Dear Stellar Teacher: Our Writing Confessions (and What We’d Do Differently!)

Sara

Hey there, teachers. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, you’re in for a treat because I’m joined by my teammate Emily, who is here for another segment of Dear Stellar Teacher. Now, this is our monthly segment where we have a more casual conversation around teaching, and I really love it when Emily joins me on the show. I hope you do too, because these episodes that we record for y’all are very similar to some of the conversations that we have during our team meetings. I think sometimes it can just be fun to listen in and hear what others think about various education topics. So hopefully, you’ve been enjoying some of the insights you get from these episodes.

Emily Of course, always good when you get to join me.

Emily

Thanks, Sara! That’s funny that you mentioned that about our team meetings, because today we read our last chapter in The Writing Revolution 2.0, and the conversation we were having while we were talking about that chapter—I was like, this is such a good conversation. I wish that we could record this and put it out into the world. So I’m excited to talk about writing today.

Sara

Absolutely. I was gonna say, maybe we need to start recording some of our team discussions, because so often we’ll have a conversation and we’re like, “Oh man, it’d be so great if we could share this with teachers,” which is kind of what our Dear Stellar Teacher episodes are like.

Emily

Yeah.

Sara

So before we talk about our topic today, which is going to be related to writing, let’s check in with what we’re reading. What have you been reading this last month that you’ve been enjoying—or not enjoying?

Emily

It’s funny that you say that because I just looked at my Goodreads, and every single book I’ve read this year I’ve given four stars. So I don’t know what that says about me, but I’ve just been, I guess, having a pretty solid foundation—good start to my reading year.

So last time we recorded, I talked about reading The Last Letter by Rebecca Yarros, and I was super nervous about it because I’m pregnant and hormonal. So hack—I looked up the synopsis before I read it, because it was a book club book and I really wanted to read it. But I just read the synopsis, and I felt really good about that. Then I was able to read the book without the anxiety of not knowing what was going to happen, because it is about children, so I just really wanted to be prepared. And since I did that, I was able to enjoy the book so much more.

Sara

I love that. I have, on many occasions, read the last chapter of a book before I read the entire book because I feel like I have to know how it’s going to end. Because if you have some sort of angst or anxiety about the topic, or if a character is going to die, or whatever—it’s like, if you know that going in, then you can just enjoy it.

Emily

Well, when you first told me that, I thought you were crazy. Now I kind of get it. I get it.

Sara

I still have not read that one yet, and I feel like I need to add it to my list, because you’re not the only person who has recommended it.

Emily

Well, it was four stars—like everything else! What about you? What have you been reading?

Sara

I had to go back and look. I have read a lot of books this year, but I have yet to read a book where I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I love that book.” Like last year, I know we talked about how much we both really loved The Women by Kristin Hannah. I haven’t had that type of experience reading yet, but I have read a lot of books that I’ve enjoyed.

I most recently finished The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt—I think that’s how you say his last name, H-A-I-D-T. And I feel like I don’t have kids, but if I had kids, I would want to read it. So if you are a parent, I would recommend reading it. But I also think every teacher should read it. And honestly, I think just every adult should read it, because cell phone use and internet access are things we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. It really just highlights some of the more hazardous sides of having instant access to social media and the internet and all of those things.

I really enjoyed reading it. It was a nonfiction book, though, so it was really hard for me to get through at a quick pace. While I was reading that, I also read a couple of fiction books. One that came to me through a Goodreads challenge— I don’t know if you do those—was The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. It was like a romance-slash-fantasy book with the whole witch thing. It was cute. I think I gave it four stars as well. It’s not a book that I ever would have picked up for myself, but it was really cute. I enjoyed it.

Emily

Wow. I’m so proud of you for kind of going out of your comfort zone a little bit. I can’t say I would do that.

Sara

You know, I’m competitive, and I love a good challenge. So when Goodreads is like, “Here’s your different challenges,” I’m like, “Okay, well, I’ll have to read a book from this list now, because Goodreads suggested it.” So anyway…

Emily

Wow, wow.

