Teaching our students how to write effectively is crucial to their future success. It can also be one of the most challenging aspects of our instruction, especially for those of us who are not trained ELA teachers (Hello, Social Studies, Math, and Science!)
When it comes down to it, effective writing looks different in every subject. A beautifully written expository essay might earn an A in English class but be dismissed as ineffective in Social Studies. An argument-based Social Studies paragraph might not be the short answer response a Science teacher is looking for in Chemistry class.
At the end of the day, we are all responsible for teaching students how to write well in our subject areas. But, how do we do it? Read on for a few simple tips you can implement in your classroom.
Jump Ahead:
Teach Writing with Confidence!
First, let go of any reservations about teaching writing in your subject.
If you are a teacher, you already know how to effectively write in your content area!! You successfully completed papers and other written responses during the academic journey that brought you where you are today.
Why Do Many Teachers Avoid Teaching Writing?
I've heard every excuse in the book for not incorporating writing instruction - "I don't know how to teach writing." "Teaching writing is not my job." "I don't have time to teach both content and writing." I've used a few myself during the stressful days of my early teaching career.
Beyond full schedules and dislike of writing instruction, teachers may be less willing to teach writing outside of ELA because they never learned they were supposed to do so. This 2016 study found that most teacher prep programs in the United States don't incorporate classes on writing instruction, instead lumping it in with reading instruction courses or leaving it out entirely.
If a teacher prep program doesn't even bother to teach effective writing instruction, why would teachers realize how important it is to teach writing? Some researchers argue that incorporating more writing instruction into teacher prep programs will help teachers recognize how important it is to our modern students.
Regardless of what teacher prep programs are teaching, today's students are expected to write well in college and on standardized tests in all core subjects throughout high school. We must teach them how to do so!
How Do You Create Writing Instruction That Works?
Start with self-reflection. What made you a successful writer throughout your academic career in your chosen discipline? Teach these concepts and strategies to your students.
Utilize proven writing instruction strategies, such as explicit instruction (discussed later in this article), integrating writing into reading or content instruction, modeling, and allowing peer review.
Writing Instruction in Social Studies
I can't speak for every discipline here, but writing is essential to success in Social Studies. Students need to be able to develop and support written arguments about history. That's what studying history is! So we need to teach it, even if we are not ELA teachers or have reservations about getting started.
Speaking of Social Studies, there is research out there about how to create a writing curriculum that works in our subject. For example, this 2021 study found that a program combining writing instruction with historical reasoning was highly effective in improving the writing skills of 11th graders. Try to include the following in your Social Studies writing instruction:
explicit strategy instruction
modeling
prewriting opportunities
peer interaction
Collaborate with an ELA or Literacy Teacher
You may know how to write well in your content area, but you can still benefit from a conversation or two with your ELA counterpart.
Here are a few reasons to schedule a time to chat with your students' ELA teacher:
They can help you teach specific writing skills you are uncomfortable with
They can align their instruction with your own to reinforce skills with your students
They can give you great tips for streamlining the grading of essays and other written responses that eat up your planning time
ELA teachers can help you integrate writing instruction with reading in your subject, another proven strategy for teaching writing effectively
A quick anecdote about collaborating with your ELA counterpart:
A few years ago, I sat down with one of the tenth-grade ELA teachers with whom I shared many students to discuss curriculum planning for the upcoming year. I wanted to pick her brain for ideas about writing instruction and see how we could support one another's instruction in our respective classrooms.
In our conversation about teaching writing, we discovered the following:
We used different language to refer to the same things with our students. For example, in Social Studies, I was teaching that a thesis statement was an argument made up of "claims." She was referring to thesis statements in their entirety as "claims." No wonder our kids couldn't keep it straight!
If we tweaked our schedules just slightly, we could be teaching the same things at the same time. For example, she could be teaching the novel The Kite Runner right after I taught developments in late 20th century Afghanistan, giving our shared students plenty of context for the novel. What an easy way to reinforce student understanding of the concepts in both classes.
She had an effective strategy for teaching evidence vs. analysis, which was a constant struggle in my Social Studies classroom. She helped me significantly improve how I was teaching evidence vs. analysis. This had been an ongoing struggle for me for years. I was wasting time and energy trying to reinvent the wheel when my colleague was perfectly happy to share an excellent method - all I had to do was ask!
