Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 38: Everybody writes
Building ratio through writing

The amount and quality of writing students do in your classroom is one of the most important determinants of their academic success—possibly the single most important thing—so one of the simplest and most powerful shifts you can make is to increase the amount of writing—especially high-quality writing—your students do. Why ask, “Who can tell me what Jonas has just realized about what it means to be released?” and have one or two students answer, when you could say, “Please tell me what Jonas has just realized about what it means to be released. One minute to write some thoughts in your packet. Go!” This shift means every student answers and every student battles to frame the thought in precise syntax. Teachers often define a sentence as “a complete thought.” By having students write more, we cause them to push their ideas from vague notions or developing ideas to complete thoughts; to practice developing complete thoughts is to practice perhaps the core task of thinking.

Increasing the amount of writing in your class raises important questions, however, from the practical (How do I get them to actually write?) to the philosophical (Where in the sequence of learning is writing most valuable? How can I build a process-oriented culture of revision into my writing?). For that reason, this chapter looks at techniques that can help you use writing for maximum effect on both Participation Ratio and Think Ratio.

Technique 38: Everybody writes

When we think about writing that is part of the process of learning and mastering content, we see teachers use three primary types.

One of them, developmental writing, I'll define in technique 41, Art of the Sentence. For now I want to define a concept called formative writing and compare it to the more common summative writing. The technique Everybody Writes is about using formative writing prompts frequently throughout class.

Formative writing is writing in which students seek to decide rather than explain what they think. The purpose is to use writing as a tool to think: to develop and discover new insights rather than to justify an opinion they already have. In contrast, the purpose of summative writing is to explain or justify the writer's opinion and often to include evidence to create a supporting argument. Summative writing says: Here is what I think and why. To complete a summative writing task, students must already know what they think and be ready to marshal evidence and select an appropriate structure to make a cogent argument.

Summative writing is probably the most common form of analytical writing done in schools, in part because it looks like—and therefore (we often think) must prepare—students for the sorts of questions they are asked on assessments.

Again, in summative writing you have to know what you think before you start; in formative writing the purpose is to find out. Here's a gallery of summative and formative prompts from different subjects, placed side by side for comparison:

One thing you've probably noticed is the openness of the formative prompts. They ask for “some reasons” rather than “the reason” or “the reasons”—all of them, presumably. The change encourages students to consider more than one possible answer and implies that it's hard to say how many reasons there might be. They ask questions for which it is hard to be wholly wrong as long as you are diligent and thoughtful, as in: “What strikes you about …” Perhaps the most important word in many formative prompts is the word “might.” What might the figs be symbolic of? Rather than: What are the figs symbolic of? Or: What ideas might the artist be attempting to convey with his choice of colors? “Might” makes it clear that the goal is to explore, not to prove; the stakes are lowered.

The lowering of stakes can be powerful with writing. Putting words to the page is intimidating, so it is understandable that many students may have trouble beginning the process. “I don't know how to start,” they tell us. Often, perhaps, that's because summative prompts set the bar so high. “Explain your opinion about X or Y.” There are Xs and Ys in the world I have been thinking about for years and still have not fully arrived at an opinion about. I hereby propose that the ability to think without deciding too early is a very good thing intellectually. A formative prompt lets you start with maybe. Maybe one reason is …

A few years ago, we discussed the idea of formative writing with Ashley LaGrassa, then an eighth-grade English teacher at Rochester Prep in Rochester, New York, and she decided to give it a try. After all, eighth grade might be one of the toughest years for getting students to open up in writing.

“The idea that a simple change of format might make my classroom feel safer for students, leading them to take risks and engage more deeply, was too alluring to pass up,” Ashley said, “and the result was one of the most joyful lessons of the year. My eighth graders jumped in to wrestle with challenging questions, pregnant with the possibility of multiple ’right’ answers.” Afterwards she reflected on what worked and why.