Sara

Okay, so today, we aren’t necessarily answering a listener question, but we are going to be talking about some writing confessions. Emily and I are going to share with you all of the things that we did incredibly wrong when it came to our writing instruction in the classroom.

And the reason why we’re doing this is because this summer, our team is hosting our annual book study, which is all about The Writing Revolution 2.0. We are so excited about it. And of course, let me take this opportunity to invite you—our listeners—to sign up for our book study.

Last year, we had a blast reading through Shifting the Balance with our audience. It was probably one of my favorite things that we’ve done all year. I’ve been looking forward to our book study again this summer. So if you would like to join us and read through The Writing Revolution with the Stellar Teacher team and a bunch of other really incredible teachers, you can save your seat at stellarteacher.com/bookstudy.

The book study is going to begin and basically run through the entire month of June, but you can sign up and save your seat now.

So like I said, today we’re going to share our writing confessions—all the things that we did and messed up on when it came to teaching writing. And I told Emily that I have eight listed out—eight mistakes for sure. I mean, there’s way more than that, but there were eight that I was like, I could talk about all of these. I don’t know if we’ll get to all of them, but Emily, I’m going to let you lead us off here. What would you say was your number one mistake that you made?

Emily

Okay, so first of all, this podcast concept reminds me of that social media trend that’s been going on—you listen, and you don’t judge. Have you seen any of that?

Sara

I have not.

Emily

Well, okay, Sara—and our listeners—do not judge me for the things that I am about to say, because there were so many mistakes that I made while teaching writing. And you know, there are a bunch of reasons why I feel like I made these mistakes, and I’ll just kind of categorize those as excuses, and we’ll move on.

But writing was just not really a priority. I think a big contributor to that was the way that we did our writing assessments. It was just three writing assessments every year—argumentative, informational, and narrative. And I’m sure many teachers can relate to that.

The way we did it was we just, three times a year, set some time, gave these writing assessments, and then we would literally score them on a rubric, put them into a Google Sheet, and bada bing, bada boom—that was it. So maybe there wasn’t really that accountability piece, you know? It was just… it was a mess.

So that brings me to my mistakes, and now there are a thousand, but we don’t have the time for all of them.

Sara

I don’t think you’re alone in that. Like, “Don’t judge me, I didn’t really teach writing.” You’re not alone in that. I think there’s a lot of teachers listening who are like, “I’m not really teaching writing either.” And so yeah, I don’t think there can be a lot of judgment, because I think a lot of us can relate to that.

Sure, we’re doing writing, we’re assigning writing, we’re assessing writing, but we’re not really teaching writing.

Emily

So when I was really thinking about the mistakes I wanted to share today, I thought about really high-level mistakes that could make a big impact for our listeners. Okay, so the number one mistake I made was I did not make time to explicitly teach writing.

Please know, by the way, I have come so far since then, and that’s why I just feel so excited to share all my new knowledge with our listeners, because, I mean, I’m so lucky that I get to have this new information. So I really hope that what we share can help our teachers.

The way I taught writing was mostly through writing comprehension questions. We would read a text together, and then I would assign my students a prompt to answer. And when I checked their writing, I wasn’t necessarily looking at, you know, sentence structure or their writing techniques—things like that. I was just looking at, oh, did they answer the question correctly?

So what I’ve learned since then is that writing instruction can be systematic and explicit, just like reading instruction.

Sara

But I feel like you were doing some things well there, right? It’s like you were trying to bring writing into your content. So celebrate that. That wasn’t an entire mistake. But yeah, I can say I didn’t explicitly teach writing either. I’m right there with you.

Emily

So the other thing that I learned too is that you don’t necessarily need a writing block to teach writing. In fact, writing instruction can be so much more beneficial when it’s embedded in the content.

So I kind of, you know, file it under excuse, but I did not necessarily have that traditional writing block. So we didn’t teach it as explicitly and systematically as I talked about. But now, I know that you don’t need a writing block, and writing instruction can be embedded in content.

