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

Technique 42: Regular revision
Building ratio through writing

In the previous technique, Art of the Sentence, I described how short developmental writing exercises could harness the benefits of deliberate practice and help avoid a common trap for teachers—assigning a lot of writing but never managing to teach students the fundamental skills of expression or syntactic control.

Often, mastering syntactic tools comes as much from revision as it does from the initial act of writing. By revision, I mean the process of asking rigorous but straightforward questions about one's written idea formation: Does that word capture exactly what I mean? Could I express my idea more precisely, perhaps with fewer words? If I change the order, how would that affect meaning? If my words are unclear, then what exactly did I mean?¹¹

Most of us submit our own writing to the revision process frequently and, for some of us, constantly. We revise even an informal email to a colleague perhaps, or scratch out and use a different word three times when texting an explanation to a friend about running late. Revision is an everyday thing in the real world but too often a special event in the classroom—a formal activity applied mostly with compositions and longer pieces. It's often encoded in what some teachers call the writing process, which can take a week to complete, with each step (drafting, revising, editing) getting its own day. Over the course of the year there are perhaps three or four “revision days.”

I'd argue that to make students' writing powerful and also to allow writing to cause writers to think most deeply—to boost the Think Ratio, that is—revision should always be a part of writing. In some ways the less distinguishable as a “separate step,” the better.

The technique Regular Revision pursues the simple idea that we can make student writing better by making revision an everyday act, often done in short simple doses, and by making it a habit to regularly revise all manner of writing, not only formal pieces.

I find this observation of Bruce Saddler's profound: “Sentences represent vehicles of communication that are literally miniature compositions,” he writes. We could apply the drafting and revision process reserved for longer compositions more frequently, and probably more successfully, to smaller writing exercises just by thinking of them as compositions, too. Sentence-length developmental writing exercises, for example, are perfect vehicles for revising. Small and focused, they are perfect for successful, deliberate practice.¹²

Skills are mastered when practiced regularly, even if practiced in smaller chunks. You might call that the Yo-Yo Ma Effect. As a child, the great cellist's father taught him to play in short, frequent, and intense doses. He played better, and with more attention, because he played shorter. The frequency of practice and the level of focus and attention involved are often more important than the duration in shaping outcomes.¹³ Five minutes of practice a day for ten days, done with focus and attention, will probably get you farther than an hour of practice on one occasion, even though the number of minutes applied is greater in the second instance. Doubly so if your level of attention starts to tail off at the end of the hour.

Revising smaller pieces of writing more frequently allows for focus and energy. It also allows us to have a single very specific goal for every round of practice—something the cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson points out as being critical to accelerating learning in practice. If there's one thing to focus on and improve, it's easy to see—and then to support people as they apply that particular idea. Let's add an active verb here. Let's figure out why this syntax doesn't work. See the difference between those focused prompts and a more general “revise your paragraph?” There's a clear task to start with, so students know what to look for and to change; the task then ends with visible progress, giving students the sense of success that we discussed earlier. This will make them want to continue in the endeavor.

As it is now, teachers spend an immense amount of time giving students feedback on their writing. We mark up their essays with comment after comment we hope they'll read—when we return their papers in three or four weeks—and perhaps apply, at an undetermined time in the future. Often by the time they read our reams of feedback they barely remember writing the original. In addition to the time lag, there's also usually too much feedback to use. Most of it will get ignored and students will then practice ignoring feedback. I'm your student and among the fifteen suggestions you have on my three-page paper is to use more active verbs and to make my thesis statement clearer. Perhaps I'll find opportunities to use active verbs. Perhaps I won't. But usually there is no clear and immediate opportunity to even begin to try to respond and apply to this plethora of “opportunities for improvement.” Even if I wanted to try to make all of your changes, it is likely to take another month to get an opportunity.

Of course you could guarantee me the chance to rewrite my thesis by asking me to revise the whole essay but the transaction cost is high. For both of us. I rewrite the essay—as do my twenty-nine classmates on their own essays—and you're back to three weeks of dreading the stack of thirty essays staring at you accusingly from the corner of your desk.

So what if we, as teachers, applied our feedback not to writing of the largest unit size but of the smallest? What if I wrote a sentence and you suggested I rewrite it with more active verbs and I did it right then and there? Three minutes later you'd say, “Yes, much better, Doug. See how different your sentence is?” And I'd agree, because I could see that I had made a difference by making an immediate and focused change. I could look at the before and after to see the change. And then perhaps you'd say, “Try another.” Or next you might say, “Here's another one-sentence composition to write. Focus on active verbs.” “Yes,” you'd say, reviewing my work only a matter of seconds after I had completed it. The feedback cycle is suddenly fast and focused and effective.

Sentence-Level Revision Is High-Quality Practice

To maximize the benefits of practice, Ericsson suggests, the practice should first have well-defined, specific goals. “We're working on our writing” is insufficiently vague. “We're working on using active verbs in our writing” or “on incorporating indirect quotations into our writing” or “on starting sentences with prepositional phrases” are clear, specific goals.

We make more progress if we teach larger skills by linking a series of baby steps, aggregating smaller skills into a larger whole. For this we'll need sentence-level practice to happen frequently. Daisy Christodoulou makes a similar point in her outstanding book, Making Good Progress. We presume that the best way to prepare for a task we want to assess is to assign tasks just like it over and over. But this often overwhelms students' working memory, as cognitive load theory tells us. Students will show more mastery on the final, more complex task if they first build that mastery through practice on discrete, manageable chunks. To put it plainly, your students will write far better three-page compositions if, throughout their time with you, they have been regularly practicing writing and revising excellent sentences.

