Edutopia contributor Sarah Gonser has published a useful article on imparting writing skills.
She says, “Writing instruction often gets short shrift in the classroom, where busy schedules and the urgency of meeting academic benchmarks tend to elbow out the time-intensive process of teaching kids the skills of good writing. But that’s got to change, write Steve Benjamin and Michael Wagner for Phi Delta Kappan, because students still struggle “to produce the kinds of writing expected of them in college and the workforce.”
To do a better job helping students improve their writing, the authors recommend adopting an apprenticeship framework. The concept of cognitive apprenticeships—where teachers “model how to do the task, narrating their thinking at every step, and students repeat the process, explaining their actions as they go,”—isn’t new, yet it’s rarely practiced in the classroom, write Benjamin and Wagner, who are, respectively, an education consultant, and the chief academic officer of Concord Community Schools in Indiana. “If this sort of frequent practice, reflection, and coaching were the norm, students would have to spend much more time on their writing, be taught a much more intensive writing process, and work toward much higher expectations than we see in many classrooms.”
Here are a few of the practices Benjamin and Wagner explore in their article, as well as advice from teachers from our own Edutopia content”.