So a good example would be if I taught a whole unit on the regions of the United States, then I could take 15 minutes of my reading block each day and explicitly model steps of the writing process and then walk my students through a prompt related to that content.

Sara

Yeah, I think that is one of my takeaways from The Writing Revolution 2.0—this idea that you can embed writing into your content areas and you can still explicitly teach writing even if you don’t have a separate block.

I feel like those two ideas sometimes are hard for teachers to grasp.

I did have a dedicated writing block, and let me tell you, I did not use it. I did not use it wisely. When I look back and think on just the way that I taught writing, again, similar—it’s like I have learned so much since being out of the classroom, and I love that we get to hopefully help teachers learn from our mistakes.

I think my biggest mistake that I made—it was hard to rank these as far as which one is the biggest mistake—but I think the biggest mistake that I probably made as a fourth-grade teacher in the state of Texas was putting too much of an emphasis on essays, and not any emphasis at all on sentence-level writing.

You know, at the end of the year, back when I taught fourth grade, that was still when students were asked to write a five-paragraph narrative essay and a five-paragraph expository essay. And so since that was our end-of-year expectation, we spent all of our dedicated writing block going between narrative essays, expository essays, narrative essays, expository essays.

Here’s your prompt. We’re going to practice writing an essay. So our entire writing block was really focused on teaching students how to write essays.

And my next mistake has to do with how I taught students how to write essays. It wasn’t helpful. We did not build that writing foundation. There was no explicit instruction on building how to write a sentence.

And when I look back on it, I had students that were great writers and they had no problem writing a five-paragraph essay, but it’s not because of anything I did. It’s because they came to me with a good ability to write.

And then I had students who struggled with writing, and they struggled with writing the entire year because they were still trying to master how to write a complete sentence, how to expand a sentence, how to recognize a complete sentence compared to a fragment or a run-on.

And meanwhile, I’m trying to get them to write an entire essay. And especially since reading The Writing Revolution 2.0, realizing that if students can’t write a complete sentence, they’re never going to be able to write an essay.

I completely overlooked that and missed that. And if I could go back, I would have spent so much more time doing sentence-level activities compared to the essay focus that we had.

Emily

Yeah, I think what you’re describing with your class coming to you with different abilities is the experience for so many of our teachers, and that’s part of what makes writing so intimidating. It’s like, I have all of these levels—where do I start? But we kind of have some overlap, because my second mistake is, just as you said, throwing my students into paragraph writing and essay writing without any support.

And you kind of stepped on my toes, Sara, by mentioning sentences, but I’m not surprised that we have some overlap with that, because sentence-level writing is so overlooked and so important.

Sara

Yeah, I think especially in upper elementary, right? It’s like we have this assumption that a student is going to come to us already with the ability to write a complete sentence, so we don’t need to teach it.

Emily

Yeah, exactly.

So getting back to the idea of writing instruction feeling so overwhelming, I think when I read about sentences in The Writing Revolution too, it just made writing instruction feel so much more accessible for me.

And kind of getting back to the way that I handled the writing assessments, I would just be like, Okay, guys, here’s your prompt. We’re going to read a text. I guess we were asked to build a little bit of content knowledge, so we read a text and we watched a video, and then we would just expect our students to write these essays.

And I never taught them how to even write a sentence. I never taught them how to outline. I never taught them how to, you know, edit or revise. And the disservice—it just makes me cringe. And I know you can relate, but all we can do is just move on.

Sara

Well, and they bring that up in The Writing Revolution, right? They talk about how so many teachers have this—I don’t want to say habit—but it’s almost just like, this is how writing has been taught and teachers have not been taught.

I remember in my education classes, I was never instructed how to explicitly teach writing. I didn’t really even know what explicit instruction was until I started learning about the science of reading myself. And so we assign writing, right? And we sort of miscategorize the fact that we are assigning writing as instruction.

