What if my students are just “not getting it?”    You’ve looked at the scope and sequence, selected the designated lessons for your grade level, presented the lesson, the children respond, but don’t seem to be able to apply the skills when you move to Guided Practice?

First of all, are you spending at least 20-45 minutes of whole class, objective driven, explicit instruction twice a week? Simply providing time for students to “just write” will not result in significant growth.

Almost always, if you are providing the instructional time but students are still struggling, the problem usually relates to insufficient modeling.  Sometimes if teachers are feeling less than confident about their ability to model they’ll take the modeled sample/exemplar from the book and share it with the students, talk  about it, then move to Guided Practice without having actually engaged in the dynamic modeling process, in real time, with their students.  This process of asking specific, productive questions, and building on student responses (both verbal and nonverbal) is critical.  When teachers first begin getting their feet  wet, they may actually use the productive questions, but respond slowly when translating student responses into fluent charted responses.  The time lag allows children to become distracted and off-task, resulting in less than desired results.

Here are some tips to improve the modeling dynamic in the classroom:

            1.)  When asking productive questions, be sure your questions are really specific.  If you want to describe a character’s hair, include kind and color, length, texture – have a number of increasingly specific questions ready.  Think backwards from the detail you’d like to see, using that to form questions.  Many teachers just starting out will write the description themselves, in advance, not to use as an example, but to inform the questioning process, and thus learning and practicing how authors think as they write.

            2.)  Watch for nonverbal responses from children.  Whenever possible, ask them  to “show” you how big or small something is, show you the expression on a character’s face, or how the character moved.  Then be ready to assign language to their demonstrations.

            3.)  Until you’re really comfortable, only ask and chart responses to 2 – 3 questions in a given class modeling session.  This allows you to hold student attention, to revisit the work the next day, and to prepare yourself in between.

            4.)  Model more, more, more before moving to Guided Practice. Often teachers feel pressure to get students to produce something on paper quickly. Resist the urge and, instead, model some more, constantly articulating the questions authors ask, allowing students a stress-free rehearsal in which to assimilate the questions that need to become a part of their own internal writers’ dialogue.

            5.)  View one of our video segments that show what modeling looks like. This will inform your instruction and provide you with a standard against which to gauge your own modeling.  See the Elaborative Detail Video

            6.)  Share your experience with a colleague and consider team-teaching. Two heads are always better than one – talk about your frustration and ask about how it went with a colleague. Either get coverage and visit one or the other class, or pile both classes in together (as a BIG TREAT!) and plan on delivering the modeling as a team. Watch and listen to one another in terms of how students respond and how you might approach something differently.  As ongoing PD you could contact EW and arrange for a coach to visit your classroom to model a lesson with your students.

            Lastly, be sure you have a really good handle on the content and methodology.  Review all the background information provided on the teacher pages in your resource books, especially the Comprehensive Guides.  Also, be sure to use the many awareness-building lessons in which students have the opportunity to identify and compare specific skills in writing.  They can use these to begin to inform their own work and to recognize what it is you’re looking for – but remember – this never takes the place of modeling!


How long should each lesson take?  The answer here depends on many things – the teacher’s level of experience and confidence, the student’s prior knowledge and experience at the time you begin. If this is the first time for everyone, any given lesson or skill will take a little longer, as everyone will be learning as they go.  In schools where the approach is implemented consistently across grade levels, year 2 will be considerably smoother than year one, year 3, even better, year 4, smooth sailing.  The question of following the scope and sequence with fidelity is important, but in a chronological sense rather than the calendar-sense.  Reproduce the scope and sequence for your grade level and place it in a binder.  Cross off the lessons as you complete them in a way you feel generally pleased about, meaning that most students demonstrate an understanding of whatever skills you taught.  Then move on.  You will have opportunities to review past lessons, pull a small group of struggling students together for reinforcement or reteaching.  In year one you may not be able to cover all of the skills in the suggested pacing timeline from the scope and sequence.  Not to worry – the skills are reviewed in the next grade.  Better to be a few weeks or even a month behind than to skim over important learning.  


Do you keep all of the parts and then put them together to make a story?   Generally, no. We practice specific skills, one at a time, so that students learn to recognize them and apply them mindfully. The resulting writing from each skill section can be used to great advantage standing alone.  This is how writers work – they put their attention on the skill or task at hand, and address it explicitly.  This also helps writers to break down a large project into manageable pieces.  Holding individual skill pieces and later attempting to pull them together can result in students becoming bored with the thematic material, and frustrated that it’s taking so long.  In your scope and sequence you will see opportunities for a process piece – an entire piece of writing revisited over a reasonable amount of time.  This is where they have the opportunity to put all the pieces together – and they have the necessary skills to do it well.

 

How do we put it all together?  You feel as though your students have practiced the individual skills well, but seem to forget them as they work on a whole piece of writing?  To address this, be absolutely certain that students are not given a writing task and then left to manage the entire process on their own. Be sure to see the PROCESS WRITING TIMELINE in each of the respective Comprehensive Guides in order to provide them the structure, review, timely feedback they need to be successful.  Another powerful way to put all the pieces together is to take a writing prompt from one of the Guides, or use a classroom theme as a jumping off point and MODEL THE ENTIRE PIECE WITH THE WHOLE CLASS over a period of about a week, asking the productive questions, using student input, articulating the transitions between the various sections of the composition, each day rereading what has already been done, editing and revising as you go.

How do I use student work to drive instruction?  Have a look at our Annotated Student Samples.  Each piece has been analyzed and  includes prescriptive lessons from our resource materials.