I’m planning to compile some links and thoughts here in preparation for a presentation at a regional conference coming next month.  I’m also hoping to post a link to the video of the presentation – something I’ve attempted in the past that didn’t quite succeed as planned.

I’d like to start with some simple premises:

• Writing – in its multiple forms and genres – is an excellent learning strategy and instructional strategy.
• Writing is diverse enough to be tailored to almost any circumstance.
• Teaching science through writing is a way of synergizing – teaching two or more things (scientific thinking and written expression) at the same time in a way that makes both more effective.

I suppose we can argue with these premises.  However, the last premise is probably the most unusual and has an obvious objection.  Teaching both science and writing could perhaps distract from one or the other.  If a student is struggling with both science and writing, it becomes difficult to resolve clearly.  And I don’t think most science teachers want to be in a position where they are teaching writing instead of science.  This last premise works best when students are already strong in writing, or strong in science, and can use one to help the other.  It also helps when a teacher is comfortable with teaching both.  The other challenge is, of course, the nature of writing assessment.  It’s difficult to offer helpful, actionable feedback on writing that translates to improved student writing in the future.  It’s much easier to focus on more objective measures, especially in a field with so many concepts to assess.

Let’s add, too, some important challenges or pitfalls:

1. Some kids might think – based on a variety of things, some of which we can control, and some we cannot – that adults don’t write, or don’t need to write.  Or only some adults write.  In other words, some kids think WRITING IS A GAME YOU PLAY IN SCHOOL ONLY.  Then you move on.
2. Writing is work.  Often, it is hard work.  For some kids, it is extremely hard and time-consuming.  There might not be an easy way around that, even including modified assignments and lots of scaffolding.  Some kids need quite a bit of help to write well.  Some kids have learned to keep asking for help until they get more than they need.  In other words, writing is a task where a significant number of kids show learned helplessness.  “If I keep refusing to develop my thinking, and if I keep refusing to write more than one paragraph, eventually the teacher will either do it for me or stop asking me to do more.”
3. Writing assessment can be highly subjective and idiosyncratic.  Conventions of writing structure, like the five-paragraph essay, seem to be comparatively well-defined, and as a result, these conventional modes attract the most attention and get the most business.  The subjectivity of writing, however, is its strength, and the corner-cutting of generations of teachers has added up to a somewhat dismissive approach to teaching writing.  “Because it’s subjective, it’s not really rigorous, and not really important.”

I should say that all of these things have troubled me at some point or another.  It’s difficult to teach writing without feeling the echoes of the dreaded five-paragraph elephant in the room.  It’s almost to the point where we teachers sometimes feel that denying kids the experience of five-paragraph pain is doing them a disservice on standardized tests and future classes that orbit around outlines and rigid paragraph structure.  Yet teaching only that, only one (very closed, limiting, and excruciatingly BORING) structure is also a disservice.  In fact, the five-paragraph essay is an elephant that only lives in academia.  Professional academics, when they write for disciplinary journals, write with a specific structure determined by the needs of their audience and the purpose of the text.  They don’t count paragraphs in some obsessive game of universal order or something (I want to throw in a crack about deck chairs on the Titanic, but I’m not sure that this ship has completely sunk yet).

(more later)