Our students are responding to prompts. They’re engaged in writing. They’re doing writing. But that’s not teaching writing. And I feel like I missed that until I really read through this book, and I was like, Oh, I assigned a lot of writing. I didn’t teach a lot of writing.

Emily

Yeah, same. Guilty, guilty as charged.

Sara

Along the same lines—or when I was writing this together, I was like, oh my gosh, this was causing—I had a lot of cringy moments when I was sort of taking my notes for this.

So my second mistake was that I was trying to use band-aid strategies to help my students grow as writers. And what I mean by that is I felt like I was actually teaching them. But when I look back on it, I wasn’t.

For example, our students had to be able to write an expository paragraph by the end of the year. And there was this formula that we taught our students—the entire fourth-grade team used it. Back then, I thought it was great.

Emily

Is it an acronym?

Sara

It is. It’s an acronym.

So we taught our students that for expository writing, every paragraph had to use the acronym DANCE—D, A, N, C, E—and every sentence had to follow this acronym. Now, it didn’t need to be in this order, but every paragraph had to have a descriptive detail. Every paragraph had to have an amazing fact or statistic. Every paragraph had to have a narrative vignette. Every paragraph had to have a comparison. And every paragraph had to have an example.

So every paragraph in your three-body-paragraph essay had five sentences, and they all had these different sentence types. And I taught my students that strategy thinking that I was helping them create these amazing essays, right? Because they’re having variety in sentence structure and including all of these things.

But looking back on it again, the students who knew how to write were doing things like that whether I prompted them with this acronym or not. And the students who were still struggling with writing a sentence—it did not matter if I told them, okay, one of your sentences needs to be a D, one of them needs to be an A, an N. They couldn’t write a sentence anyway, and so they were still struggling.

And so it was not an effective strategy. I was not actually teaching them what a fragment was, what a run-on was, what a simple sentence is, or what a complex sentence is. So it really was a band-aid, right?

It was like, we know what the test is going to be, so let’s come up with a strategy that will try to help our students do well on this test. When, in reality, you’re never going to use that DANCE strategy in real life.

I don’t write emails with it. I don’t write anything that I do professionally using that strategy. Yet that is something we taught our students was effective writing. And when I look back on that, I’m like, oh, I just cringe, because we used that for years thinking it was great, and really it was just a band-aid for explicit instruction.

Emily

I mean, okay, I don’t completely hate it. But you said it—you were teaching something that was helping your students pass the test. And we talked about that on our last episode. We really tend to tailor writing instruction toward getting our students to pass the state tests. So I don’t completely hate it, but yeah, there are better ways.

Sara

I feel like that strategy could be okay. It could be okay if students had that foundation, right? But again, going back to the fact that I did not teach my students how to write a complete sentence—it doesn’t matter if I’m telling them what types of sentences to write, they still struggled to create a simple sentence, or, you know, a simple sentence that had some details in it.

So it’s like, how can they even write a sentence that is comparing this idea to another idea? Or a sentence that has, you know, a fact or statistic in it? It just became very… yeah, it became interesting because we used that strategy with the hope of it adding variety, but all the essays just sounded the same, you know, because they would use the same sentence starters for their fact or statistic or their example.

And so there was no uniqueness to their writing. It was just them trying to learn how to use this formula.

Emily

The big, big, big takeaway that I’ve gotten from The Writing Revolution is that sentences are the foundation. And I like how you’re talking about how we were trying to give them tools to add in variation, and there are better ways to do that—activities like sentence types. Getting your students to write different sentence types is a great way for us to teach them about variety in sentences.

Sara

I didn’t do that at all.

Emily

No, neither did I. Please know that anything smart I say about writing today, I did not do when I was a third-grade teacher.

Sara

Everything smart we say today we learned from The Writing Revolution.

Emily

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Okay, so keep it going. What’s your next mistake you want to share?

Sara

Those are my first two biggest mistakes. I don’t know if I’ll go as in-depth in all of these. But my next sort of mistake, when I think about it, is focusing on the end result of writing versus the process, right?

