Kuunari

The series “Reading Write Like This” is a number of essays I wrote last year while reading Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts by Kelly Gallagher for a graduate class. While the book fails to delve into how race and culture can impact learning, it is full of engaging, student focused activities to teach writing. I highly recommend this book to teachers of writing. Even though this book is geared towards high school writing classes, I found a lot that was applicable for my elementary classroom.

Kelly Gallagher in Write Like This posits two central premises to guide the rest of the book’s work in improving writing instruction. The first is that young writers should be introduced to real-world discourses. The second is that teachers should provide students with extensive teacher and real-world models. Both of these premises will be key in guiding improvements in my writing instruction in my 4th grade classroom. 

The first central premise is that young writers should be introduced to real-world discourses. The focus of instruction should not be on learning the various forms or genres of writing, but rather to learn why writers write. As Gallagher wrote in an earlier book, Teaching Adolescent Writers, “If we want our students to understand the value writing can play in their lives, maybe we should consider shifting instruction away from strict adherence to the traditional discourses and begin having our students explore the reason why writers write.” (8) Gallagher goes on to explain that this can help students “internalize the relevance of writing”. (8) 

If you can get a student to see the relevance of the work they are doing, keeping them engaged and persevering becomes much easier. Instead of having to perform a “song and dance” to get the students attention and keep them focused on their work, the students keep themselves engaged. 

Gallagher explains that real-world writing purposes can be broken down into six major purposes: express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and judge, inquire and explore, analyze and interpret, and take a stand/propose a solution. These have been adapted from Bean, Chappell and Gillam’s book Reading Rhetorically. These six writing purposes tie into the Common Core in fourth grade through the analysis of text structures, with many of the text structures corresponding to one or more of the writing purposes.

It also will be very helpful for students that struggle to think of things to write about to realize that there are more than one way to write about a specific topic. While many of the boys in my class want to write about hockey or football, but then struggle when they have to actually put words to paper, these six purposes helps students to generate richer writing topics about their interests. In particular, the 1 Topic = 18 Topics worksheet will help many of my students to come up with lots more ways that they can write about topics that interest them. 

The six purposes will also help me better implement the second central premise; providing students with extensive teacher and real-world models. It can be hard sometimes to find articles that fit the writing goal that you are trying to teach to students, particularly when you are dealing with fourth graders. Their reading level is such that most published articles will be above their reading level. With the six purposes, it enables us as a class to analyze and understand the purpose of a text that might be well above our reading level. With guidance from the teacher, the students will be able to look at real world mentor texts to improve their own writing. Students can tell the difference between made up and real articles, and love it when we read articles that correspond to their own interests.

Teacher modeling is something that I have not done enough of with my students. While I provide them with supports and the students read and share each others’ writings, it is rare that I will actually write in front of them. Gallagher’s statements in this section could not be a stronger rebuke to that. “Of all the strategies I have learned in my twenty-five years of teaching, no strategy improves my students’ writing more than having my students watch and listen to me as I write and think aloud. None.” (15) I will absolutely be incorporating much more modeling into my classroom teaching, and I expect it will have a positive effect on my students, particularly my students who are resistant to writing.