Writing Skills & Writing Curriculum

I've interested in teaching and learning to write. For K12 students, we created Time4Writing.com to build writing skills. It's a traditional curriculum teaching to properly construct sentences, paragraphs, and essays based on the standards used in most school systems. Time4Writing relies on personal writing coaches (licensed teachers) to go beyond the automated approach to building writing skills (including grammar, spelling, and vocabulary) that is used in Time4Learning.com.

I have also taken a foray into new media and new approaches to writing with our blogging course for adults.  This teaches creative writing along with some technology, writing skills, and self promotion (and protection) skills by helping people create or improve their blog.  It's our most popular course in terms of student satisfaction (they love it) but our least successful course in terms of marketing it and making it profitable (It's turned out to be an expensive hobby for me).

My heart is probably more in the idea that there is a lot of innovation that could and should happen in terms of teaching writing.  So here's a quick summary of my thoughts in this area.

1. The traditional goal of K12 academic writing is to produce on-demand a tightly structured five paragrah expository essay. The essays are expected to demonstrate the basic writing principles of proper structure, an overall thesis introduced in the opening, paragraphs with topic and concluding sentences, and supporting detail.  Content is often of secondary importance to structure and correctness. This type of writing almost never occurs outside of academia. 

2.  I've done some reading where people are critical of this approach, most notably Steve Peha of  Teaching That Makes Sense (TTMS.org, great thinking and writing on that website, nice guy too).   I'm not convinced that it's so ill-conceived. Here's how I think about it.

3. Writing skills are open-ended and building them provides a solid foundation for all types of writing. Lets use a sports analogy for a second.  When basketball players practice, they do endless layups by themselves trying to execute an exact string of steps.  Martial artists endlessly practice kata which are arcane and stylized. In both cases, the practice is not "real world" since in real games (or fights), there is almost a never simple layup to the basket (and of course, a fighter never ever never gets into a cat stance or a horse stance when they are fighting). Nevertheless, these forms of practice build skills, coordination, and control which can be applied to more complex situations at game time (or when the bell rings).  Martial artists have for centuries practiced blocks (inwards, outwards, upwards, downwards) which are ultimately more like calistenics than real world paries. My point is that just like in sports, the practice simulates only a fraction of the real deal. And if students the writing skills to meet academic writing requirements, they have a solid foundation from which to learn to attack real world writing challenges.

4.  Another thought is that the real educational problem is not just writing skills development, it's motivation. Students are often not highly motivated (yes, I'm trying for the understatement of the year award).  Does the writing assignment have anything to do with how motivated the students will be and whether they will struggle to express themselves and thence build skills? Of course yes.  A thousand times yes.  But, it does not follow that writing prompts per se are necessarily demotivating. Bad writing prompts are demotivating, good writing prompts are inspiring.  On the corner of my desk sits a book called Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt. He suggests that his greatest success as a language arts high school teacher might have come from when he had the students, an ethnically diverse academically-uninterested batch, read aloud their favorite recipes in class.  One could argue that part of the appeal was that everyone knew it was something new, an experiment.  Couldn't writing prompts, properly designed, provide the same appeal?

OK, time's up. I have people coming to my office. I'll conclude that this is an interesting discussion and probably, the closest that I could claim as a consensus view is that canned time-proven writing prompts are an inferior tool to a teacher, in touch with the students, designing prompts that inspire and challenge the students at that time.  Creating a prompt involves many skills but mostly it has to do with knowing what matters enough to the students so that they'll struggle to really express themselves.

Looking forward, I'll probably do some cross over work taking new media techniques into teaching writing to K12 students (I just bought a slew of books on the subject) and I'm interested in adapting our Time4Writing materials to the problem of teaching some remedial writing skills to adults. I find many adults are embarrassed by their writing and they just need help:
- mastering some confusing words: their they're too two to your you're etc
- ensuring subject verb agreement
- mastering short expository sentences
- mastering effective paragraphing and essaying

BTW, below is an example of the type of lessons that we teach at Time4Writing (double click on it to see it full size)....