When we were teaching writing, it was so focused on publishing the essay, as opposed to our students actually developing the writing skills. And when I think about that, there are parts of the writing process that I have now learned—it’s not mentioned as much in The Writing Revolution, but for sure in The Writing Rope—they talk about how the two most important phases of the writing process are outlining and planning, and how you should spend 40% of your time outlining, 40% of your time revising, and 20% of your time drafting.

And when I think about how we structured our writing block, it was like 70% of our time was spent drafting, right? We’d spend 5% of our time brainstorming, quickly jump into drafting thinking that’s where the bulk of the work is happening, and a very small amount of time revising, editing, and then more time publishing—because they needed to write their essays by hand.

So when I look back on how we went through the writing process, we were so focused on just getting to the end result, not paying attention to the process. And I completely overlooked and missed how I should have been putting more emphasis on helping students develop the ability to outline and to revise.

I know in both of these books that I’ve mentioned, they talk about how you can have students create an outline without ever finishing the entire writing process. And it’s almost like anything we wrote, we felt we had to publish. And I wish that I would have had a different understanding or perspective, because we missed out, I think, on opportunities to develop the actual skill of writing. We were so product-focused.

Emily

So let me ask, did you have a clip chart hanging on your wall with the writing process and you would move your students’ clips?

Sara

Absolutely, I had that.

Emily

Me too.

I agree—The Writing Revolution gave me that knowledge-slash-permission that not everything needs to be published. And I think we almost used publishing as motivation for our students, like, “You guys, we’re gonna have a party! We’re gonna get to have an author share!” Things like that.

But it’s like, we’re missing the point—the point is not necessarily the final product. The point is the process that we’re going to take our students through. And yeah, The Writing Revolution—how many times have we said it? Take a tally every time we say The Writing Revolution!—but that book really talks about how important outlining is for the process, and how outlining alone can be enough.

Sara

Yeah, they mention this at the very end of the book—we just finished our discussion—but they talk about how writing is recursive, right? This idea that you don’t always have to go steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It’s a lot more fluid than we think it is.

You can start a process, stop, and come back to it or even refine it completely. But yeah, we should be much more focused on the process.

Okay, I still have a few more confessions—but do you have other things that you want to confess?

Emily

Well, I think what I’m noticing is, as you’re sharing your confessions, I’m like, “Oh yeah, me too. Me too.” So you keep going.

Sara

Okay, so other things that I regret or wish I could do over include trying to teach revising and editing at the same time as a singular skill, right? This idea of, “We’re going to revise and edit,” and I’ve realized that those are two very different skills. Especially at the start of the year when we’re teaching them, we want to break them apart.

But I think also, I put so much more emphasis on editing than I did on revising because, in my head, I was like, “Okay, when they edit, that’s when they’re polishing, right? They’re fixing their spelling errors, they’re fixing the punctuation, they’re making it publishable.” So we put so much emphasis on editing and very little emphasis on revising.

What I have learned since—from our favorite book—is that revision is really where students learn how to become good writers, and we need to put so much more time into explicitly teaching revising skills. Again, going back to using ineffective acronyms to try to teach writing, we used the ARMS strategy to teach revising. It was this checklist that students went through, but they were going through the checklist of trying to add details, remove details, substitute details, you know, whatever that acronym stood for—but they still didn’t have an understanding of what actual revision is.

They didn’t know how to improve word choice, they didn’t know how to use transition words, they didn’t know how to expand their sentences and add details. And I didn’t explicitly teach those things because we were so focused on the editing side of “revise and edit.” I wish I could go back and have separated those two and put a lot more emphasis on teaching students how to revise.

Emily

Yes, me too. I definitely emphasized editing more than revising, and I think the reason why is because editing feels more comfortable than revising. Getting your students to edit is kind of like a safe place. It’s a lot more difficult to get your students to revise their sentences than it is to fix a spelling mistake, add a period, etc. So yeah, revising and editing—we definitely want to keep those separate.

