial imperatives are generating a mimetic managerial
fallacy: the imagined efficiencies of companies (or the military) are
meant to indicate how universities should operate.
I’d like to suggest an alternative to these anti-democratic,
anti-professional, anti-intellectual tendencies. It may well be that
what I propose already happens in some UK schools. If so, great.
One model is the University of California, where senior bureaucrats
have control over budgets. Faculty run most other things (for example,
establishing or closing departments). I’d like to see something like
that here, and an additional change derived from parts of the Hispanic
world, where rectors - the equivalent of vice-chancellors are (wait for
it) often elected by faculty.
We need that sort of democracy, from the apex of power down. Deans,
who are often apparatchiks serving at the pleasure of vice-chancellors,
should be voted into office by faculty, administrators and graduate
students. Departmental chairs should be elected by the same groups, and
decisions on admissions should be taken by faculty, not target-driven,
unqualified people.
That way lies, ironically, greater efficiency and effectiveness, but more importantly, a model of workplace relations characterised by employee participation.
This should help us overturn the baleful norms that are coming to
characterise higher education in the UK, including the lack of diversity
among senior management, unrepresentative decision-making and a lack of
faculty authority over admissions, research and curriculum. Is this so
difficult?
Toby Miller is a professor and director of the Institute for Media and Creative Industries at Loughborough University.
Many
people decide to get a Ph.D. because they feel a strong personal
connection to the subject matter. Thinking, writing and talking with
people who appreciate a subject or field of study as much as you feels
validating.
For some, the discovery of that subject may have clarified a
sense of educational purpose. Perhaps it even illuminated a sense of
individual purpose or a frame through which the world makes more sense.
Of course, not everyone feels that way about the material they
research and teach during graduate school. But for those who do, it can
be easy to tie one’s sense of identity to the academic enterprise. “Iam a scholar of 19th-century German painting.” “I am an
ecologist.” Rather than “I am currently teaching a course on the figure
of the child in British poetry.” Or “Right now I am working on
understanding the how the charter school movement impacts social
mobility for low-income children.”
The difference might seem purely semantic. Yet the length of time
spent in graduate school can enculturate students to feel a deep sense
of connection between their identity and their field of scholarly
inquiry.
This sense of intense personal investment in a subject can make you
feel engaged, invigorated and interesting. When you are reading or
talking about it, you feel smart. You have unique and meaningful
knowledge to contribute. Spending time learning more about this topic,
asking new questions about it and sharing new ideas with others who
value it can make you feel a greater sense of purpose -- or just feel
good about yourself.
Over the five-plus years you spend as a graduate student, you begin
to feel the subject matter is inherent to who you are. So the thing you
get paid to research, teach and present is no longer just a professional
identity but also foundational for your whole identity. One of the
consequences of that tie between sense of self and subject matter that
informs professional identity is that if your professional identity
changes, you may feel like you will also lose your sense of self.
Among other possible life challenges, this false equivalence can make
a nonacademic job search, in particular, really difficult. It also
creates challenges for efforts within the academy to normalize career
pathways where the focus of the work is not one aligned to their
scholarly interest or self-determined - in other words, it looks
different from that of a typical tenure-track faculty member. Further,
when seeking positions outside the professoriate, an applicant must
widen interests after years of narrowing them and seek out jobs
described in terms of skills and responsibilities rather than a body of
knowledge. In general, few of the common assumptions about nonacademic
work seem to align with the value system of the professional community
to which Ph.D.s have belonged for the previous nine years or more.
Graduate students and recent Ph.D.s can find this perspective shift a
bit startling. It then becomes not only an intellectual challenge to
identify and articulate transferable skills persuasively, but also an
emotional one. If I take a job fund-raising for a natural history
museum, for instance, I will no longer be developing new research on
Mesoamerica - I’ll just be asking people for money, so I won’t be
intellectually fulfilled. If I am developing marketing materials for
consumer product companies, I will be wasting my Ph.D. If I work for a
pharmaceutical company, I’ll be a sellout. It is difficult to imagine
how a new context for work will create the same sense of intellectual
engagement and gratification that so often enlivens people, inspires
their pursuit of the Ph.D. and shapes their sense of self.
And so graduate students considering nonacademic career paths may
wonder: Does someone managing grants at a think tank feel the same sense
of intellectual fulfillment she did as an academic? When she goes to
work, does she feel unstimulated and without a sense of identity? Such
questions may crowd out the consideration that she goes to work, engages
many of the same intellectual muscles she did as an academic and comes
to recognize meaning and value in the application of her knowledge -
not in the knowledge itself.
How can we shift mind-sets that equate identity with academic work? And in doing so, can we relieve anxiety about exploring unfamiliar career pathways? We can:
Talk to graduates who have been gainfully employed for more than two years. Being
employed full time in any capacity, particularly in a nonfaculty
position, is different than being a graduate student, even if much of
the day-to-day work looks similar. The things we find most impactful
about our work or where we take the most pride are often not what we
expected. Listening to the stories of friends and colleagues who have
some distance from their initial job search often provide a useful
perspective about the evolution of the professional identity in their
sense of self.
Participate in activities unrelated to your research and teaching sooner rather than later. When
you spend the large majority of your days thinking about topics related
to your academic identity and talking with other people who do the
same, it is easy to lose sight of all that provides your sense of self.
Volunteer in your community. Spend time with friends and family outside
your academic community. Get a part-time job or internship to learn
about other professional opportunities that interest you. That will
broaden your network and skill set, clarify your values, and connect you with fulfilling opportunities outside your academic research and/or teaching.
Learn about aspects of higher education beyond your discipline. Becoming knowledgeable about or involving yourself with
other units of your university demonstrates higher education is an
industry that does more than just support and require scholarship and
teaching. You’ll find that student affairs, fund-raising, government and
public relations offices, and many others are doing important and
rigorous work.
Practice thinking and talking about your academic work differently. Pay
attention to the intellectual muscles you exercise when writing an
essay, teaching a course or presenting a conference paper. Which aspects
of the writing process do you enjoy most? Is it the research, the
planning or composing the sentences and paragraphs? When you leave a
class feeling energized, which aspects of teaching made you feel most
fulfilled? Was it the moment you confidently explained a complex
concept? Or when the student who had not said a word in class all
semester shared insights into the text under consideration? Identifying
the specific experiences and activities that create the feelings of
engagement and intellectual satisfaction we often align so closely to
the academic enterprise can help broaden our sense of self as
constructed and fulfilled more by how we work rather than what we work on.
People feel personally invested in their work for a variety of
reasons and at different levels. Broadening the way you understand your
work and its role in your life helps avoid a merging of professional and
personal identities and the challenge of disentangling them if and when
your career shifts. The best approach is to try to clarify the values
that make your work feel self-defining. Doing so can make the process of
identifying other career pathways that feel similarly fulfilling much
more gratifying.
Bio
Sarah
Peterson is associate director for student support services and
professional development and career planning, and director of the
Teaching Assistant Training and Teaching Opportunity Program at the
Laney Graduate School at Emory University.
