Writing is Thinking

Last week was my dad’s birthday…and you probably enthusiastically do not care, right? And why should you? What does this have to do with you? How can you use this information? What in the world was my purpose for telling you this?   

The question of purpose for writing is the most important question a writer must ask before putting pen to pad, fingers to keys. My purpose here is to discuss one aspect of explanatory writing – and to give a few easy formative assessment tips that will gauge your students’ progress without making your grading life crazy.  

You gave your pithy World War II mini-lecture: give students 3-5 minutes to summarize the lecture and explain the main points. Walk the room as they write to ensure pens are moving or keyboards are clacking…(in the case of keyboards, you might tell them that you’ll ask random writers to post their summaries to the class’s electronic journal). Ask them to highlight the main ideas – then, share with two seat mates to compare and clarify notes. Finally, go whole class. Get volunteers and non-volunteers to share what they learned. Clear up misunderstandings as you go.  

You showed the 20 min. video excerpt: give students a Give One/Get One graphic organizer (pick one of the zillion templates online, or shoot me an email me if you want one of mine). Give students 3-5 minutes to write (on the left side of the organizer) what they learned from the video. Then ask them to walk the room and speak to students they rarely, if ever, talk to – to discuss the points they wrote. If they learned something new, they should write what they learned on the right side of the organizer, giving credit to the student they learned from. Then, move on to (maybe two different students). Walk the room to ensure that students are discussing the material, rather than merely exchanging papers and copying notes. Listen to their clarifying conversations. Then, go whole class to ensure they got it.  

You read to them or assign the reading: give students 3-5 minutes to write one question and one comment.  The question can be a higher order thinking question that could have multiple answers, or it could be a clarifying question where the answer is right there on the page, but wasn’t understood. Depending on your purpose, ask students to comment by agreeing, disagreeing, explaining, analyzing, evaluating, observing, synthesizing their ideas with the writer’s ideas, or connecting the reading to personal experiences, to another text, or to current events in the world. Give them time to partner share. Then, take the discussion whole class. 

These writing-to-learn activities are interchangeable, can be used in any content-area, and can be modified to support younger students by asking them to write down the key words or phrases they remember from a mini-lecture, video, or reading. They can serve as a quick check for understanding – or can take the whole period, depending on your purpose. Either way, they are a good way to engender frequent, but short bouts with writing that will garner deeper understandings for your students – especially when your content or topic might be dense and complex.   

If you have other writing-to-learn strategies, please share – so that we build our writing community.  

…oh, and my dad, a laborer, and my first writing teacher, who wrote letters for his Navy buddies, thank-you notes to his friends, and poetry in the bathroom of our one-bathroom house, would have been 91.