Drills for Teaching Writing, part 1
Fluency for floor-raising
Throughout the year, our class uses a variety of drills to get better at writing. At first, each drill is simple, targeting just one specific thing. But, as students gain familiarity with a given drill, it evolves to be more holistic. And, while I’ve used these drills with elementary students, I’d argue that, except for maybe handwriting, none would be out of place in a secondary classroom.
This week, I’ll start by describing how we use quick free-writes to develop writing fluency.
Our free-write fluency drill:
Prompt (seconds)
Collaboratively brainstorm (2-3 minutes)
Write for a set amount of time (3-7 minutes)
Share and give feedback (3-5 minutes)
This is a 10-15 minute drill we can fit into our writing block or somewhere else in the school day. We typically do them in a notebook.
Prompt
“Write a story that goes with this picture.”
To start I typically choose an illustration or piece of art as a prompt for the story. I look for ones from picture books that can be taken in multiple ways but also present a moment of conflict. Agencies that represent children’s book illustrators are a great place to find these quickly online; they typically have portfolios for each artist in their stable.
As the year goes on, inspiration can change to match what we are working on. If we are working on description, the prompt might be a landscape painting or a photograph from the neighborhood near the school. We can also prompt them by specifying the first word or sentence of the story.
For example:
“We're going to free-write today. Your first word must be: Itchy.”
“On the board is a sentence: ‘Of all the students in third grade, Rosie was, by far, the laziest.’ That’s your first sentence today. As you write it down, start thinking.”
Giving a starting place and some constraints are important for solving the “I-don’t-know-what-to-write-about” problem. Having constraints helps people be creative because they work out how to solve the problem presented by the prompt.
For example, give kids this illustration by Gregor Foster.
They have to decide what is going on. Are the duck and the fox friends? Why is the duck worried? Is someone about to be eaten? What is that building in the background? A martial arts dojo? Is this ninja training and the fox is trying to sneak up on his master? Maybe they’re just playing hide and seek. Or is that building a restaurant? It could be a famous ramen spot you must hike up a mountain to dine at.
The prompt presents the decisions the writer must make.
2. Collaboratively brainstorm
To further preempt “I-don’t-know-what-to-write”, we brainstorm as a class before they start writing. I have students suggest “useful” words, which I write on the board.
“Alright, what are some words that would be useful to tell this story?”
The words students suggest are usually trickier to spell and non-obvious to the story. For example, here, students are unlikely to raise their hand to suggest fox or duck. Too obvious and easy to spell. More likely are things like suspicious, enemy, karate, warrior, restaurant, chef. But if it was a porcupine or platypus instead of a duck, someone would definitely say porcupine or platypus.
This helps avoid students asking for spelling and gives everyone some hints at the ideas floating around in their classmates’ heads. Maybe you were just looking at the picture thinking about a fox and a duck, and then someone suggested the word ninja. Now you’re off and rolling.
3. Write for a set amount of time
The goal is really to write as much as they can in the given time. We are really focused on building fluency. I explicitly remind them of this when we start.
“When I say go, you’re going to have 5 minutes to write a story about the picture. Use any of the words on the board. Don’t worry about spelling. Write the entire time and do your best writing. Ready? Go.”
Just as with reading fluency, we want to encourage kids to do their best, not their fastest.
At the start of the year, some kids won’t be able to write longer than 2 or 3 minutes and will need follow-up prompting or to be fed ideas to keep going. But that’s just because they haven’t really done it before. They will get better quickly and be able to sustain writing for 5 minutes within a week or two.
While they are writing, I will often circulate just to make sure everyone’s off to a good start, but the room is silent apart from the sound of pencils on paper. I’m noticing people with strong starts whose work I might want to share with the class later. About halfway through, I might make one or two comments highlighting people who have already written a lot as well as comments about quality. This is a way to nudge the norm.
“Wow, everyone over here already has half a page.”
“Omar’s got a great sentence here with our vocab word from this morning: ‘treacherous’. Oh, and look, Ava does too. Keep going. 2 more minutes.”
Other times, I won’t circulate at all but instead write my own story for the prompt.
4. Share and give feedback
Choose some stronger ones to share. Show and share exemplars that push the class towards where you want their writing to go.
“We're looking at the ones where people worked hard and tried their best. They used what we've been learning and really tried to write a story that goes with the picture.”
“I didn’t get a chance to read everyone’s, but these were a couple I saw that had some great stuff going on in them.”
