Technique 40: Front the writing - Building ratio through writing

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

Technique 40: Front the writing
Building ratio through writing

In many classes, writing serves as a capstone—to a discussion, a demonstration, a lab, a presentation, or some other part of the lesson. It's often right and good and logical that writing comes last. Writing is an ideal tool for synthesizing and processing ideas. But there's also immense value when the writing comes first. Front the Writing is about designing lessons so that the writing happens early on.

Consider, first, two common sequences—let's call them RDW and ADW (read-discuss-write and activity-discuss-write). You might do RDW if you were reading a short story with an ambiguous ending. You might finish the last paragraph and ask, “So tell me, what does the final line of the story mean? What happened and why?” A discussion might ensue, with students first making conjectures of varying types. Likely, they'd bring evidence as the details of the story's ending were discussed.

With ADW you might look at a chemical reaction or perhaps listen to a piece of music and then discuss it. What do we think is happening in the beaker and why? What do we think the composer was trying to communicate?

After those discussions you'd ask your students to write about the text they read or the activity they did. As they wrote, they'd be drawing on two sources of information: what they took from the story or the activity and what their classmates said in discussion. Ideally, a student would take his or her initial understanding from the reading or the activity and add some nuance and additional detail gleaned from discussion, but it doesn't always work that way. It especially doesn't work that way for your weakest students, with the weakest readers particularly at risk.

In many cases, students are able to use what they hear and learn in the discussion to write, convincing you that they understood the reading (or the lab experiment or a lecture) far better than they did. You might call this “piggybacking.” So while it is valuable to use a final writing exercise to assess how much your students know or to allow them to synthesize ideas, the writing in this case conflates information gleaned from two sources, one often easier to understand than the other. You (and your students) could easily get a false positive—an erroneous indication of mastery—as a result of piggybacking.

This happened to some colleagues at a school I work with. They were doing a unit in which students read Romeo and Juliet and strove to have a college-level discussion about it. In this case, the discussion was held in part online and via chat—a fact that had the unanticipated result of allowing teachers to go back and analyze it later. As the discussion unfolded, they had cause to.

Originally my colleagues thought their unit had been a triumph. The discussions were rich and, thanks to the accountability of the chat structure, they could easily track who had participated how many times, ensuring that everyone contributed.

But as a capstone, students were asked to write a paper analyzing a passage from the play, and the papers were a stunning disappointment. You've been down this road once or twice probably. They couldn't wait to see what students wrote, but as they read each successive paper they moved from anticipation to disappointment to despondency and despair. Where had the trenchant insight and deep analysis gone? Then they realized they had a transcript of all of their discussions. They went back to look for clues. They found that the discussion was indeed full of outstanding ideas, but that, time and time again, those ideas were broached by just two students, with the rest of the class piggybacking on their breakthroughs. The class was able to reflect on a unique and powerful insight once it was made, but only two girls were consistently able to generate those underlying insights. They (and only they) were able to discern the germ of core conflicts and themes in Shakespeare's Elizabethan verbiage. Once they laid it out clearly, others were able to jump in. “Oh, it's about loyalty? I can speak to that!”

It's good in some ways that the ideas of these two scholars permeated the room. But it also convinced teachers that the students had greater and broader mastery of reading Shakespeare than they actually did. This was exacerbated by the fact that the teachers had had no tool to measure whether students were able to generate meaning directly from the text. Read—or analyze a data set or do another activity—then discuss, then assess, is problematic if you want to know if students can do the first task on their own. If you want to know that, you've got to get some form of assessment before the discussion.

As students advance in their educational careers, they will increasingly find themselves in situations where they must make sense of a text or an experiment or some other key learning activity on their own—without a group of thirty colleagues with whom to distill the information and discuss first. As they mature, they will add value in professional settings by being the ones who can themselves generate ideas directly from the initial experience.

One of the simplest ways to address this is to shift the cycle from RDW to RWD or ADW to AWD and put the writing before the discussion. You still get the benefit of an exchange of ideas at the end, but not before everyone practices thinking deeply and autonomously: What did I just see? What did it mean? How can I make sense of it? Beyond the other benefits of writing, this also allows you to assess what students know right away, before the discussion. You can even design the discussion to respond to the initial understanding you see on their papers.

