It has been well established across current research and the Common Core State Standards that the job of teaching literacy no longer rests solely in the hands of the ILA or English teacher. This is true for reading and vocabulary development, along with writing. Content area teachers must be infusing writing assignments and instruction in their classes, and at the elementary level, writing must exist across the day and content areas. As Dr. Paul Rodgers shares in this video about content area writing, teachers in the content area are going to have to take some responsibility to teach writing. Students must be engaged and motivated to want to write in the content area. To do this they must see writing as a key component in their success as a science, social studies, or math student.
One way to increase this motivation and engagement, is to add in an aspect of competition. Douglas Fischer and Nancy Frey (2013) introduce the idea of power writing in their article titled "A Range of Writing Across the Content Areas." In this approach, the teacher puts a word or phrase on the board and gives students one minute to write about it. After writing they identify any errors in their writing and count their words. This procedure is repeated 2-3 more times in the same class session, potentially about another word or phrase related to the course content. At the end of the period students plot their highest word count in a place where they keep a running graph for the year (p. 97). While the authors do not explicitly say so, the students are competing with themselves to increase their writing fluency each day and have a graph to show for their growth.
This strategy also motivates and engages students because of the impact that power writing has on the comprehension of the content. Many of the students who were exposed to this writing strategy noted that they really didn't have many thoughts or deep understanding about the topic before they began writing (p.97). By allowing the students to focus their learning and respond to a concept from class, they are engaged in making meaning and ensuring understanding. Teachers would often respond to students' writing in the form of a conference or follow-up lesson based on areas of needs that are revealed through their error analysis and their responses. This type of support is individualized and responsive to students needs so this can hopefully motivate them to take ownership of their own work.
Another way to engage students is to gradually release responsibility when it comes to writing tasks. This can be done through shared and interactive writing, that Fischer and Frey explore later in the article. In shared writing the teacher transcribes what the students are saying, while in interactive writing the students and teacher work together to discuss ideas and then the students write the final product (p.97-98). Both of these strategies can work across the content areas. In science, the classes might complete a shared or interactive writing for a claim they could make about a content area, or in social studies, to summarize a new concept or event that they learned about in that particular class period.
In "Teaching Adolescent ELs to Write Academic-Style Persuasive Essays," Kathleen Ramos (2014) talks specifically about working with non-native English speakers and developing their academic written language. She introduces an approach for teaching specific genres of writing called the Reading to Learn approach. “This approach centers on the notion of guided interaction in the context of shared experience in which teachers 'make visible' the language resources that function to create meanings in school valued genres" (p. 656). Teachers explicitly introduce language resources that students should be using as they write, unpack a model text in the genre together, write together, and eventually write independently. In this case the progression focused on writing persuasive essays about amnesty for illegal immigrants, but I feel this genre-based pedagogy could be used to teach any type of academic writing. Student motivation and engagement levels were high because of how involved they were in developing their own understanding and learning in each step of the process.
In a secondary content area classroom, the same procedure could be used to teach how to write a formal lab report. The teacher would begin by helping the students to build background knowledge about the topic of the lab in the "Building Field Stage." Once they had developed vocabulary and a comfort level with the concepts they would move into the "Preparing to Read Stage" where they would become familiar with the structure of a lab report by reading lab reports that would serve as mentor text and discussing what is common among all of them. The teacher would be sure to have reports that likely show the introduction, hypothesis, materials, procedure, results, discussion, and conclusion. The teacher would need to teach them explicitly about the type of language used in a scientific lab report and then closely read the report color coding the language that they find that meets the criteria.
At this point the students would be ready to write. Their first lab report, according to the series of stages laid out by Ramos, should be an interactive writing for the teacher and the class or a small group of students. The class might perform an experiment, for example how does fertilizer affect plant growth, and then work together to write up the results. This is called the "Joint Construction Stage." During this time the teacher is able to give feedback and coach the students towards the desired written product, based on the assessment tool that he or she would need to create. Teachers and students move through a series of steps known as "Focus, Propose, Affirm, Elaborate, and Direct," where the teacher is supporting their students in moving towards independent writing in a particular genre (p. 662). Finally, students are ready to write a lab report independently in the final stage "The Individual Construction Stage."