“What a creative idea for this picture!”
“Good word here: innocently”
“Great use of dialogue here. I love how the fox speaks like he’s up to something, ‘Surely a smart fellow like yourself would never...’ You just know by the word choice that he’s trying to trick the duck.”
“Oh, it keeps going on the next page. They wrote a lot!”
I will highlight quality: handwriting, creativity, vocabulary use, sentence structure, dialogue- anything we’ve been working on. But I will also remark on quantity. We’re trying to push fluency without sacrificing thoughtfulness. And I will go out of my way to find quality or quantity from the weakest writers in the class and make sure their exemplars are also being shared. They might have a really strong opening sentence or they might have written a ton about a particular prompt. It’s important students know that excellent writing is a result of action rather than an inherent trait some people have and others don’t. Teach everyone how to be an excellent writer and then prove to them that they’re on the way to becoming one.
This is also how we can model giving feedback. Then, sometimes instead of whole class teacher-led feedback, we can have students read their stories with a partner and give feedback to each other. While it’s always nice for them to share their work with each other, we shouldn’t put too much stock in them learning from it unless we’ve modeled and taught students how to give worthwhile feedback. It also helps a lot to have them focus their feedback on something specific.
Next Steps
You can level up this drill by connecting to things you are teaching elsewhere in the writing block or during reading.
Maybe we are focused on dialogue. We can push students to include dialogue in their free-write. When we give feedback, we’ll highlight some of the strongest dialogue that the class came up with.
Or maybe, we’ve been working on story structure and summarizing. In our reading block at some point in the year, I’ll have typically taught a basic structure for retelling or summarizing: someone, wanted, but, so.
1. Someone: who is the main character?
2. Wanted: what did they want?
3. But: What obstacle or problem stopped them from getting what they want?
4. So: What did they do about it?
I’ll teach this in reading and students will have practiced summarizing fiction and nonfiction first verbally and then in writing. It helps us focus on the main character, their motivation, and the main conflict. We want this retelling structure to become second nature.
We also will flip this structure around as a way to generate narratives or even informational texts. This is something we can practice in our free-writes.
“Write a story that goes with this picture. Make sure your story has a someone, a something they want, a reason they can’t get it right away, and a way they solve their problem. Remember, it’s usually best if they have to solve their problem instead of it getting solved for them.”
Then when I am giving whole class feedback at the end, I will highlight or have the class identify how the exemplars used someone, wanted, but, so.
We’ll practice in free-write with illustrations and, later in the year, students might use the same structure to describe the Puritans arriving in Massachusetts or the process of animal pollination.
Having a notebook full of past free-writes later helps us practice proofreading and revision. We can direct students to go back and revise an old free-write or expand it. We can have them revise each other’s old free-writes. We can grab some old free-writes and, with the author’s permission, make copies so everyone can revise the same story, then compare revisions and see who improved the original piece of writing the most. We have all this left-over writing with which to practice revision. They can get a good density of repetitions just revising because we don’t need to go back and produce first drafts along the way.
Floors and Ceilings
We enjoy the benefits of 10-15 minutes a day working on writing fluency all year long. It makes it so much easier for the class to respond in writing across all subjects because it is so easy for them to get ideas to paper.
For example, when we’re reading a class novel, we might end each day with a paragraph response to a question. Students will have been taught to make a claim, introduce textual evidence, and explain what the evidence means. They’re writing a paragraph between 4 and 6 sentences. Without our fluency work earlier in the year, this would take some of them 20 minutes or more. It would be prohibitively long to do every day. But with the steady investment into writing fluency, kids can jot these off in 5-10 minutes. They can turn them out rapidly enough that we can do one every day, and they can get feedback on an argumentative paragraph every day. This is only possible because producing writing has become easy for them.
In all areas of teaching, we have floor-raisers and ceiling-raisers. Floor-raisers increase the ease and speed with which students can perform a task. Ceiling-raisers increase their skill and ability. Rather than there being a trade-off between these two, ceiling-raisers and floor-raisers work together. When the fundamentals of a task are easy, more cognitive effort can be devoted to performing emergent skills. To think deeply about what we’ve read, we must be able to effortlessly read the words. To solve complex math problems, we need to own mathematical facts as a second language. We can’t be a good chess player if we’re remembering how the pieces move. Automaticity facilitates mastery; it’s as true for writing as for anything else.
I love this piece! I’m going to try this!