Teaching Writing

Many parents are disappointed by the writing skills of their children. However, they find that teaching writing is difficult as the kids don't necessarily recognize the parents' authority in this area.

Most schools just don't have the resources to give the children lots of writing assignments with appropriate feedback. Without the practice and instruction, students' writing skills do NOT improve.

Many parents look for help to teach writing. Time4Writing provides that help. It's a set of online eight week courses which gives weekly writing assignments followed by in-depth personalized feedback on the writing. Students can take courses afterschool, during the summer, or for homeschool families, whenever it fits into their schedule. Classes start almost every Monday.

Prices are terrribly reasonable for the amount of personalized instruction that each student needs. The course requirements are simply an Internet connection and a browser. The writing is done on an online system so a word processor is not even required.

In middle and high school, a methodology called Four Trait Writing is used. The first course on Four Traiting Writing is available from Time4Writing, which provides online writing courses. But there are likely to be books and other courses promoting this methodology in the near future. Time4Writing conforms to the NSTE approach to writing.



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"The H* with Spelling" Time Magazine article

"The Hell with Spelling" Time Magazine. And I quote:

In the course of a congressional hearing on U.S. economic policy, a witness casually mentioned the importance of education to the future of the nation. That was enough for Vermont's plain-spoken Republican Senator Ralph Flanders, 76, who proceeded to sound off on what has obviously become one of his favorite topics.

"Our education system," said he, "is a shambles. I have, for instance, four grandchildren in high school . . . Three of them are writing rather good theses and essays but are not corrected in spelling. They communicate; that's all that is necessary. The hell with spelling.

"Furthermore, the leading citizens of the town in which I live, Springfield, Vermont, were hypnotized into signing a statement of educational policies which includes this: that examinations shall be student-based and not subject-based. In other words, it is of no great importance whether a child really understands the mathematics so long as he is working hard at it. If so, he gets a good grade. But as to whether he has achieved a satisfactory degree of proficiency is not of any particular interest to the school."

Here's my questions, what is this about?

As far as I can tell, the position of standardized tests measuring skills and achievement is very strong in this country. NCLB has vastly increased their importance and impact. So what is he going on about that the lack of testing is the problem with our educational system? It's true that spelling has lost some ground in academia due to the increased use of proof-reading and spell checkers and word processing.

Remember, my generation went to school and we drafted our writing by hand. One did not make endless revisions since each one could mean copying over the entire document. Instead, we doodled up an outline, wrote a draft, proofed it, and then wrote a final version in pretty distinct stages. Now that we have word processors, we tend to do our brainstorming on the keyboard rather than in our head and doodling. So more typos and misspellings occur. And we get sloppy since the spellchecker fixes most of them correctly so some great bloopers get through.

But this is hardly a sign of our educational system going to pot.

Frankly, there haven't been that many great tools to make spelling time, a fun time. But there are now...try SpellingCity.com




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My karate interest, my interest in blogging leads to...

I've been quite the dojo rat, hanging out at lavallees karate school in ft lauderdale. What's funny is how I have now combined two of my hobbies:

• Karate
• Blogging

The fusion of these two hobbies can be seen in my karate blog. Plus, I've combined them with my professional life in several ways. Firstly, I've been building blogs and found that they can be used to help grow my business through providing increased visibility for my online educational sites. Secondly, and this is the most interesting, I've found that writing an interesting blog is difficult. While I can write interesting articles, I've had trouble finding a voice and personna that people want to read and that the audience will keep coming back to. So I started looking around for interesting examples. And I've found that only a few people have learned how to blog about their life in a way that actually connects to an audience.

So, my efforts at karate blogging have led me to wish that I could earn a black belt in blogging. That is, I wish I could blog well. So if you want to know more about my writing course and specifically, the blog writing course.

This is how it's all come together. john