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Teaching creative writing in primary schools: a systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity

Open access
Published: 17 June 2023

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Georgina Barton ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2703-238X 1 ,
Maryam Khosronejad 2 ,
Mary Ryan 2 ,
Lisa Kervin 3 &
Debra Myhill 4

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Teaching writing is complex and research related to approaches that support students’ understanding and outcomes in written assessment is prolific. Written aspects including text structure, purpose, and language conventions appear to be explicit elements teachers know how to teach. However, more qualitative and nuanced elements of writing such as authorial voice and creativity have received less attention. We conducted a systematic literature review on creativity and creative aspects of writing in primary classrooms by exploring research between 2011 and 2020. The review yielded 172 articles with 25 satisfying established criteria. Using Archer’s critical realist theory of reflexivity we report on personal, structural, and cultural emergent properties that surround the practice of creative writing. Implications and recommendations for improved practice are shared for school leaders, teachers, preservice teachers, students, and policy makers.

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Introduction

Creative writing in schools is an important part of learning, assessment, and reporting, however, there is evidence globally to suggest that such writing is often stifled in preference to quick on-demand writing, usually featured in high-stakes testing (Au & Gourd, 2013 ; Gibson & Ewing, 2020 ). Research points to this negatively impacting particularly on students from diverse backgrounds (Mahmood et al., 2020 ). When teachers teach on-demand writing typical pedagogical traits are revealed, those that are often referred to as formulaic (Ryan & Barton, 2014 ). When thinking about creative writing, however, Wyse et al. ( 2013 ) noted that it involves the absence of structure and teaching creative writing requires an ‘open’ pedagogical approach for students to be given imaginative choice. By this, they mean that teachers need to consider less formulaic ways to teach writing so that students can experience different opportunities and ways to write creatively. They argued that if students are not given the flexibility to experiment through writing then their creativity might be stifled. Similarly, Barbot et al. ( 2012 ), who carried out a study with a panel of 15 experts of creative writing, posited that creative writing is when students draw on their imagination and other creative processes to create fictional narratives or writing that is ‘unusually original’. They also noted that creative writing is important for the development of students’ critical and creative thinking skills and ways in which they can approach life in creative ways.

Creative writing is defined in various ways in literature. Wang ( 2019 ) defined creative writing as a form of original expression involving an author’s imagination to engage a reader. Other definitions of creative writing involve the notion of children’s imagination, choice, and originality and much research has explored the concept of creativity within and through the writing process.

While creative writing is defined in various ways, and the many ways that it is treated in literacy education, this article is not concerned with the nature of the term per se. Rather, it focusses on research about creative writing and creativity in writing to understand how research unpacks the personal and contextual characteristics that surround creative writing practices. To this aim, we adopt a broad definition of creative writing as a form of original writing involving an author’s imagination and self-expression to engage a reader (Wang, 2019 ). Creative writing is important for children’s development (Grainger et al., 2005 ), allowing them to use their imagination and broaden their ability to problem-solve and think deeply. Creativity in writing refers to specific aspects within a writing product that can be deemed creative. Some examples include the use of senses and how a writer might engage a reader (Deutsch, 2014 ; Smith, 2020 ).

International research on teaching writing has indicated a loss in innovative or creative pedagogical practices due to the pressure on teachers to teach prescribed writing skills that are assessed in high-stakes tests (Göçen, 2019 ; Stock & Molloy, 2020 ), often resulting in specific trends including teaching a genre approach to writing (Polesel et al., 2012 ; Ryan & Barton, 2014 ). A comprehensive meta-analysis by Graham et al ( 2012 ), designed to identify writing practices with evidence of effectiveness in primary classrooms, found that explicitly teaching imagery and creativity was an effective teaching practice in writing. In addition, a review of methods related to teaching writing conducted by Slavin et al. ( 2019 ) included studies that statistically reported causal relationships between teacher practice and student outcomes. Common themes in Slavin et al’s ( 2019 ) quest for improving writing included comprehensive teacher professional development, student engagement and enjoyment, and explicit teaching of grammar, punctuation, and usage. While they did not specifically cite creativity, motivating environments and cooperative learning were important characteristics of writing programs.

This systematic literature review aims to share empirical international research in the context of elementary/primary schools by exploring creativity in writing and the conditions that influence its emergence. It specifically aims to answer the question: What influences the teaching of creative writing in primary education? And how can reflexivity theorise these influences? The review shares scholarly work that attempts to define personal aspects of creative writing including imagination, and creative thinking; discusses creative approaches to teaching writing, and shows how these methods might support students’ creative writing or creative aspects of writing.

Writing is a complex process that involves students making decisions about word choice, sentence, and text structure, and ways in which to engage readers. Such decisions require a certain amount of reflection or at times deeper reflexive judgments by both teachers and students. Consequently, we draw on Archer’s ( 2012 ) critical realist theory of reflexivity to guide our review as research shows that reflexive thinking in practice can improve writing outcomes (Ryan et al., 2021 ). Archer ( 2007 ) highlights how reflexivity is an everyday activity involving mental processes whereby we think about ourselves in relation to our immediate personal, social, and cultural contexts. She suggests we make decisions through negotiating the connected emergences of personal properties (PEPs) related to the individual, structural properties (SEPs) related to the contextual happenings and cultural properties (CEPs) related to ideologies, each of which is influenced by the other developments. These decisions influence, and are influenced by, our subsequent actions. In applying reflexivity theory to writing (see Ryan, 2014 ), we cannot simply focus on the writing product, but should also interrogate the process of writing, that is, the influences on decision-making and design which are enabled or constrained through pedagogical practices in the classroom. Writing practices and outputs are formed through the interplay of personal, structural, and cultural conditions. Student decisions and actions about writing ensue through the mediation of personal (e.g. beliefs, motivations, interests, experiences), structural (e.g. curriculum, programs, testing regimes, teaching strategies, resources), and cultural (e.g. norms, expectations, ideologies, values) conditions. Therefore, teachers play an important role in facilitating the interplay of these conditions for their students and recontextualising curricula and policy (Ryan et al., 2021 ). For example, by enabling students’ agency and creating an authentic purpose for writing, teachers can balance the personal conditions of students (such as their motivation and interest) against the structural effects of the curriculum requirements. Using a reflexive approach to investigating the literature on creative writing we aim to reveal the personal, structural, and cultural conditions surrounding the study and the practice of creative writing. We argue that it is through the understanding of these conditions that we can theorise how a. students might make their writing more creative and b. how teachers might establish classroom conditions conducive to creativity.

The approach taken for this paper was guided by the PRISMA method (Moher et al., 2009 ) for conducting systematic literature reviews (see Table 1 ).

Our electronic search involved several databases: researchers’ library online catalogue, EBSCO host ultimate, ProQuest, Eric, Web of Science, Informit, and ScienceDirect. Using the following search terms: creativ* AND (‘teaching methods’ OR pedagog*) AND writing AND (elementary OR primary) to search titles and abstracts as well as limiting the search to peer-reviewed articles written in English within a 10-year timeframe (2011–2020), we initially retrieved 172 articles. Information about all 172 articles was input into a data spreadsheet including author, article title, journal title, volume and issue number, and abstract. Once completed, these articles were divided into two equal groups and two researchers were assigned to review the articles for relevancy against the following inclusion criteria:

Studies were peer-reviewed empirical research published in English;

Participants were primary students and/or teachers;

Students were not specifically English as a Second or Additional Language/Dialect learners (samples of culturally and linguistically diverse students in primary classrooms were included);

Studies were not carried out in curriculum areas other than English; and

Studies did not have a specific focus on digital technologies in the classroom.

For this systematic review, we were interested in the ways in which teachers thought about, understood, and taught the ‘creative’ aspect of writing.

The 25 studies that met the inclusion criteria were synthesised to review what influences the improvement of creative writing in primary education. We analysed the papers for how creative writing and/or creative aspects in writing were viewed as well as how teachers might best support students to develop reflexive capacities to improve the creative aspects of writing. We also identified any personal, structural, and/or cultural emergences that might impact on the effectiveness of students’ creative writing. Two of the authors read the entire articles and identified four main categories of research which were (1) understanding creative writing; (2) creative thinking and its contribution to writing; (3) creative pedagogy; and (4) what students can do to be more creative in their writing. These were cross-checked by the entire research team. Some of the papers fit more than one of these themes. In the next section, each theme is introduced and defined and then the articles that fall within the theme are reviewed.

Overall a total number of 25 articles had overlapping themes that included various personal and contextual aspects. Figure 1 shows what we have identified as the key themes under each category. In the next sections, we represent papers based on their main theme.

