Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

by John Warner

have been incentivized to create imitations rather than the genuine article.

We are training students

to pass standardized assessments, not teaching them how to write.

judged against a standard of “correctness” and resemblance to a kind of “standard” academic writing that doesn’t actually exist in nature, the making of which bears little resemblance to the process writers employ when confronted with genuine writing tasks.

but they struggle mightily with writing tasks that ask them to synthesize and create knowledge. Part of this is because synthesizing

Curiosity: the desire to know

more about the world Openness: the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world Engagement: a sense of investment and involvement in learning

Creativity: the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas Persistence: the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects Responsibility: the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others Flexibility: the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands Metacognition: the ability ...

Knowledge of writing Knowledge of the subject being written about

Why science is perfect for writing. Do, analyze, write

when we require students to write too far outside that frame, their writing skills may appear wanting, when in reality the students are struggling because they don’t have anything to say.

This is where CER is super appropriate because they are writing about things they witnessed in lab time. They are very familiar with subject matter

It is as though we are in a leaky boat and 100 percent of our attention has been focused on bailing faster, rather than trying to plug the hole that is letting all the water in.

The same pattern has repeated over and over, both in my teaching and my writing: for the learning to be meaningful I must “discover” something for myself that many other people already “know.”

Yes!!! This how I teach science now! They discover. I don’t tell

It’s possible I was an oversensitive kid, and it’s likely my memory has distorted reality. At the time, I might not have outwardly displayed much stress. But that’s part of the point. We may not be able to immediately observe surveillance-driven distress. Kids may not even be fully aware of the origins of their own feelings. Children in classrooms that use ClassDojo are being acculturated to a world where they must comply 100 percent of the time or risk censure. What effect is this likely to have on their attitudes toward school and learning?

Interesting take on class dojo

is so important that things like sitting up and tracking the speaker are mandatory behaviors, and teachers are instructed to give real-time corrections to students who do things like rest their chins on their hands. While

Would We expect adults the behave like this

If your mind is attending to sitting up straight so as not to risk punishment from the teacher, how much of the lesson can you be absorbing?

Yes!

Attention and engagement are not synonyms.

Reformers who put their faith in testing believe they are a route to meritocracy. More often, they are x-rays that reveal existing structural inequalities.

Some students have access to seaworthy vessels while others are left swimming for their lives.

The New Orleans “miracle” following Hurricane Katrina (“the best thing that happened in the education system in New Orleans,” according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan), showed that any increase in test scores came from flushing the most disadvantaged students out of the system.10

there’s no evidence that standardized testing regimes help improve student cognition

However, when this aspect of reading is translated into something that fits inside a multiple choice question where only one answer is allowed,

the complexity of reading is narrowed to something with considerably less impact.

Also never mind that how we see the tree may be significantly dependent on our individual response to the text. Meaning is created when reader and text intersect. Those intersections will be different for different readers.

Reducing complex texts to multiple choice questions, and believing those questions test how closely or how well a student reads, requires a willful ignoring of some of our most important human qualities.

The resulting writing was scored in no more than three minutes by anonymous graders hired as temporary workers who had to adhere to production quotas. Imagine

In fact, to do well on the essay-writing portion of the SAT, Les Perelman, former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program and an expert in designing and evaluating writing assessments, had some advice: “Just make stuff up.”

I’ve said this to kids regarding the ELA benchmark

But the resulting writing does not exist outside of the demands of standardized assessment.

In a nine-week grading period, the average student only does two assignments requiring them to write three or more pages.19

All of this concern about how much students are writing, and 70 percent of them are not even required to write, all because of the nature of these tests.

Autonomy means having sufficient freedom to pursue our own curiosities driven by individual desires. Mastery means we are motivated by a desire to achieve goals of our own design, and equally important, to have experiences that reinforce this desire along the way. The importance of mastery suggests the doing (process) is as important as or more important than the having done (the product). Purpose means we believe what we are doing is important and meaningful to ourselves,

The story of grit follows the education-fad hype cycle. Duckworth

KIPP jumped in with both feet, creating “character report cards” (later changed to “character growth cards”), which measure traits like “zest,” “grit,” “optimism,” “self-control,” “gratitude,” “social intelligence,” and “curiosity.”14

Anyone else think this is insane?!

An insistent focus on curriculum of any stripe—be it academics or character—as the sole key to student development obscures all of the underlying factors at play regarding children’s behavior and performance in school.

In fact, contact with faculty and between students may be the most meaningful part of education.

Whether your Candy Crush skill translates beyond the game is a different question.

Is repeating the same presentation over and over word for word to confused students a pedagogical practice we would accept in a human instructor?

Education is an ongoing process, not a product, and what we learn as we stumble off the path is often more valuable than when we are toeing the line. Do we value “efficiency” in our relationships with our families? Is our most profound love “efficient?”

We should not ask students to write anything that will not be read. When

notion that students must learn the “basics” of grammar before allowing writers to move on to the more difficult work of expressing ideas

This is like in science where they want to teach all the vocab and the content before letting the kids do any kind of figuring out on their own

This is not a declaration that anything goes or that students do not need to be instructed on writing good sentences, but from their earliest attempts at writing we must allow students to see that “proper” expression is dependent on audience and occasion, and this means they must make informed choices.

I’m sure it was idiotic, and I should be grateful the evidence does not survive, but I remember Mrs. Thompson’s comments peppering the margins: “Ha!” and “Very funny!” When she handed it back—and I remember this because it was so meaningful—she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ve never read anything like this.”

The power of teacher feedback

Everything should be up for questioning.

Yassssss!

As Daniel Koretz of Harvard shows in The Testing Charade, public school teachers have been subjected to year after year of shifting external demands for accountability, each change more oppressive and draconian than the last. School reform has resulted in testing regimes that have “sometimes been taken to lengths that

are both absurd and cruel.”

such as implementing curricula and testing related to the Common Core State Standards—without being given adequate training.”12

Teaching, like writing, is an extended exercise in failure. You make a plan, do your best to execute, have some portion of your ass handed to you by circumstances and events you could not foresee, and try to do better next time around.

In other words, deep learning allows students to extend something they’ve encountered in one situation to another situation, even when those situations may not seem obviously related. Students who are subject to deep

We call it a meritocracy while failing to recognize the different starting lines afforded those who won the birth lottery—but perhaps one’s parents and social capital are properly viewed as part of one’s “merit.”

Trying to fix schools while not paying sufficient attention to the people who populate those schools has only led to a system increasingly antithetical to learning, and even toxic to students’ mental and physical well-being.

If students are not properly fueled, they cannot learn. If they are tired, they cannot think.