Making School Writing Real for Young Adolescents

In this Middle School Journal article, La Salle University (PA) professors Deborah Yost and Robert Vogel say that “most young adolescents engage in out-of-school writing every day for hours on end with great enthusiasm” – through texting, social media, and blogs. But there’s rarely a connection between all this fervid after-hours communication and classroom writing. That’s a shame, say Yost and Vogel, because, “Young adolescents have a fundamental need to find relevance in the work they do in school.”

The authors go on to describe Writing Matters, a Pennsylvania program based on teacher Erin Gruwell’s work with high-school students (featured in the movie Freedom Writers). Writing Matters gets students writing about their innermost thoughts and dreams and making connections with their peers across racial and cultural lines. Students do informational, narrative, and persuasive journal writing in response to prompts. Here are some of the Writing Matters themes:

• I am from…
• Teen challenges…
• Family matters…
• Living life…
• Dreams, aspirations, and the future…
• The things people do to be popular…
• Proving to people that they are wrong about you…
• Going through a difficult time with a friend…

The Writing Matters program guides students through these steps:

• Choose or create an idea.
• Brainstorm your ideas.
• Play back your ideas.
• Write a first draft.
• Share with others.
• Consider your listeners’ comments, then rewrite.
• Publish your work.

This kind of intensely personal writing allows young adolescents to make sense of their social worlds, seek shelter from harsh realities, develop their inner voices, express their views on important topics, shape their identities, and hear others’ stories. “A large number of students wrote about fear and risk-taking,” say Yost and Vogel. These appear to be universal, not situational issues. 

As teachers go through the year-long Writing Matters training and meet every month to share impressions, they are struck by how much more they learn about their students. “Every time I collect a batch of journals,” said one teacher, “I am always struck by the power of my students’ words. They become more than just ‘Erica, who never hands in her homework,’ or ‘Jeff who plays baseball.’ They suddenly become very real, developed young men and women who have the same self-doubts, insecurities, family problems, stress, and dreams that I do.” 

Writing Matters links students’ writing to field trips, service projects, and works of literature like The Diary of Anne Frank, all of which stretches students beyond their immediate world and provides meaningful contexts for writing. “When students have a mission related to a personally meaningful task,” say Yost and Vogel, “motivation to ‘get it right’ drastically increases.” A teacher remarked, “Students who moan and groan about writing a paragraph and rarely hand in assignments will write four- to five-page journal entries with higher-level skills than they’ve ever displayed before.”

After seeing the film Freedom Writers, one student wrote, “It’s not only me who goes through this, it’s other kids. Then I thought to myself – this is not only in Philadelphia, this is around the country. Kids got their issues, too. Before the program, I always thought that these were my problems. If anyone got in the way with me, there was going to be a problem. Now, I understand them more. They are going through problems and issues just like me, so I have to cool it.” 

Has the Writing Matters program improved students’ writing proficiency? Each year, students have been pre- and post-assessed on the Pennsylvania Writing Assessment Rubric, which measures focus, content, organization, and style on a 4-3-2-1 scale. Overall, students made solid progress each year – for example, from 2.26 to 2.89 in 2006-07, from 1.53 to 2.37 in 2007-08 and from 1.62 to 2.64 in 2009-10. The areas in which students made the most growth were focus, content, and organization, and students’ confidence also improved. “At first, I hated writing and telling people what I had in my mind. It was difficult for me at first. But now I feel like I [want to] write a novel.” 

“Writing Matters to Urban Middle Level Students” by Deborah Yost and Robert Vogel in Middle School Journal, January 2012 (Vol. 43, #3, p. 40-48), no e-link available; the authors can be reached at yost@lasalle.edu and vogel@lasalle.edu.