The personal, structural, and cultural conditions surrounding creative writing

Personal emergent properties

A total number of 13 articles were about what students can do to be more creative in their writing (Mendelowitz, 2014 ; Steele, 2016 ) and how teachers’ and students’ personal characteristics relate to the development of creative writing. These articles were mainly focussed on the personal emergent aspects of writing (Alhusaini & Maker, 2015 ; Barbot et al., 2012 ; Cremin et al., 2020 ; DeFauw, 2018 ; Dobson, 2015 ; Dobson & Stephenson, 2017 , 2020 ; Edwards-Groves, 2011 ; Healey, 2019 ; Lee & Enciso, 2017 ; Macken-Horarik, 2012 ; Ryan, 2014 ). The personal aspects identified in our review were (1) personal views about creative writing, (2) creative thinking, (3) writer identity, (4) learner motivation and engagement, and (5) knowledge and capabilities.

Personal views about creative writing

From our systematic review, we identified three articles exploring views about what creative writing is, and more specifically the role that it plays and the elements that make creative writing, in primary classrooms. One of these studies was focussed on the views and experiences of experts in writing (Barbot et al., 2012 ), whereas the other two investigated students’ perspectives and experiences (Alhusaini & Maker, 2015 ; Healey, 2019 ). Barbot et al’s ( 2012 ) work, for example, recognised that creative writing involves both cognitive and metacognitive abilities. This was determined by the expert panel of people whose work related to writing including teachers, linguists, psychologists, professional writers, and art educators. The panel were asked to complete an online survey that rated the relative importance of 28 identified skills needed to creatively write. Six broad categories were identified as a result of the responses and the rank given to each factor by the expert groups (See Table 2 ). They acknowledged that these features cross over various age groups from children to professional writers.

Findings suggested that each independent rater weighted different key components of creative writing as being more or less important for children. Overall, the findings showed.

a global ‘consensus’ across the expert groups indicated that creative writing skills are primarily supported by factors such as observation, generation of description, imagination, intrinsic motivation and perseverance, while the contributions of all of the other relevant factors seemed negligible (e.g. intelligence, working memory, extrinsic motivation and penmanship). (p. 218)

One factor that was ranked as critical by most respondents, but underemphasised by teachers, was imagination. Teachers’ work in classrooms around creative writing is complex due to the difficulty in defining imagination (Brill, 2004 ). Teachers also under-rated other aspects related to creative cognition.

Another study that explored students’ creativity in writing was conducted by Alhusaini and Maker ( 2015 ) in the south-west of the United States. Participants included 139 students with mixed ethnicities including White, Mexican American, and Navajo. This study involved six elementary/primary school teachers judging students’ writing samples of open-ended stories. To assess the work a Written Linguistic Assessment tool, which was based on the Consensual Assessment Technique [CAT] (Amabile, 1982 ) was implemented. According to Baer and McKool ( 2009 ), The CAT involves experts rating written artefacts or artistic objects by using their ‘sense of what is creative in the domain in question to rate the creativity of the products in relation to one another’ (p. 4). Interestingly, Alhusaini and Maker ( 2015 ) found the CAT to be effective in relation to interrater reliability. The authors do not share what the Judge’s Guidelines to Assess Students’ Stories entail. They mention the difference between technical quality and creativity and note that assessors were able to distinguish the differences between the two, but the reader is not made aware of the aspects of each quality. Overall, the study revealed that one of the most challenging problems in the field of creativity and writing is trying to measure creativity across cultures by using standardised tests. Such studies could have implications for other students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds as teachers become more aware of cultural nuances in constituting ‘creative’ in creative writing.

The final study we identified in this category was by Healey ( 2019 ). Healey employed an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and explored how eight children (11–12 Years of age) experienced creative writing in the classroom. He shared how children’s writing experiences were based on ‘the affect, embodiment, and materiality of their immediate engagement with activities in the classroom’ (p. 184). Results from student interviews showed three themes related to the experience of writing: the writing world (watching, ideas from elsewhere, flowing); the self (concealing and revealing, agency, adequacy); and schooled writing (standards, satisfying task requirements, rules of good writing). The author stated that children’s consciousness shifts between their imagination (The Writing World) and set assessment tasks (Schooled Writing). Both of these worlds affect the way children experience themselves as writers. Further findings from this work argued that originality of ideas and use of richer vocabulary improved students’ creative writing. Vocabulary improvement included diversity of word meanings, appropriate usage of words, words being in line with the purpose of the text; while originality of ideas featured creative and unusual (original) ideas—which in many ways is difficult to define.

Overall, when concerned with personal views and attitudes in creative writing, the two studies by Healey ( 2019 ) and Barbot et al. ( 2012 ) show contrasting findings about ‘imagination’ captured through the view of students and teachers, respectively. While Healey’s ( 2019 ) study suggests that children shift between their imagination and set assessment tasks in creative writing, Barbot et al. ( 2012 ) highlight the lack of attention to imagination among their participated teachers. Although these results cannot be generalised, they highlight the significance of understanding personal emergent properties that both students and teachers bring to the classroom and the way that they interact to affect the experience of creative writing for learners. From this theme, we suggest the importance of educators acknowledging students’ imagination through their definition of creative writing as well as providing quality time for students to choose what they write through imaginative thought. We now turn to creative thinking and related pedagogical approaches to teaching creative writing from the research literature.

Creative thinking

We identified two articles that were focussed on creative thinking and its contribution to writing (Copping, 2018 ; Cress & Holm, 2016 ). Copping ( 2018 ) explored writing pedagogy and the connections between children’s creative thinking, or a ‘new way of looking at something’ (p. 309), and their writing achievement. The study involved two primary schools in Lancashire, one in an affluent area and one in an underprivileged area. Approximately 28 children from each school were involved in two, 2-day writing workshops based on a murder mystery the children had to solve. Findings from this study revealed that to improve students’ writing achievement (1) a thinking environment needs to be created and maintained, (2) production processes should have value, (3) motivation and achievement increase when there is a tangible purpose, and (4) high expectations lead to higher attainment.

Cress and Holm’s ( 2016 ) study described a curricular approach implemented by a first-grade teacher and their class comprised 13 girls and 11 boys. The project known as the Creative Endeavours project aimed to develop creative thinking by (1) creating an environment of respect with a positive classroom climate. (2) offering new and challenging experiences, and (3) encouraging new ideas rather than praise. The authors argued that through peer collaboration and the flexibility to choose their own projects, children can become more authentically engaged in the writing process. The children wrote about their experiences and their choices, and reflected upon the projects undertaken. In this study, it was revealed that the children showed diversity in their writing assignments including presentation through sewing, photography, and drama. While there were only two papers in this particular theme, their findings are supported by systematic reviews (Graham et al., 2012 ; Slavin et al., 2019 ) that emphasise not only new ways of exploring a range of concepts for learning but also the creation of motivating environments for improving writing (Copping, 2018 ). In addition to the significance of positive and encouraging learning environments, these two studies suggest that setting ‘high expectations’ or ‘challenging experiences’ are conducive to creative thinking however, teachers would need to set appropriate, reflexive conditions for this to occur.

Writer identity

Studies in this category revolve around choice and learner writer identity. The study carried out by Dobson and Stephenson ( 2017 ) focussed on developing a community of writers involving 25 primary school pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds. The project was offered over 2 weeks and featured a number of creative writing workshops. The authors applied the theoretical frameworks of practitioner enquiry and discourse analysis to explore the children’s creative writing outputs. They argued that the workshops, which promoted intertextuality and freedom for the children as writers, enabled a shifting of their ‘writer’ identities (Holland et al., 1998). Dobson and Stephenson ( 2017 ) showed that allowing students to make decisions and choices in regard to authentic writing purposes supported a more flexible approach. They recommend stronger partnerships between schools and universities in relation to research on creative writing, however, it would be important for these relationships to be sustainable.

The second paper on this theme is by Ryan ( 2014 ) who noted that writing is a complex activity that requires appropriate thinking in relation to the purpose, audience, and medium of a variety of texts. Writers always make decisions about how they will present subject matter and/or feelings through all of the modes. Ryan ( 2014 ) suggested that writing is like a performance ‘whereby writers shape and represent their identities as they mediate social structures and personal considerations’ (p. 130). The study analysed writing samples of culturally and linguistically diverse Australian primary students to uncover the types of identities students shared. It found that three different types of writers existed—the school writers who followed teacher instructions or formulas to produce a product; the constrained writers who also followed instructions and formulas but were able to add in some authorical voice; and the reflexive writers who could show a definite command of writing and showed creative potential. Ryan ( 2014 ) argued that teachers’ practices in the classroom directly influence the ways in which students express these identities. She stated that when students are provided choices in writing, they are more able to shape and develop their voices. Such choices would need to include quality time and support to be reflexive in the decisions being made by the students.