We eventually developed an integrated curriculum because we worked well together and had similar styles, but you can decide for yourself if that's something you want in your future.
Explicitly Teach Writing Skills
Believe me, I know how hard it is to give up a content day when you are held to a standardized test or curriculum - I have 175 (ish) days to teach centuries of WORLD history (impossible!).
However, I've learned that taking a day or two to explicitly teach about writing in your subject area will save you time in the long run. Yes, you'll lose a content day - but you'll make up for it by saving time and frustration in every future class period as your students' written responses improve.
Explicit writing instruction is proven effective when working with students with various learning disabilities. This 2021 study found that explicit writing instruction and goal setting were two teaching techniques that significantly improved the writing skills of students with learning disabilities.
Plan ahead to incorporate writing into your curriculum. Check out our Simple School Year Planner for a quick and easy way to map your year.
Here are a few tips for explicitly teaching writing skills in a non-ELA class:
Display a high-scoring response on the board. Discuss what about the WRITING made it effective (as well as the content)
Provide sample sentence starters and fill-in-the-blank sentences until your students can write them on their own
Teach a writing formula. "If the question asks ________________, start your response with _________________." Keep these consistent and use them until your students are ready to come up with their own sentences
Provide clear writing rubrics and use them for grading. This will help your students understand what they are doing well and what they need to work on.
Re-teach writing skills as Do Nows and Exit Tickets based on what your students are struggling with. Do this at least once weekly to keep writing skills top of mind.
Create "Quick Guides" that break down and explain how to respond to different prompts they will encounter in your subject. (Looking for history guides? Check out these writing Quick Guides in our store.)
Teach writing like you teach your content. Don't expect your students to just figure it out on their own. Once you start incorporating this into your curriculum, you'll be amazed at how natural it feels and the difference it makes in your students' work.
Streamline Your Grading
Teaching writing means a lot more grading. For my fellow NYC teachers, we see about 175 students every day. So every essay assigned means 175 essays to grade. That is bananas and can add up pretty fast.
Try these tips to streamline grading written responses
Grade one part of the written response per assignment. For example, look at thesis statements one day and evidence the next.
Allow peer review before reviewing the entire assignment for a grade.
Ask students to highlight the elements you are looking for in their essays. For example, "highlight your thesis statement in yellow, your evidence in green, and your analysis in blue." This is also a great way to check for student understanding of the different elements of their writing.
Provide office hours or scaffolding options for struggling students to avoid receiving essays that are nearly impossible to decipher.
Keep your students' writing within a time limit. This limits their responses to manageable lengths and allows them to practice for testing situations.
Use rubrics. Create a detailed rubric in advance so you can simply mark where each student fell on the rubric for each element of their written response. This reduces the number of comments you need to write on each essay. Host office hours or other times for students to sign up for more specific feedback. Google Classroom has an excellent rubric function that can help you streamline your grading.
Meet Your Students Where They Are
Your students will likely have different writing abilities. Our job as teachers is to meet them where they are. If they've never written an essay before, that's where you start. If they've never written a thesis statement before, start there instead.
As frustrating as it can be to walk into a class to learn your students don't know something you feel they should have been taught at a younger age, it's better to just teach it to them than to try to skip ahead to where you think they should be.
An Anecdote About Meeting Students Where They Are
I learned this lesson as a first-year teacher in Harlem. I walked through the door to my tenth-grade classroom with the intention of teaching essays and AP-level readings like I remembered from my own high school a million years earlier. Instead, Instead, I found myself reworking my curriculum to incorporate a day focused on "What is a complete sentence and how can I write one?"
My students were bright and hard-working but needed this explicit instruction to set up for success for the year. Just taking the time to show them basic social studies writing skills, without any historical content or distractions, helped them grow in their writing almost instantly.
Wrapping Up
Teaching writing skills can be challenging for those of us who are not ELA or literacy teachers. Remember, you are the expert on writing in your content area! Explicitly teach students writing skills and collaborate with an ELA teacher when you need to. Your students will thank you one day for teaching them these essential skills.
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