For maximum benefit, practice also requires a focused mindset and full attention, Ericsson advises. Obviously, this ability to focus is dictated in part by the vibrancy of classroom culture, but shorter activities are an ideal way to maximize the attentive capacity of students at any age. As the practice pays off and students experience success, their ability to expand the duration of their attentive focus will also grow. In other words, as I write about in technique 39, Silent Solo, start small.

Finally, according to Ericsson, effective practice requires the giving (and use) of quality feedback from a knowledgeable source. Again, with smaller units of writing, feedback can be given more quickly and students more easily socialized to use it. And of course as they do so and see positive changes, they're likely to become more motivated and to like writing.

Show Call: Revision's Best Friend

To bring revision to life, teachers need a tool to make the process visible, and for that there is Show Call (technique 13). The technique is discussed extensively in Chapter Three but it also serves as a great tool for teaching revision. Show Call allows you to make the often private and individualized process of revision legible and meaningful to all the students in your classroom. That aspect is a game changer.

In many classrooms a typical “revision” exchange without Show Call might go something like this:

1. A student, Martina, reads her answer aloud.

2. The teacher says to the class, “Let's give Martina some feedback. What was effective about her answer?”

3. A classmate, working from her limited and fading memory of what Martina wrote, makes a vague observation: “She had really good details.”

4. The teacher tries to elicit a specific example to discuss: “Good. What was good about her details?”

5. The commenting student, with memory rapidly fading, tries valiantly to respond but offers an even vaguer response. “Um, I don't remember exactly; I just remember they were really good.”

This well-intentioned exchange is essentially a waste of time for both Martina and the class. If you are going to take class time to practice revision (and I certainly hope you do), then you need to make sure that both the original student author and the rest of the class (now in the role of “assistant-revisers”) are able to derive meaning from the exercise. Therefore, we need to keep the writing we are talking about in students' working memory—it must remain visible to them. Show Call does that, enabling a teacher to ask for precise, actionable analysis. If I project Martina's writing, I can say, “I like Martina's thesis sentence, especially her use of a strong verb like ’devour,’” and then use the projected image to point it out for everyone. Or “I like Martina's thesis sentence, but it would be even better if she put it in the active voice. Who can show us how to do that?” This way, when we talk about what's good about a particular piece of writing, or how it can be improved, people are not just following along, but are able to actively think about the revision task. Since most of the information we take into our brains comes to us visually, students will now understand and remember the revision you are talking about far better.

Making a problem visible also allows you to ask perception-based questions. Asking a student, “Do you see any verbs we could improve on?” is far better than saying, “Amari has used a so-so verb here, let's see if we can improve it.” The former question causes students not simply to exercise the skill of improving verbs but to recognize—and practice recognizing—places where it needs doing, where writing could benefit from improvement. Without the critical step of perceiving opportunities for revision on their own, they won't learn to write independently.

Finally, after leveraging the minds of all the students in the class and eliciting thoughts from several of them on the revision at hand, you can then create an opportunity for all students to apply the learning they've just done. “Great, now let's all go through our sentences, check the ones that are in the active voice, and revise any that are in the passive voice.” Through the use of Show Call, the Think Ratio and Participation Ratio on the revision task has just increased exponentially.

Incidentally, a nice way I've seen teachers make sure that every student learns from each revision opportunity is by doing something called an “offline rewrite.” After Show Calling student A's work, provide feedback, ask the class to revise, and then Show Call student Z's work to see if he or she applied the feedback as well. This ensures that everyone is accountable for applying the feedback, not just the person whose work was Show Called. It also gives students the time and space they need to make thoughtful revisions. This can be especially helpful for students who need additional processing time before they can effectively apply feedback.

On Revising Writing

Here are some hints to help you make revisions as productive as possible.

Judith Hochman has observed that it is important to distinguish editing, which is fixing basic errors like capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, from revising, which is the task of improving writing—specifically by revising structure or word choice. As Hochman has pointed out, if you let students choose, they will generally edit, primarily because it is easier to add a missing capital letter than to revise a sentence so as to use a subordinating conjunction, for example. In fact, many teachers, too, will choose editing over revising for this reason. But of course the real work is in revision.

One high-value task Hochman suggests is to ask students to add an appositive phrase to a sentence that lacks substance. In a lesson at New Dorp High School in Staten Island, a teacher began revising the sentence “Gandhi had an impact.” The teacher first asked her students to use a Turn and Talk to write four good appositives to describe Gandhi. Students then inserted the best appositives into the sentence so that it read, for example, “Gandhi, a pacifist and important leader, had an impact.” After the teacher asked her students to add a few more clarifications, the students came up with sentences like these: “Gandhi, a pacifist and important leader in India, had a strong impact on society.” And the best part was not so much that her students had made this sentence markedly better, it was that they were learning how to use a replicable device, the addition of an appositive phrase, to improve any sentence they might write. That's the power of a good revision task: it teaches a replicable skill.

With thanks to Hochman for the insights that inform some of these suggestions, here are a few more high-value revision tasks:

1. Take a look at Ivan's work here. I want you to find two places where more specific technical vocabulary could make his work even better.

2. Take a look at Ivan's work here. I want you to find at least one place where he could replace a direct quotation with a partial or full paraphrase. Be ready to show us how he could write into or out of the quotation.

3. Take a look at Ivan's work here. I want you to find his two best, most dynamic verbs and then find two verbs you could upgrade to make his writing stronger.

4. Take a look at Ivan's work here. I want you to use a subordinating conjunction to add crucial information.

5. Take a look at Ivan's work here. I want you to add a phrase beginning with “but,” “because,” or “so” to improve this sentence.

6. Take a look at Ivan's work here. I want you to take these two sentences and combine them to show how the ideas connect and make your writing more fluid.