Take a breath, pause, and then jump back into the restructuring of our 3 Rs. Our modern Thirty Years War over how best to teach Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic is not yet over. While our national and state-based educational generals have cast their critical eyes on reading and math, the second R, writing, has slipped into the backwaters of school subjects. We need to correct this. Said simply, reading is the development of understanding and writing is the demonstration of understanding and more. As we teach children to be skilled readers, we must teach them to be skilled writers. We must do what is right by writing.
What Do We Know?
No Child Left Behind and the Common Core focused national educational systems on student achievement in reading and math. These two initiatives provided a warlike educational scenario. NCLB was the mandate that made improvement our only option and the Common Core was our dictum. The reading, ELA, and math Core standards became the subjects that mattered. If you want proof, check your school’s official state report card. What gets tested gets taught. Although writing is appropriately and very well addressed in the Common Core, the two expressive sides of reading, writing, and speaking, get short shrift.
We finally are back on track in our instruction of reading. Elementary teachers have slogged through more than thirty years of reading wars. A resurgence of explicit instruction of reading in the larger, well documented Science of Reading is moving the needle of student achievement in reading. The two-pronged attack of language comprehension and word recognition are moving all children into the realm of skilled readers.
The Missing Link Between Information and Knowledge
Today we face a “now what” question. As children become skilled readers, what do we want them to do with the information they read? How do we use input reading skills and meaningful reading material to generate useful student knowledge? We teach all children to expose their learning through writing.
All children need a complete education. NASA does not send astronauts to the moon without having planned for their return to earth. When we ask a child to read a book, we don’t say “Good. Job well done. You can read. End of story”. We ask them “to do” something with what they read. Our something modalities are speaking, performing, or writing. The first two modalities are predicated on the third – plan what you want to say or how you want to demonstrate it by writing it. The reading trip is not complete without a child writing about what they read.
Input skills Become Output Skills
The Science of Reading teaches us five elements that create language comprehension.
- Background knowledge
- Vocabulary
- Language Structures
- Verbal Reasoning
- Literacy Knowledge
With learned word recognitions skills, these five building blocks help a reader understand the printed letters. They interpret letters into sounds, sounds into words, and words into the writing of Shakespeare. These same five building blocks help students tell us what they think about Romeo and Juliet. They use verbal reasoning to craft summaries, interpretations, comparisons and contrasts with other works, evaluate what they read, and create their own original written “masterpieces”. They use their vocabulary and background knowledge to form what they want to write and language structures and literacy knowledge to tell their story. One does not write well without language comprehension faculties. Reading skills are writing skills.
Some educators are attempting to construct a Science of Writing to mirror the Science of Reading. Unnecessary. The skills sets are known. All we need to do is turn inputs into outputs.
When we provide children with exciting things to learn, we also provide them with exciting things to write about. At all grades and in all subjects, writing is essential for students to tell us and others about what they are learning, the music they are playing, the art they are creating, the experiments that go “bang”, and the difference between “bull” and “bear” markets. Stephen King tells us “The scariest moment is always just before you start”. The teacher’s job is to get the writer started. They will write.
Our To Do
Stephen King, again. “If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot”. We have launched our students as readers. Now we need to land them as writers to make the reading-writing connection complete. If I can be appreciative of anything we received from the pandemic, it is school technologies. Almost all children have a laptop or IPad for their writing instrument. They can write anywhere anytime. They can save, delete, and send. They can share and edit. I watch actors in role of Shakespeare use a quill and rough paper to simulate his writing. Ink-stained fingers and balled up discards abound. Today’s writers have the ease of technology. They know how to get information as readers, and we can teach them how to tell us what they know as writers.
Our Not To Do
Teachers: Don’t should thyself with reading everything a student writes. Writing for learning assessment purposes is only one of many reasons for student writing. Student writers need to read their own writing many times in the writing process. They need to reciprocally read and comment on other student’s writing. Parents need to read their child’s writing. Other teachers need to read student writing. Your principal’s need to read student writing.
Once you stop shoulding thyself to read everything, do right by writing. Write away!