The Teachers as Writers project (2015–2017) was conducted by Cremin, Myhill, Eyres, Nash, Wilson, and Oliver. In a recent paper ( 2020 ), the team reported on a collaborative partnership between two universities and a creative writing foundation. Professional writers were invited to engage with teachers in the writing process and the impact of these interactions on classroom teaching practices was determined. Data sets included observations, interviews, audio-capture (of workshops, tutorials and co-mentoring reflections), and audio-diaries from 16 teachers; and a randomised controlled trial (RCT) involving 32 primary and secondary classes. An intervention was carried out involving teachers writing in a week long residence with professional writers, one-on-one tutorials, and extra time and space to write. They also continued learning through two Continuing Professional Development (CPD) days. Results showed that teachers’ identities as writers shifted greatly due to their engagement with professional authors. The students responded positively in terms of their motivation, confidence, sense of ownership, and skills as writers. The professional authors also commented on positive impacts including their own contributions to schools. Conversely, these changes in practice did not improve the students’ final assessment results in any significant way. The authors noted that assuming a causal relationship between teachers’ engagement with writing workshops and students’ writing outcomes was spurious. They, therefore, developed further research building on this learning.

Knowledge and capabilities

The role of knowledge and capability is central to the articles in this category. In Australia, Macken-Horarik ( 2012 ) reported on the introduction of a national curriculum for English. This article drew on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by investigating the potential of Halliday’s notion of grammatics for understanding students’ writing as acts of creative meaning in context. Macken-Horarik ( 2012 ) argued that students needed to know deeply about language so that they could make creative decisions with their writing. She outlined that a ‘good enough’ grammatics would assist teachers in becoming comfortable with ‘playful developments in students’ texts and to foster their control of literate discourse’ (p. 179).

A project carried out by Edwards-Groves in 2011 highlights the role of knowledge about digital technologies in writing practices. 17 teachers in primary classrooms in Australia were asked to use particular digital technologies with their students when constructing classroom texts. Findings showed that an extended perspective on what counts as writing including the writing process was needed. Results revealed that collaborative methods when constructing diverse texts required teachers to rethink pedagogies towards writing instruction and what they consider as writing. It was argued that technology can be used to enhance creative possibilities for students in the form of new and dynamic texts. In particular, it was noted that teachers and students should be aware that digital technologies can both constrain and/or enable text creation in the classroom depending on a number of variables including knowledge and understanding, locating resources and logistical issues such as connectivity and reliability.

In addition, Mendelowitz’s ( 2014 ) study argued that nurturing teachers’ own creativity assisted their ability to teach writing more generally. She noted several ‘interrelated variables and relationships that still need to be given attention in order to gain a more holistic understanding of the challenges of teaching creative writing’ (p. 164). According to Mendelowitz ( 2014 ), elements that impacted on these challenges include teachers’ school writing histories, conceptualisations of imagination, classroom discourses, and pedagogy. Documenting teachers’ work through interviews and classroom observations by the researcher, the study found that teachers need to be able to define imagination and imaginative writing and know what strategies work best with their students. She noted that the teacher’s approaches to teaching writing ‘powerfully shaped by the interactions between their conceptualisations and enactments of imaginative writing pedagogy’ (p. 181) and that these may either limit or create a space for students to be more creative with their writing.

Such Personal Emergent Properties show that individual attributes of both teachers and students are important in learning creative writing. The next section of the paper explores the articles that shared various structural and cultural properties.

Structural emergent properties

In the subset of structural emergent properties, we mainly identified pedagogical approaches for creative writing that explored primary school learning and teaching (Christianakis, 2011a ; Christianakis, 2011b ; Coles, 2017 ; DeFauw, 2018 ; Hall & Grisham-Brown, 2011 ; Portier et al., 2019 ; Rumney et al., 2016 ; Sears, 2012 ; Steele, 2016 ; Southern et al., 2020 ; Yoo & Carter, 2017 ). These pedagogical approaches were aimed at addressing issues related to personal emergent properties such as motivation and engagement, and confidence in writing. The two categories of writing pedagogies were those that engaged professional authors and artists in teaching about creative writing, and the approaches that involved play(ful) activities, and use of visual arts, and drama.

Engaging professional authors and artists

Interestingly, many of the studies used literary forms and/or professional creative authors to spike interest and motivation in the students. Coles’ ( 2017 ) study, for example, used a garden-themed poetry writing project to support 9–10-year-old children’s creative writing in a London primary school. The 5-week project partnered with a professional creative writing organisation that facilitated the Ministry for Stories (MoS) writing centres across the USA. The study found that the social relationships created through this partnership allowed for a more inclusive and socially generative model of creativity. This meant that teachers should not just include creative aspects in assessment rubrics but rather recognise that creativity is encouraged through imagination and working with others. The researchers found improvements in the children’s participation in classroom writing activities as well as diversity in the ways they expressed their writing. The approach valued ‘rich means of expression rather than a set of rules to be learnt’ (p. 396). They also acknowledged issues associated with school–community partnerships including the sustainability of the practice.

Similarly, Rumney et al. ( 2016 ) found that using creative multimodal activities increased students’ confidence and motivation for writing. The study implemented the Write Here project with over 900 children in 12 primary and secondary schools. The study involved the children visiting local art galleries to work with professional authors and artists. Case studies were presented about pre-writing activities, the actual gallery work and post-gallery follow-up sessions. It aimed to improve students’ social development and literacy outcomes through diverse learning activities such as visual art and play in different contexts such as art galleries and classrooms. Like Coles’ ( 2017 ) study, this project showed that creative activities (e.g. talking about and acting out pictures; using story maps; backwards writing and planning) engaged students more than just teaching skills.

In addition, DeFauw’s ( 2018 ) study had student-centred learning and leadership at the core when working with a children’s book author for one year. The collaboration involved three face-to-face sessions with the author as well as online communication through blog posts. Data included recorded interactions, readings and pre and post interviews with teachers ( n = 9), students ( n = 36), and the author. The partnership showed that students’ interest was activated and sustained due to the situational context as well as the extended time given to students to interact with the author. The project improved students’ interest in and motivation to write as a result of engaging with authors and hearing about their own experience and writing strategies. It also found that teachers gained more confidence to support students’ exploration of writing in more creative ways. The creative pedagogies were also used in addressing issues related to creative writing outcomes for students, including teachers’ lack of confidence about pedagogies (Southern et al., 2020 ). Through a creative social enterprise approach, the authors facilitated professional development and learning involving artist-led activities for students. The program called Zip Zap had been implemented in schools in Wales and England, and data were collected through focus groups with teachers, students, and parents/carers. Observations of some of the professional development workshops were also video recorded. Third space theory was used to describe the collaborative practice between educators and artists that supported students’ creative writing outcomes. It was noteworthy that involving ‘creative’ practitioners largely focussed on the specific strategies that could be used in classrooms, to which our next section now turns.

Play(ful) activities, visual arts, and drama

Much research explores how to best support students who find writing difficult. Sears’ research ( 2012 ) is a case in point. The author shared how visual arts may be an effective way to improve struggling students with writing. They argued that the visual arts can provide ways of ‘accessing and expressing [student] ideas and ultimately opening a world of creative possibilities’ (p. 17). In the study, six third-grade students engaged with drawing and painting as pre-writing strategies, leading to the creation of poems based on the artworks. The students’ final poems were assessed and showed improved knowledge of all 6 technical categories in writing: ideas, organisation, fluency, voice, word choice, and conventions. The author also argued that students’ motivation to write increased as a result of the visual art activities.

A study by Portier et al. ( 2019 ) investigated approaches to teaching writing that were motiving and engaging for students. Involving 10 northern rural communities in Canada, the project implemented collaborative, play(ful) learning activities alongside sixteen teachers and their students. Interestingly, the study, like many others in our review, found a disconnect ‘between the achievement of curricular objectives and the implementation of play(ful) learning activities’ (p. 20); an approach valued in early childhood education. The students were supported through action research projects in creating texts with different purposes. Students’ motivation as well as samples of work were analysed and showed that student interest areas and collaborative approaches benefited both teachers and students. Further research on how reflexive thinking might have influenced these benefits is recommended.

Similarly, Lee and Enciso ( 2017 ) highlighted the importance of motivation and engagement in their study. In a collaboration with Austin Theatre Alliance, Lee and Enciso ( 2017 ) investigated how dramatic approaches to teaching, such as through expanded imagination and improvisation, can improve students’ story writing. They argued that the students’ motivation to write was also increased. The study was carried out through a controlled quasi-experimental study over 8 weeks of story-writing and drama-based programs. 29 third-grade classrooms in various schools, located in an urban district of Texas, were involved. The study also pre- and post-tested the students’ writing self-efficacy through story building. The study found that students were more able to use their cultural knowledge such as ‘culturally formed repertoires of language and experience to explore and express new understandings of the world and themselves…’ (p. 160) for creative writing purposes but needed more quality resources to support opportunities such as the Literacy for Life program. A most important finding was that for children who experience poverty, drama-based activities developed and led by teaching artists were extremely powerful and allowed the students to express themselves in entertaining ways. We do note that ‘entertainment’ and or engagement might mean different things for different students so reflexive approaches to deciding what these are would be necessary.

