Why Do I Need to Include Writing in All Classrooms?

Laurian Phillips
Apr 19, 2010

Writing serves as a type of formative assessment. It gives you insight into how students are thinking about the information they have learned. You are able to see the connections students are making to other content and to real world contexts. Writing is a means to improve the thinking and reasoning ability of students in academic subjects. Writing activities increase the quality of learning by helping students clarify ideas and relationships between them.

I recently trained teachers at Garner Elementary School in Polk County, FL. The leadership team met after the training and decided that writing should be a component in every classroom every day. I could not believe my eyes when I returned one month later. The summary point writing that the students were doing in every grade level in every subject was astounding! Every classroom posted student work with writing guided by a graphic organizer. I watched as students summarized at the end of every class by writing two or three sentences. One of things that amazed me the most was that the students did this with very little prompting and took it seriously. They wrote their summaries in less than 4 minutes.

I asked the teachers how they got their students to do this, since I usually hear "My students can't write in that amount of time." Or "it would take too long to do that every day." Or "I wouldn't get quality work." The response was the same from room to room. "Our principal expected us to do this, told us he would be monitoring after about two weeks to see that it was happening in every classroom, and so we simply expect our students to do it."

They all agreed that using a graphic organizer to guide the writing was the key to making the process easier. "When I collect my students' summaries at the end of class, it is quick and easy to see who got it and who didn't," said one teacher. "Then I know if I can go on or if I need to re-teach the lesson to the whole class or work with a few students to clarify information."

Applebee, Langer, and Mullis (1987) concluded that writing serves as a tool for three thought processes basic to learning: (a) to draw on relevant knowledge and experience in preparation for new activities, (b) to consolidate and review new information and experiences, and (c) to reformulate and extend knowledge. Writing-to-learn activities cause students to think, not just record what the teacher has said or what they have read.

For more information on how to teach writing in the content areas, see the Writing Assignments notebooks in the Literacy Collection.

Source:

Applebee, A.N., Langer, J.A., & Mullis, I.V. (1987). Learning to be literate in America:
Reading. writing, and reason. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.