The lesson focused on Alice Walker's “Beauty: When the Other-Dancer Is the Self” and began with formative writing as part of the Do Now: “How might Alice Walker's experiences have influenced her writing?”

“My hope in including the word ’might’ was to help students feel safe jumping in with thoughts rather than comprehensive answers,” she said. Students jumped in and she was happily surprised to see “twice as many hands as usual” offering to share their answers. On a later question, Reflect on the role of gender in Walker's experience, she again found that “students went right to work. There was no flipping through the packet or rewriting of the question to pass time. Students began quickly jotting down their thoughts; seemingly, the sense of possibility within the question made students feel more comfortable with risk.”

The subsequent discussion too crackled to life. “Within moments, students were deeply analyzing the impact a scar discussed in the text had on Walker in light of her gender, moving from her specific experience to a message about society at large. By asking students for their reflections, the question invited students to share all thoughts and suggested a validity in a variety of responses. This encouraged them and prepared them to take the risks.”

Formative questions made writing a “low-risk adventure” in which students “didn't always have to have a final argument about the theme to discuss the story.” You can see this play out in the video Arielle Hoo: Keystone. Arielle asks her students to write their “conjectures” to start their reflection on a problem. She is suggesting, “We're just thinking and experimenting with ideas at this point.” She says go and the class springs into action.

Ironically, students are more likely to have a strong final argument about the theme if they'd had time to wrestle with the idea formatively first. In other words, the argument isn't that formative writing is “better” than summative writing, because it isn't. Both are important and students need to be able to do both. Rather, the argument is that formative writing is also necessary—if more likely to be overlooked—and that the two types of writing are synergistic in a dozen ways. For example, formative writing helps students engage in and care about the text so that they feel more vested in any argument they then decide to defend or explain in summative writing … which in turn helps them to understand what things they should seek to understand or figure out through formative writing.

One other key aspect of the writing prompts used in Everybody Writes: they occur and reoccur, midstream and throughout in the lesson, while ideas are fresh. Teachers often call their Everybody Writes prompts “Stop and Jots” for two reasons: (1) The word “jot” expresses the informality and conjectural nature of the exercise. And the responses are pretty short. These aren't essays. They're forty-five, sixty, and ninety-second reflections. (2) The “stop” implies that students are in the midst of doing something else. We want students to write formatively as they are experiencing an idea, a question, an uncertainty. We want them to “stop” and wrestle with it on the page while the question is fresh in their heads.

So the idea behind Everybody Writes is simple. Ask students to write frequently and formatively and do it midstream, in short bursts throughout your lesson. Suddenly you will awaken students to a whole new side of writing. You will help them learn to think in writing.

Some other benefits of Everybody Writes:

· Because you can review student ideas in advance by reading over their shoulders, you're able to select useful responses to begin discussion. Of course, there will be other times when rather than looking for exemplary responses, you will seek Stop and Jots that show ideas that are partially developed or show a common confusion. It all depends what you are looking for.

· If you use Everybody Writes before discussion, then every idea that gets shared aloud is in effect a second draft, a thought of higher quality than what would otherwise have been shared without the opportunity to think in writing first.

· Everybody Writes also allows you to Cold Call students with the confidence that they have been set up to succeed, because you know that everyone is prepared with thoughts. You can simply ask, “What did you write about, Avery?” to kick things off.

A final thought: the more you use writing, the better (and more efficient) your students get at using it. The first time you try it, it may take students a bit of time to get started; the quality may be only so-so. But by the time they are answering reflection prompt number 87, as students in Jessica Bracey: Keystone do, they are very good and very efficient at using the Everybody Writes moment as an opportunity to develop their thoughts. Practicing something important eighty-six times will have that effect. This was certainly evident in Jessica's class: not only was the post-writing discussion of high quality, but it began with almost every hand shooting into the air. Having had an opportunity to “write to determine what they think,” they are now ready to discuss, expand, and refine their ideas in discussion.