Sara

I’m glad you mentioned the comfort space, because I think you’re right. You know, I have never felt confident as a writer. I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer. I feel like I’ve come a long way, but especially when I was in the classroom, I didn’t feel like I was a great writer, and so I felt uncomfortable trying to help my students become good writers because I didn’t identify as one.

And so it’s like, “Okay, well, editing is easy.” There’s a yes or no to that, right? I can tell you if the word is spelled correctly or not, whereas improving details or adding details—that’s a little bit more vague or subjective. So I for sure avoided the writing tasks that I felt uncomfortable with. And it’s like realizing that if I wanted to be a good writing teacher, if I was going back, I would have had to be willing to step out of my comfort zone and engage in the teaching tasks that maybe I didn’t feel personally confident with—and that’s still okay.

Emily

Yeah, and I know I keep bringing it back to sentences, but I mean, everything—just everything—is turning up sentences. But that’s why I love focusing on sentences so much as the foundation, because then you have those kinds of tools in your toolbelt, where you can prompt students: “This is a fragment,” or “How can we expand this sentence?” or “How can we change the order of the sentence to add variety?”

When you are doing that sentence-level work, you kind of have that foundation that you can come back to again and again, even as you’re moving through paragraphs and essays.

Sara

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, I know we’re coming up towards the end here, so I’m just going to quickly go through my last two confessions.

Next confession is teaching grammar in isolation. I did that. That’s like—that’s all I did for grammar. We had our writing lesson, and then we had our grammar lesson, right? So it was like a grammar worksheet. It was not connected to anything, and students would do a great job on the grammar assessments that I gave them. They had no problem with the grammar worksheets—they crushed it. But they could not bring it back to their actual writing.

So of course, as we know from The Writing Revolution, teaching grammar in the context of writing is the way to go—but I didn’t do it.

Emily

Guilty. I’m also guilty of grammar worksheets.

Sara

Yeah, I think there’s definitely a place for them. I think they can be used in the classroom. I just don’t think we want to rely on them as our main source of grammar instruction.

And then my last big confession is not incorporating writing into the content areas. And I know that you talked about that as well. But not even just writing about the content areas—it’s realizing that anytime a student has their pencil to the paper, you could teach them how to revise, you could teach them how to plan. They could outline their response for a math question. They could revise their response for a science or social studies prompt.

We forget that when students write in all the content areas, they can be planning, drafting, revising, publishing in all of those areas as well. And we can use all of those opportunities to teach. I just think about how many missed opportunities I had with my students.

Emily

Yeah, and not only that, but writing can be used as such an important tool for assessment. When it comes to content areas, when students don’t know the content that they’re writing about, they will struggle to write. So we can use prompts like that—even just simple sentences—to uncover those instructional gaps. It’s a super important tool in all content areas.

Sara

Yeah, for sure. I agree. So anyways, those are my confessions.

Emily

Do you feel like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders?

Sara

I’m not gonna lie. Kind of. It’s like, okay, really what I wish I could do is go back and apologize to all of my students and say, “If I knew better, I would have done better.”

But all that to say, if you are a teacher who is listening and you are relating to some of these confessions, and you are thinking, “Oh man, that’s how I am currently teaching writing,” you’re not alone. And also, it’s not your fault.

We sort of took the direction that our schools gave us, or our literacy coaches, or the curriculum. But there are better, more effective ways to teach writing.

So if you would like support in learning how to be a more effective writing teacher—and if you would like to learn from our mistakes so you don’t have to carry the weight of your writing confessions on your shoulders—join us for our summer book study. It really is one of the most fun things that we do all year. We would love to have you be part of our group. You can learn more and sign up at stellarteacher.com/bookstudy.

And if you have any other areas of teaching that you would like to hear Emily and me share our confessions on, let us know. Send us a DM on Instagram if there’s another topic you want to hear about, and maybe we’ll do another confessions episode.

Emily

I’m sure we can dig something up.

Sara

Right. So we hope to see you back here next month for another episode of Dear Stellar Teacher—and be sure to go sign up for our book study!

Emily

Have a great month!