Three Ways to Use Writing in Content-Area Classes

American students’ writing achievement has been stagnant for years, say Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (San Diego State University) in this article in The Reading Teacher. Why? Because too many teachers just assign a prompt, have students write, and mark up and grade what they produce. This rarely helps students meet state and Common Core standards like these:

• Write opinions and arguments with evidence.
• Write informational pieces that include details.
• Write narratives that are highly descriptive. 

The literacy block is prime territory for building writing skills, but Fisher and Frey believe teachers in the content areas should also be using writing regularly as a check for understanding. Here are three routines for doing that:

• Power writing – This is a series of brief, timed writing events designed to build fluency. For example, a social studies teacher writes immigration on the board and tells students to “write as much as you can, as well as you can” in their journals for one minute. When the time is up, students read over what they’ve written, circle any errors, and count the number of words they wrote. The teacher repeats this routine two more times, and by the end of the class, students have three one-minute writing samples and record the highest number of words on a sheet of graph paper in their notebooks. Students’ fluency improves with practice – from 10 words a minute to 25 to 60 – and their understanding of the content also improves because they have put down what they know and are that much more attentive to instruction and discussion. Power writing also helps the teacher check for understanding and notice common student errors.

• Shared writing – For example, in a fourth-grade math class, the teacher read How Much Is a Million (Schwartz, 1993) with students, had them turn and talk about possible items they could count, decided on tennis balls, and posed the question: How much space would a million tennis balls take up? After some discussion, students came up one at a time to write the problem as a series of algebra statements, with prompting on word choice, spelling, and punctuation.

• Writing from sources to inform and explain – This is an important part of science and social studies classes, say Fisher and Frey. “Students must use their writing skills to produce pieces that are informative or explanatory.” Annotating a text is a key precursor skill, and they list the most common annotation marks: underlining; vertical lines in the margin to highlight longer passages of note; star or asterisk in the margin to emphasize important points; numbers in the margin to indicate a sequence of points; number of other pages where the author makes the same points; circling key words or phrases; writing questions in the margins or at the top or bottom of the page. “When students annotate a text, they have sources that they can use to support their claims,” say Fisher and Frey.  

“A Range of Writing Across the Content Areas” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in The Reading Teacher, October 2013 (Vol. 67, #2, p. 96-101), http://bit.ly/1bSjtLC 

From the Marshall Memo #506