Steele’s ( 2016 ) study also looked at supporting teachers’ work in the classroom. Involving 6 out of 20 teacher workshop participants in Hawaii, this exploratory case study utilised observations, interview, and portfolio analyses of teacher and student work. Findings from the study showed that some teachers relished moving away from everyday ‘typical’ practice and increased student voice and choice. Other teachers, however, found it difficult to take risks and hence respond to student needs and ideas.

Dobson and Stephenson’s ( 2020 ) study focussed on the professional development of primary school teachers using drama to develop creative writing across the curriculum. The project was sponsored by the United Kingdom Literacy Association and ran for two terms in a school year. Researchers based the research on a collaborative approach involving academics and four teachers working with theatre educators to use process drama. Data sets included lesson observations, notes taken during learning conversations, and interviews with the teachers. The findings showed that three of the four teachers resisted some of the methods used such as performance; resulting in a lack of child-centred learning. The remaining teacher could take on board innovative practice, which the researchers attributed to his disposition. The study argued that these teachers, while a small participant group, needed more support in feeling confident in implementing new and creative approaches to teaching writing.

The final study, identified as addressing creative pedagogies for creative writing, was carried out by Yoo and Carter ( 2017 ) as professional development for teachers. Data included teacher survey responses and field notes taken by the researchers at each workshop (note: number of workshops and participants is unknown). The program aimed to investigate how emotions play a role in teachers’ work when teaching creative writing. The researchers found that intuitive joint construction of meaning was important to meet the needs of both primary and secondary teachers. A community of practice was established to support teachers’ identities as writers (see also Cremin et al., 2020 ). Findings showed that teachers who already identified as writers engaged more positively in the workshop.

These studies presented some approaches for teachers to consider how to teach creative writing. For example, the need to value unique spaces for students to write, including authentic connections with people and places outside of school environments was shared. Further, the need for quality stimuli and time for writing was acknowledged. Several other studies identified that blended teaching approaches to support student learning outcomes in the area of creative writing is important for schools and teachers to consider. We do acknowledge there may be other methods available to support students in creative writing, however, understanding what types of SEPs are impacting on teaching creative writing is an important step in determining improvements in schools.

Cultural emergent properties

Christianakis ( 2011a , 2011b ) wrote two papers about children’s creative text development with an emphasis on the cultural aspects. The first was an ethnographic study across 8 months with a year five class in East San Francisco Bay. The study included audio recording the students’ conversations and analysing over 900 samples of work. In the classroom, students were involved in a range of meaning-making practices including those that were arts-based and multimodal. The conversations with the students involved the researcher asking questions such: tell me more about this drawing, how did you come up with the idea? or why did you make this choice? The study found that there was a need for schools to reconceptualise the teaching of writing ‘to include not only orthographic symbols, but also the wide array of communicative tools that children bring to writing’ (p. 22). The author argued that unless corresponding institutional practices and ideologies were interrogated then improved practice was unlikely.

Christianakis’ ( 2011b ) second article, from the same project, explored more specifically the creation of hybrid rap poems by the children. She explicated how educators needed to negotiate and challenge dominant practices in primary classroom literacy learning. Like many studies before, a strong recommendation was to be more inclusive of youth popular cultures and culturally relevant literacies for students to be more engaged in creative writing practices. For Christianakis, culturally relevant literacies meant practices that embraced diversity in class and race and accounted for, and challenged, the dominant hegemonic curriculum that ‘privileges a traditional canon’ (p. 1140).

In summary, we found several themes under PEPs that could be considered for further research including those outlined in Table 3 below.

Discussion and implications for classroom practice

From this systematic literature review, several positions were exposed about the personal, structural, and cultural influences (Archer, 2012 ; Ryan, 2014 ) on teaching creative writing. These include limited teacher and student knowledge of what constitutes creative writing (Personal Emergent Properties [PEPs]), and no shared understanding or expectation in relation to creative writing pedagogy in their context (Cultural Emergent Properties [CEPs]). The negative impact of standardised testing and trending approaches on how teachers teach writing (CEP; Structural Emergent Properties [SEPs]) could also be considered (see AUTHORS 1 and 3, 2014 for example). In addition, teachers’ poor self-efficacy in terms of teaching creative writing (PEP); a paucity of quality professional development about teaching and assessing creative writing (SEP); and issues related to the sustainability of creative approaches to teach writing (SEP; CEP) need to be considered by leaders and teachers in schools. Our literature review advances knowledge about creative writing by revealing two interconnected areas that affect creative writing practices. Findings suggest that a parallel focus on personal conditions and contextual conditions—including structural and cultural—has the potential to improve creative writing in general. Below, we share some implications and recommendations for improved practice by focussing on both (1) personal views about creative writing and (2) the structural and cultural aspects that affect creative writing practices at schools.

Focussing on personal views about creative writing

School leaders and teachers must clearly define what creative writing is, what key skills constitute creative writing.

From our search it was apparent that schools and their educators often do not have a clear idea or indeed a shared idea as to what constitutes creative writing in relation to their own context. Without a well-defined focus for creative writing students may find it difficult to know what is required in classroom tasks and assessment. In addition, when planning for creative writing in school programs, teachers should consider flexible learning opportunities and choice for their students when developing their creative writing skills. Such flexibility should also involve choice of topic, ways of working (e.g. peer collaboration, individual activities etc.), and open discussions led by students in the classroom as shown throughout this paper. It would also be important for leaders and teachers to interrogate current approaches to teaching writing which we argued in the introduction to be formulaic and genre based.

Improve teacher self-efficacy, confidence, and content knowledge in teaching writing

Many of our studies showed that teachers who lacked confidence about writing themselves had less knowledge and skills to teach writing than those that may have participated in projects encouraging ‘teachers as writers’. Further, improved knowledge of grammar (as highlighted in Macken-Horarik’s, 2012 work); talk about writing in the classroom and other spaces (Cremin et al., 2020 ) and the writing process (see Ryan, 2014 ) could assist teachers in becoming more confident to take risks in the classroom with their students. Above all being playful about writing through extended conversations and practices is required.

Focussing on the structural and cultural resources

Improve training and further professional development and learning about teaching and assessing creative writing.

In order for the above personal attributes to be improved, further professional development and learning are required. Many of the papers presented throughout this review demonstrated the powerful impact of immersive professional learning for teachers. Working alongside professional authors, researchers, drama practitioners, visual artists, poets, for example, provided positive opportunities for teachers to learn about writing but also to feel more confident to teach it without imposing strict boundaries on students. We argue for professional development to be both formal and informal including such approaches as coaching and mentoring in the classroom. Demonstrated practice alongside the teacher is also recommended. This, in turn, would address the ongoing issue of creative writing being stifled for students in the classroom context.

Consider sustainability of creative pedagogic approaches and spaces for creative writing in curriculum planning

Many of the studies throughout this paper shared creative approaches to teaching writing but there were concerns that some of these methods may not be sustainable. It is important for school leaders to support the work of teachers in relation to teaching creative writing. We acknowledge that there is increasing uncertainty and scrutiny surrounding teachers’ everyday work (Knight, 2020 ), however, continued engagement in learning about and participating in creative pedagogy for writing is highly recommended. In addition, the studies suggested the provision of appropriate and authentic spaces in which students could creatively write and these often included spaces outside of the normal classroom environment and arts-based approaches implemented in such spaces. Teachers should be encouraged to collaborate and take risks rather than follow predetermined strategies for every lesson. A whole of school practice can be developed with important conversations about the ideologies that inform the school’s approach to writing.

Schools should not stifle creativity in the classroom due to the infiltration of standardised and/or trending approaches to teaching and assessing writing

It is evident that pedagogical approaches to teaching writing have been stifled by more formulaic methods aiming to meet expectations of standardised tests despite other evidence showing the benefits of more productive, engaging, and creative approaches to teaching writing as highlighted above. This can be particularly the case for students from non-dominant backgrounds where writing about cultural and life experiences through innovative practices has been proven to empower their voices (Johnson, 2021 ). The research shows that when students are offered rigid structures of texts, no choice of genres, and indeed word lists, their own decisions about writing are diminished (Ryan & Barton, 2013 ). It has been proven that students’ engagement and motivation to write can increase when they are able to write directly from their own experience or in social groups. It is therefore recommended that school leaders and teachers reconsider their ideologies about writing and explicitly indicate the importance of real-world purposes for writing—not just formulised, quick writing as usually included in external tests—but also those that encourage students’ growth in imagination, creativity, and innovative thought.

