if you want to help students become better writers, you must teach them the process. The five-step writing process as described by Donald Graves (1983) has been around for a while. This podcast will expand on the brief outline of the five-step writing process, it will describe tips for teaching the 5-step writing process, and it will identify six types of writing that should be included in a writing curriculum.

Throughout my series of podcasts related to writing instruction you’ll encounter six reoccurring themes:

1. Everyone can write. Writing is creating meaning with print and sharing that meaning with others. Everyone can record or express an idea on paper (or computer). Young children may use more pictures and squiggly shapes than letters and words, but they are creating meaning with print and sharing their ideas.

2. Students need to be taught the writing process. The five-step writing process will be described in Chapter 1 and referenced through this book. Everyone can become better writers if they are taught the steps and follow the process. The process may look a bit different in first grade than it does in 12th grade, but there is a process, and it does produce better writers.

3. Students need opportunities to practice writing. You become a better tennis player by practicing. You become a better piano player by practicing. You become a writer by practicing. Like any skill, you need to do it a lot to get better at it. This means that teachers must provide ample opportunities to practice writing. Students should expect to write every day.

4. Students need to have authentic writing experiences. An inauthentic writing experience is when the teacher asks students to respond to an artificial writing prompt and the only response given is a grade, some edits, and a comment from the teacher. In contrast, an authentic writing experience is when students are recording, explaining, or describing their ideas for a real-life audience (often their peers). This makes their writing comes alive. It moves it from an abstract exercise to a real-life event. And when students are engaged in authentic writing experiences, you seldom have problems ‘motivating’ them to write. Again, humans have a natural inclination to communicate; to share their thoughts, experiences, perspectives, and emotions with others. When you tap into this natural inclination, writing instruction becomes effortless.

5. Students need responses. A response if much different from correction. A response is a reaction. Students need to see how their writing is playing in the heads of the reader. They need to know which parts work and which parts are a little fuzzy or could use some revising. They need responses from the teacher and their peers.

6. Every teacher can be an effective teacher of writing. There’s nothing magical or complicated about being and becoming a good teacher of writing. You simply need to understand the five-step writing process and have a few good strategies that you can adopt and adapt to fit your needs and teaching style. And that’s where I come in. Hence, this book.

• Students need their own writing topics. Students should be encouraged to express their thoughts and describe their experiences to the greatest extent possible. This is called authentic writing or authentic writing experiences. Not all the time, but much of the time. When I sit down to write a book or a journal article, nobody assigns me a topic. I get to write about what interests me. I get to research things about which I am curious. Research and writing seem effortless here. However, I’ve had experiences in which I’ve had to write a chapter, article, or report that I wasn’t really interested in writing. Writering is incredible difficult here. It seems as if I stare at my computer for hours and nothing comes out of my head.

• Students first need to write in order to learn how to write. Celebrate the idea in whatever form that idea takes. There are times and places to learn and become proficient in various writing forms and genre, including what Gloria Ladson-Billings (2017) refers to as the dominant academic language (DAL) or the culture of commerce and social advancement. However, learning and becoming proficient in one form will make it easier to learn and become proficient in another form.

• Students need to get real responses from real people. Sharing writing with others is what makes it come alive. She how people respond to your words gives you a sense of what is effective and what is not.

• Finally, keep the art in language arts. Again, art is not something beautiful; art is something beautifully expressed. Celebrate, in your writing instruction, the beauty of words.

Learning to write is a lot like learning to make raspberry jelly. You need to be shown the process, not just given a list of ingredients. Too often students are never taught the process used to create a finished written product. They are not shown the steps. This lack of instruction related to process is just as detrimental to jelly-making as it is to writing.

The test data didn't tell me the full story. Sally was a 1st grade girl with whom I was working last year during covid. I was doing online tutoring with kids. Before working with her, her parents sent me her test data. I read through them. There were fancy charts and colorful graphs that showed Sally’s scores on a whole array of meaningless reading subskill – They measured her distance from average. All this data really showed me was that Sally had trouble reading --- but we already knew this. Her parents knew this. Her teacher knew this. And Sally knew this. The numbers simply quantified what everybody already knew. And the testing made Sally feel more insecure about herself as a literate human being.

Five things cause ineffective reading instruction:

1. The myth of standardization.

2. Lack of understanding related to the reading process.

3. Teacher disempowerment.

4. Over-crowded classrooms.

5. Testing madness.

How is it possible that so many people believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election? How is it humanly possible? How is it possible that some still believe that getting vaccinated for COVID-19 is a bad thing? After all the information published, all the data available, how is it possible that there are people walking about who fervently believe such things? And I am not talking about just a few. Sadly, I am talking about a whole bunch of people.

This podcast examines the neurological basis of how it is that people can believe things that are so unbelievable.

test

This short podcast looks at language learning and the implications for reading instruction.

Language learning is a universal human function. People around the world, in different environments and with different abilities seem to acquire their primary language in essentially the same sequence and the same way. This tells us that humans are hard-wired to learn language in some form (Chomsky, 1968)

Four elements

There are four elements connected with language learning (Ormrod, Anderman, & Anderman, 2020):

• Semantics refers to the meaning. Children learn that certain sounds, symbols, or movements of a hand and facial gestures means something.

• Syntax refers to the rules for how the words, symbols, and movements are put together. For example, in human communication there is usually a thing word (noun) coupled with an action word (verb). Children learn that the types of words, the form of the word, and the order that they are used make a difference.

• Medium refers to the form the language takes. Children learn to produce certain sounds, symbols, or movements to communicate.

• Pragmatics is the context in which the communication takes place and the social rules around that communication. Children learn to communicate in different ways, in different contexts, with different people, and for different purposes.