SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Writing Revolution

There’s a very interesting article in this month’s Atlantic Magazine about a struggling New York high school that had tried a bunch of reforms over the years - removal of bad teachers, breaking up of the student population into smaller learning communities, after-school programs - but nothing had worked. Then in 2008, the principal decided to focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing.

It turned out that a significant percentage of the school’s students were lacking some very basic elements of writing. For example, a sizable group of students could not use simple words like “for”, “and”, “nor”, “but” and “yet” effectively. According to the article, “about 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be ‘caught’, not ‘taught’, explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will ‘catch’ what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression. The catch method works for some kids, to a point. ‘Research tells us some students catch quite a bit, but not everything,’ Graham says. And some kids don’t catch much at all.”

Although the new focus on teaching analytic writing has not solved all of the students’ problems (their high poverty rate gives them multiple handicaps), nevertheless there has been a dramatic turnaround - “an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject - one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform”.

The article concludes: “The school’s success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals - fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten - need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.” H/T JB