This systematic review used a lens of reflexivity to situate writing as a process of active and creative design whereby students make conscious decisions about their writing, with guidance from their teachers. As explained, we see creative writing as writing that engages a reader and, therefore, requires knowledge of authorial voice and appropriate word choice. This involves reflexive decisions relating to personal, structural, and cultural emergent properties. Predominant in the literature was the striking influence of CEPs or the values and expectations ascribed to writing, which in turn influence the strategies and resources (SEPs) and the experiences and motivations of students and teachers in the classroom (PEPs). Writing is about more than a series of perfectly formed sentences in a recognisable structure, which dominates conceptions of writing through high-stakes testing globally. It is about engagement with the expressive self, emergent identities, and relationships to places and people and above all communicating to and/or entertaining a reader. Without quality education in creative writing, society is at risk of losing an art form that is important for cultural practice and expression (Watson, 2016 ).

We do foresee several limitations with such a review, largely related to the positive nature of the studies in relation to creative approaches to teaching writing as well as the relatively small numbers of participants in some of the studies. Most of the studies reported favourably on the approaches taken by teachers to influence student motivation towards writing with limited comments about adverse effects. In terms of contributions, the notion that students need to draw on creative thought and ideas when writing means that teachers and leaders must think about diverse ways to teach writing. We argue, on the basis of the findings, that inquiry-based and reflexive professional learning projects about creativity are crucial for primary classrooms: what creativity means in different contexts and for different writers; how it is enabled; and the decisions and actions that emerge when creative and reflexive design guide our approach to classroom writing. Without quality knowledge and understanding of what creative writing is and how it is taught, we would be at risk of diminishing students’ self-expression and ability to communicate meaning to others in literary forms.

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Barton, G., Khosronejad, M., Ryan, M. et al. Teaching creative writing in primary schools: a systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity. Aust. Educ. Res. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00641-9

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Research as Forming a New Question

Wr 15x: essential lesson 3.

Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics. Students often believe that the most important thing about writing a research paper is having a strong thesis and therefore try to produce that thesis as early as possible in the research process. But experienced researchers know that good research begins with questions, and that those questions drive the research and writing process, even as that process leads to revision and refinement of the questions. This lesson asks students to practice this approach.

Students will be able to explore background, theory/method, argument, and exhibit/evidence sources in order to generate and recursively re-formulate research questions with consideration of different rhetorical situations.

research question, claim, BEAM/BEAT

At the beginning of WR 15x , instructors should emphasize the importance of question-oriented discovery and research, and the first parts of this lesson will help lay that groundwork. As students embark on their semester-long research projects in Module 2, the later parts of this lesson will frame information searching as a way to explore and reformulate research questions.

Conceptual Framework

However, prompts in WR 120 or other introductory-level classes typically predefine the question so that students can focus on engaging content and articulating argumentative claims. As a result, students may have little experience formulating their own research questions. Finally, because of the importance often attached to claims and thesis statements, students sometimes fail to recognize the generative–if sometimes messy–value of engaging in research as an iterative and recursive process of questioning.

The WR 15x courses require students to be more autonomous in this regard. Instructors should emphasize that nobody provides real researchers with predefined questions: they have to decide which questions they want to answer, how those questions are born from or engage in the larger scholarly conversation within their field, and which methods will answer those questions. In their assignments, WR 15x-level instructors should explain parameters and potential topics, but they should strive to help students devise their own research questions to explore their topic and to use the act of researching itself to discover evidence or material that might allow them to develop an argumentative claim that answers the question.

Research questions may derive either from empirical experience (something that students have observed themselves and that inspires their curiosity) or from identifying a gap in the scholarly conversation. Either way, the answers to such questions will often provoke new questions that are even more significant or essential to answer. At other times, the answers discovered through research might lead to dead-ends and require that the researcher begin again with a new question, perhaps framed or focused in a new way. The more students understand that research writing is not always linear, the more they will be willing to see the reformulation of their question not as a failure, but as a productive and necessary part of any research project, and indeed of intellectual inquiry more generally. This is also an opportunity for students to consider more specifically how different disciplines and methodologies might answer the same question in different ways.

Genre Awareness

Given the conceptual nature of asking good questions, the recursive process of questioning and discovery applies to many disciplines and rhetorical modes. However, students might compare how different disciplines and rhetorical modes use different methodologies to answer their questions, or pose the same question for different reasons. If or when appropriate, consider how certain genres, modes, and media–podcasts, film documentary, etc.–deploy the research question as a hook to begin the episode or scene, as well as establish the motivating purpose of the project.

Metacognition

Students should consider how their research question has evolved since they began their research, and note what new questions their research has unveiled. Students can reflect on how this approach to writing is distinct from assignments wherein students begin by finding a thesis rather than identifying a question, and how the comparative uncertainty of research-oriented writing affects them as writers, students, and people in general.

PART I: BRAINSTORM AND MAKE CONNECTIONS

Use the very beginning of the course to help students begin to imagine possible research questions, connected to their reasons for selecting this course topic.
Ask students to consider the motivating questions of the course topic, either as a full class, in small groups, or in a short take-home exercise.
Establish students’ interest.
Consider the course topic.
What do they want to know more about?
What about this topic seems intriguing to them?
How does it connect to something they care about?
Prompt students to begin forming some questions; have them write five different questions that might serve as motivating research questions for their projects.
Note that these questions may be linked, or they might represent different possible areas of interest within a topic. The task here is to articulate and reflect on possibilities for a project, not yet to narrow it down.
Which of the above questions are too large or ambitious to answer for this project assignment?
Is there a way to revise them so that they are more focused and constrained?
Likewise, which of the above questions may be too focused and constrained, insufficient for driving a large research project?
Is there a way to revise them or to connect multiple questions together into a single, coherent project?

PART II: HIGHLIGHT MODELS

Ask students to reflect on the research questions that the writer at hand hopes to answer, whenever you introduce argument or theory sources as course readings, and discuss how the writers answer those questions through evidence and analysis.
Use class readings to point out how all arguments are motivated by questions.
Help students to distinguish broad questions and narrow or localized questions, as well as the relationship among them, in the first “Course Foundations” module.

PART III: DRAFT RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND SEARCH TERMS

Help students identify the specific, researchable questions that will motivate their major writing project, right at the point in the semester when you introduce students to library resources with your librarian.
What makes this question compelling, and why?
What, as a potential reader or audience for this project, would you want to learn more about?
Do the questions seem connected in any way?
How do you envision that connection?
Discuss stronger and weaker questions as a class.
Discuss as a class the next steps–beginning research using search terms and the library website.
Model effective vs. ineffective search terms in a class session.
Ask students to choose one of their questions (or two interconnected questions) to begin researching.
Prompt them to think about the language and phrasing of the question, as well as associated search terms that might be useful when identifying resources.
Choose an example, connected to your course topic, of how students may begin approaching the use of library search terms.

For instance, imagine a research project interested in the effects of rising sea levels on vacation rentals in Florida. Searching for “rising sea level” and “Florida coast” might return very few hits on a library or resource database. Terms like “climate change AND tourism” would generate more resources, and the researcher could use other tools or additional language to narrow down those search results.

Ask students to develop and test their own list of search terms (beginning from key words in their questions) and keep track of which terms generate meaningful resources.
Set aside class time to allow students to begin researching.

PART IV: REFINE QUESTIONS AND IDENTIFY NEW DIRECTIONS

Prompt students to reflect on what they have learned from the sources they have gathered, especially new questions or variations of their initial question.
Discuss students’ challenges and discoveries, and prompt them to reflect on the process so far.
Ask students to what extent they have been able to find useful and reliable resources that will help answer their research questions.
Consider, as a class, the following questions; you may wish to have students write responses to them first, or discuss in small groups first:

What kind of resources were produced in your search, and why might the search terms you used produce those resources as top results? Is your research question either too broad or too narrow? How might it–or the key terms you are using for your search–be adjusted to produce more helpful resources? What areas of this topic seem to have grabbed the most scholarly attention? Why do you think other researchers are so interested in this aspect of your topic? What were you surprised to find that you did not expect? Are there any gaps in the research that warrant greater attention? What do these resources fail to discuss, and how might your own research address that gap in knowledge?

Prompt students to plan their next steps in the research process, given their experiences and reflections above.
Ask students whether they currently think they should revise their research question, abandon it (if it no longer seems feasible), and/or conceptualize new questions that came to mind after beginning their research.
Note that although all research writers need to be aware of the finite amount of time possible to complete their projects or papers, small adjustments to the research question–or the courage to find a better question–may end up saving time later.
Discuss research writing as a recursive process of asking questions, finding answers, and asking questions again.

Variations and Follow-Ups

Alternative lesson ideas.

