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Writing teachers enter into an unspoken contract with students to help them become better writers by the end of a course.
-Ken Macrorie
Since I remember so little about writing in elementary school, let me start with a strong memory from eleventh grade. I recall sitting side by side with my good friend Brad waiting for the teacher to return our writing. Inevitably Brad's work would come back with the teacher's affirmation-a neatly scripted red penciled A. My work chugged along behind with a B, perhaps an occasional B+. Brad had the edge on me: I knew this. What I didn't know was why. What was it that distinguished his paper from mine? What qualitative difference was there between this teacher's A and her B? The sparse marginal comments and staccato red dashes provided little information. I was never able to unravel that mystery well enough to pull off the A paper. But I survived eleventh grade English, passing with a respectable grade, and have since gone on to be a lifelong student of writing and teaching, particularly the teaching of writing.
Many of us teaching today have similar experiences of writing in school. Nothing about these experiences is characterized by the conversation, community, and attention to process that are so prevalent in classrooms today. The approach my teachers used to teach writing centered on product to the exclusion of process and delegated the teacher as "expert reader," to the detriment of the student.
Today, elementary classrooms across the country bear the influence of writing process research that has shifted attention from product to process. In 1978 Graves provided research warning that the teaching of writing received little to no attention in most elementary schools. A few years later, his book Writing: Teachers and Children at Work was published, and thousands of teachers nationwide finally had a handbook to guide them in how to teach writing.
Graves's early work and the onslaught of research that followed initiated a paradigm shift in instruction. Teachers no longer assigned and corrected writing. Instead they set aside regular time for students to write and be coached through the process.
It has been 20 years since that shift. The terms Murray (1968) first coined-rehearse, draft, revise, edit-have become commonplace...