I have been teaching for 20 years. I’d like to believe that in that time, I’ve steadily improved my practice. I cringe at the thought of how I used to teach fractions or text analysis in those first few years in the classroom. I remember feeling a lot of pressure to teach like my teammates because that’s what was expected.
“We’ve always done it that way.” - Veteran Teacher
As a fifth-grade teacher, I’m like a veterinarian. I’m expected to know how to treat a variety of animals, from guinea pigs to potbelly pigs. I’m expected to teach all of the core subjects: Reading, Writing, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies (History). Unlike my middle and high school colleagues, I do not have the privilege to specialize in one particular subject. I am not only a writing teacher. I teach students how to read, write, solve mathematical problems, critically analyze American history and scientific concepts, all in the same day.
I do not claim to be an expert in any one academic subject. However, I do believe that I am a better teacher than I was 20 years ago. This was my mindset when I picked up John Warner’s book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (2018). As I read, I realized that I have been teaching “faux-writing” instead of teaching students to actually write. According to Warner, faux-writing has the appearance of writing, but lacks authenticity and the real composition that actual writers do. Ask any teacher. When students are required to write a personal narrative, how many raise their hands and ask to write about what a topic they used last year? At least half of my students always ask because they found a topic that fits with their fourth-grade teacher’s expectations and earned them a passing grade. They want to finish the assignment as quickly as possible and move onto something else (preferably not writing).
This is not writing. This is assignment completion.
Most students have experienced a family event they can write about in school. However, most writing prompts don’t tell me much about my students’ lives. Most writing assignments don’t develop my students as writers. Writing assignments don’t tell me about their inner strengths and weaknesses. These faux-stories or faus-essays don’t tell me about who my students really are as complex and beautiful humans. Writing templates teach students how to fill in a template, not engage them intellectually in an “active learning process that prepares them for a wider range of academic and real-world writing and allows them to become invested and engaged in their own work.”
I missed the mark as an educator, especially when it comes to teaching expository writing. Most expository writing assignments prompt Elementary students to complete a template. The CER (or CERERER, depending on how much evidence you require of students) seems innocuous. Students are expected to make a claim and support it with evidence using the CER format. In middle school, students write CLEAR’s, which in theory, is supposed to help them learn how to write a 5-paragraph essay in high school and college.
This structure has always bugged me, but I could never articulate why. Warner states, “The 5-paragraph essay as employed doesn’t allow students to struggle with the important skills underlying effective writing the same way training wheels don’t allow nascent bike riders to practice balance” (Warner, 2018, p. 29).
This dysfunctional template never aligned with my values as an educator, but I was so caught up in the idea that I needed to prepare my students for writing 5-paragraph essays, that I never questioned the practice. Instead of encouraging curiosity, creativity, flexibility or metacognition, I felt bound by these required templates. Writing (even academic writing) is more than filling in boxes!
Warner’s habits of mind are ones that I want to use when designing and structuring my classroom learning (and writing) experiences for students. Learning requires openness, responsibility, engagement and persistence, not standardized assignments and prescriptive teaching.
Instead of providing my students with a writing prompt such as What is the main theme of the book Blood on the River? Providing textual evidence and reasoning to support your claim, Warner provides his students with a problem, audience, purpose, process, and reflection for each writing experience. These are how he believes that teachers can get students to experience the writing process, not through meaningless writing assignments.
I am committed to continuously improving my pedagogical practice while working to enhance my students’ school experience. I immediately picked up Warner’s second book, The Writer’s Practice (2019). Even though his writing experiences were originally designed for his college classroom, I wanted to introduce these to my fifth-grade students. Specifically, I set out to teach my students to be aware of their audience as a writer, practice the writing process, think and act like a writer, reflect on each writing experience, and then apply those reflections to their next writing experience.
I am currently creating slide decks for each of Warner’s writing experiences, following Warner’s "Really Alternative First-Year Writing" map. My goals for piloting these writing experiences in my classroom are similar to Warner’s ambitious objectives:
Increase educational challenges while simultaneously decreasing student stress and anxiety related to writing
Change the orientation of my classroom from preparing my students for middle school to living and learning in the present.
Provide writing experiences designed around learning and growth, rather than giving assignments and testing for competencies.
I’m excited to see how my pedagogical practice changes as I follow Warner’s blueprint. So far, I’ve taught seven of Warner’s writing experiences to my fifth-graders, and I see a lot of growth. I believe that these shorter experiences are pushing my students to write more instead of hammering away at a “faux-writing” piece for weeks on end. I see my students use more sensory language because they know it is more effective in engaging certain audiences with specific writing exercises.
I am confident that if I listen to my students’ needs and focus on the experience of writing as an actual writer (instead of the writing assignment), my students’ writing confidence and quality will dramatically increase this year.
I will keep you all posted on how things progress.
Have a great week!
—Adrian
Resources
A Master Course from John Warner Teaching Writing In An Artificial Intelligence World
Habits of Mind: John Warner on Teaching Writing
I’ve been using these habits of mind to structure all of my learning experiences for students (not just in writing).
I love listening to Amy Tan talk about her creative process. There is a lot here that can be applied to teaching students to write; not just complete writing assignments.
Need some motivation in changing the way things are done in your school building? Listen to this talk!
Thank you for sharing this, Adrian. Love John's stuff, and love the approach that you're taking with it. I'm a community college English professor, and as it happens I volunteered to lead an after-school creative writing club at my daughter's elementary school last year. I kind of expected that I would have to come up with fun activities to get students into writing, but as it turned out, no, they pretty much just wanted to show up and write their stories. (And read, and hang out, but you know, that was fine.)
This was a small and self-selected group, but it more or less matched what I've seen with my college students: people actually want to write if you give them the opportunity to write about something that's meaningful to them.
(And it's definitely fine with me if you don't teach your students five-paragraph essays - just means that people like me don't have to un-teach it.)
I remember learning the five paragraph essay (and before that, the one paragraph where every sentence is supposed to play a specific part). I think those structures held me back for a long time, not understanding how "actual" writing was supposed to work. I chatted with my friends and wrote blog posts online and that was more like the writing I do today, but I didn't realize it was writing. Thanks for teaching your students a better approach.