When reading model essays or engaging with argument sources, instructors should be sure to highlight how or if the researcher identifies the motivating research question(s) of their scholarship, and/or documents the way that question evolved as they began their research.
Whether or not it is included as a graded assignment, students might be encouraged to keep the three exercises included in this lesson as the beginning of a research journal that they use to chart the evolution of their research question and their writing project as a whole. This not only serves the project, but could be submitted as an example of reflections in the cumulative portfolio.

Suggested follow-ups

Later in the semester, when students reconstruct their academic research project into a new genre for a different audience, they should consider how new kinds of research (for example, interviews or recent news) can lead them to revise their research questions once again.

Suggested flipped learning modules

The Early Stages of Research
Exploring the Scholarly Territory Using Library Resources
The Scope of Research Questions and Conversations
Research and Information Literacy

For instructors

Gellis, Mark. “Teaching Research Skills in the First-Year Composition Class.” Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition , edited by Duane Roen, et al. NCTE, 2002, pp. 583–599. This resource argues for the importance of research in a first-year writing classroom, highlighting key concepts and learning outcomes for composition courses. The chapter discusses assignment design and the pedagogy that informs it, and offers an extensive FAQ and response for instructors who might be new to teaching research within the context of first-year writing.

See all Writing Program Essential Lessons Remote Implementation of Essential Lesson Activities

30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Screenshot of front cover of 30 Ideas book

The following ideas originated as full-length articles in National Writing Project publications over a 30-year period from 1974-2004. Links to the full articles accompany each idea.

Table of Contents: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Use the shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing.
Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.
Use writing to improve relations among students.
Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.
Work with words relevant to students’ lives to help them build vocabulary.
Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.
Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.
Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.
Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.
Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.
Use casual talk about students’ lives to generate writing.
Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.
Practice and play with revision techniques.
Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.
Teach “tension” to move students beyond fluency.
Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.
Require written response to peers’ writing.
Make writing reflection tangible.
Make grammar instruction dynamic.
Ask students to experiment with sentence length.
Help students ask questions about their writing.
Challenge students to find active verbs.
Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.
Ground writing in social issues important to students.
Encourage the “framing device” as an aid to cohesion in writing.
Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.
Think like a football coach.
Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.
Use home language on the road to Standard English.
Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.

1. Use the shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing.

Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith’s words, is “natural and purposeful.”

When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training wheels for the first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write about. A new baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student’s father were the playful or serious inspirations for student writing.

Says Rotkow: “Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we wrote, talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought, and how we thought about it. We became a community.”

ROTKOW, DEBBIE. 2003. “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure About Helping Students Write the Stories of Their Lives,” The Quarterly (25) 4.

2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.

When high school teacher Karen Murar and college instructor Elaine Ware, teacher-consultants with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, discovered students were scheduled to read the August Wilson play Fences at the same time, they set up email communication between students to allow some “teacherless talk” about the text.

Rather than typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent conversation between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did not occur until students had completed all email correspondence. Though teachers were not involved in student online dialogues, the conversations evidenced the same reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion, including predication, clarification, interpretation, and others.

MURAR, KAREN, and ELAINE WARE. 1998. “Teacherless Talk: Impressions from Electronic Literacy Conversations.” The Quarterly (20) 3.

3. Use writing to improve relations among students.

Diane Waff, co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, taught in an urban school where boys outnumbered girls four to one in her classroom. The situation left girls feeling overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their “voices faded into the background, overpowered by more aggressive male voices.”

Determined not to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face the problem head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their journals. She then introduced literature that considered relationships between the sexes, focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote in response to works as diverse as de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Dean Myers’s Motown and DiDi.

In the beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female responses. According to Waff, “Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex, money, and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment.” But as the students continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice that they had similar ideas on many issues. “By confronting these gender-based problems directly,” says Waff, “the effect was to improve the lives of individual students and the social well-being of the wider school community.”

WAFF, DIANE. 1995. “Romance in the Classroom: Inviting Discourse on Gender and Power.” The Quarterly (17) 2.

4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.

Jan Matsuoka, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), describes a revision conference she held with a third grade English language learner named Sandee, who had written about a recent trip to Los Angeles.

“I told her I wanted her story to have more focus,” writes Matsuoka. “I could tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of her drawings—a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother.”

“Focus, I told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with your grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip.”

“‘Oh, I get it,’ Sandee smiled, ‘like just one cartoon, not a whole bunch.'”

Sandee’s next draft was more deep than broad.

MATSUOKA, JAN. 1998. “Revising Revision: How My Students Transformed Writers’ Workshop.” The Quarterly (20) 1.

5. Work with words relevant to students’ lives to help them build vocabulary.

Eileen Simmons, a teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, knows that the more relevant new words are to students’ lives, the more likely they are to take hold.

In her high school classroom, she uses a form of the children’s ABC book as a community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus.

One student describes her personality as sometimes “caustic,” illustrating the word with a photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains that she understands the hurt her “burning” sarcastic remarks can generate.

SIMMONS, EILEEN. 2002. “Visualizing Vocabulary.” The Quarterly (24) 3.

6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.

John Levine, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), helps his college freshmen integrate the ideas of several writers into a single analytical essay by asking them to create a dialogue among those writers.

He tells his students, for instance, “imagine you are the moderator of a panel discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three writers and construct a dialogue among the four ‘voices’ (the three essayists plus you).”

Levine tells students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The essay follows from this preparation.

LEVINE, JOHN. 2002. “Talking Texts: Writing Dialogue in the College Composition Classroom.” The Quarterly (24) 2.

7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.

The following is a group poem created by second grade students of Michelle Fleer, a teacher-consultant with the Dakota Writing Project (South Dakota).

Underwater Crabs crawl patiently along the ocean floor searching for prey. Fish soundlessly weave their way through slippery seaweed Whales whisper to others as they slide through the salty water. And silent waves wash into a dark cave where an octopus is sleeping.

Fleer helped her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the phrases to produce the poem itself.

As a group, students put together words in ways Fleer didn’t believe many of them could have done if they were working on their own, and after creating several group poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone.

FLEER, MICHELLE. 2002. “Beyond ‘Pink is a Rose.'” The Quarterly (24) 4.

8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.

Douglas James Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project, makes use of what he calls “metawriting” in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose.

Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that occurs frequently in a student’s work and points out each instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available.

“I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any debate that may surround the particular usage.”

JOYCE, DOUGLAS JAMES. 2002. “On the Use of Metawriting to Learn Grammar and Mechanics.” The Quarterly (24) 4.

9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.

Glorianne Bradshaw, a teacher-consultant with the Red River Valley Writing Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of experiences from her own life when teaching her first-graders how to write.

For example, on an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring cookie batter while on vacation. She writes the phrase “made cookies” under the sketch. Then she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She writes the words who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she and the students construct the sentence, “I made cookies in the kitchen in the morning.”

Next, each student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer vacation activity and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for Bradshaw’s drawing. Then she asks them, “Tell me more. Do the cookies have chocolate chips? Does the pizza have pepperoni?” These facts lead to other sentences.

Rather than taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure gives students a helpful format for creativity.

BRADSHAW, GLORIANNE. 2001. “Back to Square One: What to do When Writing Workshop Just Doesn’t Work.” The Quarterly (23) 1.

10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.

Stephanie Wilder found that the grades she gave her high school students were getting in the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying. Other students relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged their own work.

“I decided to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained a selection of student work, were complete,” Wilder says. She continued to comment on papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her for conferences. But she waited to grade the papers.

It took a while for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of a grade, and there was some grumbling from students who had always received excellent grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their work, students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.

WILDER, STEPHANIE. 1997. “Pruning Too Early: The Thorny Issue of Grading Student Writing.” The Quarterly (19) 4.

11. Use casual talk about students’ lives to generate writing.

Erin (Pirnot) Ciccone, teacher-consultant with the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project, found a way to make more productive the “Monday morning gab fest” she used as a warm-up with her fifth grade students. She conceived of “Headline News.” As students entered the classroom on Monday mornings, they wrote personal headlines about their weekends and posted them on the bulletin board. A headline might read “Fifth-Grader Stranded at Movie Theatre” or “Girl Takes on Responsibility as Mother’s Helper.”

After the headlines had been posted, students had a chance to guess the stories behind them. The writers then told the stories behind their headlines. As each student had only three minutes to talk, they needed to make decisions about what was important and to clarify details as they proceeded. They began to rely on suspense and “purposeful ambiguity” to hold listeners’ interest.

On Tuesday, students committed their stories to writing. Because of the “Headline News” experience, Ciccone’s students have been able to generate writing that is focused, detailed, and well ordered.

CICCONE, ERIN (PIRNOT). 2001. “A Place for Talk in Writers’ Workshop.” The Quarterly (23) 4.

12. Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.

Patricia A. Slagle, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), understands the difference between writing for a hypothetical purpose and writing to an audience for real purpose. She illustrates the difference by contrasting two assignments.