But Front the Writing can go a step further. It can help students get much more out of the discussion itself. Think for a minute about what we want students to do, cognitively, during the part of discussion when they are listening to their peers. We want them to listen, of course, but what else? We often tacitly (or explicitly) ask them to decide whether they agree or disagree with the speaker, but this is a bit of an oversimplification of the sort of intellectual life our students might aspire to. In the conversations of life, those whose comments focus simply on “I agree” or “I disagree” are limited. Much more interesting are discussions with comments more like, “I agree that that evidence is important but I interpreted it differently,” or “The first part of your comment is insightful but I think you may have exaggerated the significance.”

Asking students to listen and focus on whether they agree or disagree can foment an unproductive situation: a discussion full of students with arms crossed saying, “Well, that's just what I think,” perhaps a little more loudly the second time around. Learning and growth aren't maximized when students are focused on proving that their original opinion was right and “winning” the discussion, rather than, say, listening for information that might cause them to change their original thought, to develop a more nuanced and flexible opinion that moderates and modulates their initial reaction in light of others’ perspectives. Surely we are exasperated when, in our lives outside of school, we come across people who want to win discussions instead of hear others out in the assumption that they might learn something. We should be careful about reinforcing that in our schools.

Next question, then: How can we socialize students to think of discussion as a tool to refine or revise their own thinking in light of the points made by others? One effective way is to ask them to write and then listen to the discussion with the understanding that the next step will be to revise their original opinion. That is, moving to RWDR or AWDR (read-write-discuss-revise or activity-write-discuss-revise) gives structure to the idea that during a discussion, what students should do is track ideas they will use to revise their opinion afterward. It makes a habit of it, in fact. The process ends with them changing their opinion. It expects them to.

This not only provides lots of practice revising—a skill I write about it in technique 42, Regular Revision, that is at least as important as writing an initial idea—but also causes students to engage in the discussion with a more flexible mindset: What can I learn here, and how will I apply it to my idea? This mindset is not just theoretical—someone tells me I ought to be doing that. In practice, as a student, I am prompted, ideally over and over again, to do it with the result being that I become very good at coming up with an initial opinion, writing it down to formulate it into words, engaging in an exchange with peers in which I harvest ideas that I can weave into my own thinking, and then revising my initial opinion in writing—locking down the changes in my thinking in specific, visible words and syntax. If students could do that every day, I suspect the difference for their learning, and also for a populace prone to righteous and reflexive confidence that their opinion is assuredly the only right one, would be significant.

Below you’ll find a template we often use in our workshops to show how you might put this into practice in the classroom:

Front the Writing Example in Student Work Packet

Everybody Writes #1: What might the figurative language in the first and second stanza tell us about the flowers?

Notes from Discussion Tracker

Rewrite Everybody Writes #1: What might the figurative language in the first and second stanza tell us about the flowers?

Notice the initial prompt is “formative” (see Everybody Writes, technique 38) and uses the word “might.” Notice also the room provided for note-taking during the discussion and the fact that the postwrite is the same question. You could change it, of course, but I like the idea that the message is that I want you to answer the same question, just more insightfully. You could also add more lines beneath the prompt to suggest that you want more thinking after the discussion, but again I like the idea that it's exactly the same. The message is as much about changing what you wrote as it is adding to it. I don't want more; I want better. That said, subtle changes might be fine. One teacher at a workshop in London (I'm sorry I don't remember who!) noted that he would change the prompt slightly so that the first one asked What does the figurative language in the first and second stanza tell you about the flowers? and the second What does the figurative language in the first and second stanza tell us about the flowers? I like that idea—and the idea that there are lots of ways you could play with the concept of writing before and after a discussion in a disciplined way.

You can see several great examples of Front the Writing in two of the Keystone videos in this book. The explosion of hands two minutes into Jessica Bracey's clip is in part a result of the fact that students have all written first. So, too, the hands at the beginning of Arielle Hoo's class, when she asks them to write their conjectures. And of course at the end of Arielle's class there's a group revision in writing.