Teaching Writing

From what I've seen in my observations, students don't like writing very much. They seem to have been workbook-ed to death. I graded a few essays which the students wrote for a practice PSSA test and was discouraged with what I saw – fake writing. I had to give most of them 1’s (on a scale of 0-3) because their essays were incomprehensible, didn’t answer the prompt completely or at all, or simply showed little to no effort.

I can tell that the students know that doing well on PSSA essays are high-stakes. It’s been drilled into them over and over: they need to pass to graduate, the school needs them to pass to get funding. I can see that they don’t write well because they have no good models of what good writing looks like. They've gone over "attacking" the prompt, highlighting useful information, and rewording the question with more understandable words. All of these things are great skills for writing a good essay under a time limit. However, I don't think that these skills are effective without the students having an idea of what they should be working towards. For example, I can tell the students have had the essay form modeled to them. In fact, some essays even had cues written before each sentence. Topic sentence. Example one. Example two. Conclusion. 

Even within the confines of PSSA essays, I think that there are some writing tricks that Gallagher suggests in this week's reading that might be helpful to my frustrated students.

The funneling technique described by Gallagher would be helpful in teaching students to narrow their essay focus. While grading, the most common error that I had to take points off for was not answering the prompt. When most students failed to answer the prompt, it was often because they had just restated it word for word and put one or two examples (if any) without giving them any connection to the topic at hand. Teaching students how to focus in on the topic and "write smaller" would help with the process of thesis creation and picking relevant examples from the essay prompt.

Another useful technique that Gallagher suggests is the writing fountain. I think that this technique might be useful for students who feel stuck with a particular prompt. Having had this experience before on tests, I’ve found that writing down all the associations that I had with the topic in the prompt helped me find an idea that I liked. I think that having an idea that you like, or at least relate to, make creating an essay easier. Writers write about what they know, after all.

I think that these students would find writing more enjoyable if they were able to practice for the PSSA test by writing about things that they liked. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be likely for this class, as they are restricted by the confines of the workbook. This makes showing the students good examples difficult. And outside of the canned responses given in the PSSA prep book, how can you give a good model of an essay response written in the heat of the moment? I don’t think that there is an easy answer to this question. I think that we as teachers work with what we get, and try our best to help our students make sense of it all.