She began with: “Imagine you are the drama critic for your local newspaper. Write a review of an imaginary production of the play we have just finished studying in class.” This prompt asks students to assume the contrived role of a professional writer and drama critic. They must adapt to a voice that is not theirs and pretend to have knowledge they do not have.

Slagle developed a more effective alternative: “Write a letter to the director of your local theater company in which you present arguments for producing the play that we have just finished studying in class.” This prompt, Slagle says, allows the writer her own voice, building into her argument concrete references to personal experience. “Of course,” adds Slagle, “this prompt would constitute authentic writing only for those students who, in fact, would like to see the play produced.”

SLAGLE, PATRICIA A. 1997. “Getting Real: Authenticity in Writing Prompts.” The Quarterly (19) 3.

13. Practice and play with revision techniques.

Mark Farrington, college instructor and teacher-consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project, believes teaching revision sometimes means practicing techniques of revision. An exercise like “find a place other than the first sentence where this essay might begin” is valuable because it shows student writers the possibilities that exist in writing.

For Farrington’s students, practice can sometime turn to play with directions to:

add five colors
add four action verbs
add one metaphor
add five sensory details.

In his college fiction writing class, Farrington asks students to choose a spot in the story where the main character does something that is crucial to the rest of the story. At that moment, Farrington says, they must make the character do the exact opposite.

“Playing at revision can lead to insightful surprises,” Farrington says. “When they come, revision doesn’t seem such hard work anymore.”

FARRINGTON, MARK. 1999. “Four Principles Toward Teaching the Craft of Revision.” The Quarterly (21) 2.

14. Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.

Bernadette Lambert, teacher-consultant with the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project (Georgia), wondered what would happen if she had her sixth-grade students pair with an adult family member to read a book. She asked the students about the kinds of books they wanted to read (mysteries, adventure, ghost stories) and the adults about the kinds of books they wanted to read with the young people (character-building values, multiculturalism, no ghost stories). Using these suggestions for direction, Lambert developed a list of 30 books. From this list, each student-adult pair chose one. They committed themselves to read and discuss the book and write separate reviews.

Most of the students, says Lambert, were proud to share a piece of writing done by their adult reading buddy. Several admitted that they had never before had this level of intellectual conversation with an adult family member.

LAMBERT, BERNADETTE. 1999. “You and Me and a Book Makes Three.” The Quarterly (21) 3.

15. Teach “tension” to move students beyond fluency.

Suzanne Linebarger, a co-director of the Northern California Writing Project, recognized that one element lacking from many of her students’ stories was tension. One day, in front of the class, she demonstrated tension with a rubber band. Looped over her finger, the rubber band merely dangled. “However,” she told the students, “when I stretch it out and point it (not at a student), the rubber band suddenly becomes more interesting. It’s the tension, the potential energy, that rivets your attention. It’s the same in writing.”

Linebarger revised a generic writing prompt to add an element of tension. The initial prompt read, “Think of a friend who is special to you. Write about something your friend has done for you, you have done for your friend, or you have done together.”

Linebarger didn’t want responses that settled for “my best friend was really good to me,” so “during the rewrite session we talked about how hard it is to stay friends when met with a challenge. Students talked about times they had let their friends down or times their friends had let them down, and how they had managed to stay friends in spite of their problems. In other words, we talked about some tense situations that found their way into their writing.”

LINEBARGER, SUZANNE. 2001. “Tensing Up: Moving From Fluency to Flair.” The Quarterly (23) 3.

16. Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.

Ray Skjelbred, middle school teacher at Marin Country Day School, wants his seventh grade students to listen to language. He wants to begin to train their ears by asking them to make lists of wonderful sounding words. “This is strictly a listening game,” says Skjelbred. “They shouldn’t write lunch just because they’re hungry.” When the collective list is assembled, Skjelbred asks students to make sentences from some of the words they’ve collected. They may use their own words, borrow from other contributors, add other words as necessary, and change word forms.

Among the words on one student’s list: tumble, detergent, sift, bubble, syllable, creep, erupt, and volcano . The student writes:

A man loads his laundry into the tumbling washer, the detergent sifting through the bubbling water. The syllables creep through her teeth. The fog erupts like a volcano in the dust.

“Unexpected words can go together, creating amazing images,” says Skjelbred.

SKJELBRED, RAY. 1997. “Sound and Sense: Grammar, Poetry, and Creative Language.” The Quarterly (19) 4.

17. Require written response to peers’ writing.

Kathleen O’Shaughnessy, co-director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana (Louisiana), asks her middle school students to respond to each others’ writing on Post-it Notes. Students attach their comments to a piece of writing under consideration.

“I’ve found that when I require a written response on a Post-it instead of merely allowing students to respond verbally, the responders take their duties more seriously and, with practice, the quality of their remarks improves.”

One student wrote:

While I was reading your piece, I felt like I was riding a roller coaster. It started out kinda slow, but you could tell there was something exciting coming up. But then it moved real fast and stopped all of a sudden. I almost needed to read it again the way you ride a roller coaster over again because it goes too fast.

Says O’Shaughnessy, “This response is certainly more useful to the writer than the usual ‘I think you could, like, add some more details, you know?’ that I often overheard in response meetings.”

O’SHAUGHNESSY, KATHLEEN. 2001. “Everything I Know About Teaching Language Arts, I Learned at the Office Supply Store.” The Quarterly (23) 2.

18. Make writing reflection tangible.

Anna Collins Trest, director of the South Mississippi Writing Project, finds she can lead upper elementary school students to better understand the concept of “reflection” if she anchors the discussion in the concrete and helps students establish categories for their reflective responses.

She decided to use mirrors to teach the reflective process. Each student had one. As the students gazed at their own reflections, she asked this question: “What can you think about while looking in the mirror at your own reflection?” As they answered, she categorized each response:

I think I’m a queen – pretending/imagining
I look at my cavities – examining/observing
I think I’m having a bad hair day – forming opinions
What will I look like when I am old? – questioning
My hair is parted in the middle – describing
I’m thinking about when I broke my nose – remembering
I think I look better than my brother – comparing
Everything on my face looks sad today – expressing emotion.

Trest talked with students about the categories and invited them to give personal examples of each. Then she asked them to look in the mirrors again, reflect on their images, and write.

“Elementary students are literal in their thinking,” Trest says, “but that doesn’t mean they can’t be creative.”

TREST, ANNA COLLINS. 1999. “I was a Journal Topic Junkie.” The Quarterly (21) 4.

19. Make grammar instruction dynamic.

Philip Ireland, teacher-consultant with the San Marcos Writing Project (California), believes in active learning. One of his strategies has been to take his seventh-graders on a “preposition walk” around the school campus. Walking in pairs, they tell each other what they are doing:

I’m stepping off the grass . I’m talking to my friend .

“Students soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases. I walk among my students prompting answers,” Ireland explains.

“I’m crawling under the tennis net ,” Amanda proclaims from her hands and knees. “The prepositional phrase is under the net .”

“The preposition?” I ask.

“ Under .”

IRELAND, PHILIP. 2003. “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.” The Quarterly (25) 3.

20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.

Kim Stafford, director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College, wants his students to discard old notions that sentences should be a certain length. He explains to his students that a writer’s command of long and short sentences makes for a “more pliable” writing repertoire. He describes the exercise he uses to help students experiment with sentence length.

“I invite writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page — and no fair cheating with a semicolon. Just use ‘and’ when you have to, or a dash, or make a list, and keep it going.” After years of being told not to, they take pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.

“Then we shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the upper left to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be longer than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb.”

Stafford compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the second to a drum. “Writers need both,” he says. “Rivers have long rhythms. Drums roll.”

STAFFORD, KIM. 2003. “Sentence as River and as Drum.” The Quarterly (25) 3.

21. Help students ask questions about their writing.

Joni Chancer, teacher-consultant of the South Coast Writing Project (California), has paid a lot of attention to the type of questions she wants her upper elementary students to consider as they re-examine their writing, reflecting on pieces they may make part of their portfolios. Here are some of the questions:

Why did I write this piece? Where did I get my ideas? Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece? What skills did I work on in this piece? Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why? What parts did I rework? What were my revisions? Did I try something new? What skills did I work on in this piece? What elements of writer’s craft enhanced my story? What might I change? Did something I read influence my writing? What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn? Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it? Expand it? Toss it? File it?

Chancer cautions that these questions should not be considered a “reflection checklist,” rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently when writers tell the story of a particular piece.

CHANCER, JONI. 2001. “The Teacher’s Role in Portfolio Assessment.” In The Whole Story: Teachers Talk About Portfolios , edited by Mary Ann Smith and Jane Juska. Berkeley, California: National Writing Project.

22. Challenge students to find active verbs.

Nancy Lilly, co-director of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, wanted her fourth and fifth grade students to breathe life into their nonfiction writing. She thought the student who wrote this paragraph could do better:

The jaguar is the biggest and strongest cat in the rainforest. The jaguar’s jaw is strong enough to crush a turtle’s shell. Jaguars also have very powerful legs for leaping from branch to branch to chase prey.

Building on an idea from Stephanie Harvey (Nonfiction Matters, Stenhouse, 1998) Lilly introduced the concept of “nouns as stuff” and verbs as “what stuff does.”

In a brainstorming session related to the students’ study of the rain forest, the class supplied the following assistance to the writer:

Stuff/Nouns : What Stuff Does/Verbs jaguar : leaps, pounces jaguar’s : legs pump jaguar’s : teeth crush jaguar’s : mouth devours

This was just the help the writer needed to create the following revised paragraph:

As the sun disappears from the heart of the forest, the jaguar leaps through the underbrush, pumping its powerful legs. It spies a gharial gliding down the river. The jungle cat pounces, crushing the turtle with his teeth, devouring the reptile with pleasure.

LILLY, NANCY. “Dead or Alive: How will Students’ Nonfiction Writing Arrive?” The Quarterly (25) 4.

23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.

For a final exam, Sarah Lorenz, a teacher-consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a written argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work they have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have learned in the writing class.

“The key to convincing me,” says Lorenz, “is the use of detail. They can’t simply say they have improved as writers—they have to give examples and even quote their own writing…They can’t just say something was helpful—they have to tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or how they applied this learning to everyday life.”

LORENZ, SARAH. 2001. “Beyond Rhetoric: A Reflective Persuasive Final Exam for the Writing Classroom.” The Quarterly (23) 4.

24. Ground writing in social issues important to students.

Jean Hicks, director, and Tim Johnson, a co-director, both of the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), have developed a way to help high school students create brief, effective dramas about issues in their lives. The class, working in groups, decides on a theme such as jealousy, sibling rivalry, competition, or teen drinking. Each group develops a scene illustrating an aspect of this chosen theme.

Considering the theme of sibling rivalry, for instance, students identify possible scenes with topics such as “I Had It First” (competing for family resources) and “Calling in the Troops” (tattling). Students then set up the circumstances and characters.

Hicks and Johnson give each of the “characters” a different color packet of Post-it Notes. Each student develops and posts dialogue for his or her character. As the scene emerges, Post-its can be added, moved, and deleted. They remind students of the conventions of drama such as conflict and resolution. Scenes, when acted out, are limited to 10 minutes.

“It’s not so much about the genre or the product as it is about creating a culture that supports the thinking and learning of writers,” write Hicks and Johnson.

HICKS, JEAN and TIM JOHNSON. 2000. “Staging Learning: The Play’s the Thing.” The Quarterly (22) 3.

25. Encourage the “framing device” as an aid to cohesion in writing.

Romana Hillebrand, a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass pane.

Hillebrand provides this example:

A student in her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between humans and plants, beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, “Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies….” She explained the rhymes as originating with the practice of masking the stench of death with flowers during the Black Plague. The student finished the paper with the sentence, “Without plants, life on Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes we all fall down.”

Hillebrand concludes that linking the introduction and the conclusion helps unify a paper and satisfy the reader.

HILLEBRAND, ROMANA. 2001. “It’s a Frame Up: Helping Students Devise Beginning and Endings.”The Quarterly (23) 1.

26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.

Suzanne Cherry, director of the Swamp Fox Writing Project (South Carolina), has her own way of dramatizing the comma splice error. She brings to class two pieces of wire, the last inch of each exposed. She tells her college students, “We need to join these pieces of wire together right now if we are to be able to watch our favorite TV show. What can we do? We could use some tape, but that would probably be a mistake as the puppy could easily eat through the connection. By splicing the wires in this way, we are creating a fire hazard.”

A better connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those electrical connectors that look like pen caps.

“Now,” Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), “let’s turn these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma, the equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma splice error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical connector? Think conjunction – and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of these show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device for taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not.”

“I’ve been teaching writing for many years,” Cherry says. “And I now realize the more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to ‘real world’ experience, the more successful we will be.”

CHERRY, SUZANNE. “Keeping the Comma Splice Queen Happy,” The Voice (9) 1.

27. Think like a football coach.

In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with the Third Coast Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years coaching football. While doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing the former. Here is some of what he found out:

The writing teacher can’t stay on the sidelines. “When I modeled for my players, they knew what I wanted them to do.” The same involvement, he says, is required to successfully teach writing.

Like the coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than focus on the negative. Statements such as “Wow, that was a killer block,” or “That paragraph was tight” will turn “butterball” ninth-grade boys into varsity linemen and insecure adolescents into aspiring poets.

The writing teacher should apply the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. Holt explains for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best used with care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class, a student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms such as a chinquapin or haiku.

Practice and routine are important both for football players and for writing students, but football players and writers also need the “adrenaline rush” of the big game and the final draft.

HOLT, DAN. 1999. “What Coaching Football Taught Me about Teaching Writing.” The Voice (4) 3.

28. Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.

High school teacher Jon Appleby noticed that when yearbooks fell into students’ hands “my curriculum got dropped in a heartbeat for spirited words scribbled over photos.” Appleby wondered, “How can I make my classroom as fascinating and consuming as the yearbook?”

Here are some ideas that yearbook writing inspired:

Take pictures, put them on the bulletin boards, and have students write captions for them. Then design small descriptive writing assignments using the photographs of events such as the prom and homecoming. Afterwards, ask students to choose quotes from things they have read that represent what they feel and think and put them on the walls.

Check in about students’ lives. Recognize achievements and individuals the way that yearbook writers direct attention to each other. Ask students to write down memories and simply, joyfully share them. As yearbook writing usually does, insist on a sense of tomorrow.

APPLEBY, JON. 2001. “The School Yearbook: A Guide to Writing and Teaching.” The Voice (6) 3.

29. Use home language on the road to Standard English.

Eileen Kennedy, special education teacher at Medger Evers College, works with native speakers of Caribbean Creole who are preparing to teach in New York City. Sometimes she encourages these students to draft writing in their native Creole. The additional challenge becomes to re-draft this writing, rendered in patois, into Standard English.

She finds that narratives involving immigrant Caribbean natives in unfamiliar situations — buying a refrigerator, for instance — lead to inspired writing. In addition, some students expressed their thoughts more proficiently in Standard English after drafting in their vernaculars.

KENNEDY, EILEEN. 2003. “Writing in Home Dialects: Choosing a Written Discourse in a Teacher Education Class.” The Quarterly (25) 2.

30. Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.

Jim Wilcox, teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma Writing Project, requires his college students to volunteer at a local facility that serves the community, any place from the Special Olympics to a burn unit. Over the course of their tenure with the organization, students write in a number of genres: an objective report that describes the appearance and activity of the facility, a personal interview/profile, an evaluation essay that requires students to set up criteria by which to assess this kind of organization, an investigative report that includes information from a second source, and a letter to the editor of a campus newspaper or other publication.

Wilcox says, “Besides improving their researching skills, students learn that their community is indeed full of problems and frustrations. They also learn that their own talents and time are valuable assets in solving some of the world’s problems — one life at a time.”

WILCOX, JIM. 2003. “The Spirit of Volunteerism in English Composition.” The Quarterly (25) 2.

Topics/tags:

Also recommended, using metaphor to explore writing processes, thank you for sharing: developing students' social skills to improve peer writing conferences, i was a kid: a science notebooks project with karen romano young.

Berkley Center

Teaching research and research writing: five frameworks to refocus student energies.

By: Phil Sandick

In the educational documentary Take 20 , professors of composition and rhetoric are asked to reflect on 20 questions about teaching and learning, including “What do you wish you had been taught in graduate school (but were not)?” Writing studies theorist Nancy Sommers responds that she wishes she “could have been taught how to do research.” Her answer serves as a reminder that teaching undergraduate or graduate level research is often challenging and elusive, not in the least because, at its core, it is a skill that requires engaging with the intellectual and disciplinary traditions of the humanist, the social scientist, and the scientist.

In the field of writing studies, we know that finding effective strategies for teaching research, like framing both empirical and textual research as active and dynamic , can help our students have a greater potential to transfer their knowledge to new writing situations. The five sections below offer instructional strategies for teaching research across the curriculum. Each section focuses on a key aspect of the research process, seen through the lens of how to best keep students attentive and engaged with their broader goals as scholars.

Entering a Conversation: Audience Awareness

In my Writing 015: Writing and Culture seminars, I try to emphasize effective research writing as writing that enters into an ongoing conversation . For most forms of textual research, the goal of reading widely and annotating texts is to eventually articulate a set of patterns to a particular audience. Compositionist Doug Brent notes that “ the ability to learn from texts is the fundamental academic research skill .” Altering and demystifying student perceptions of what research is, and emphasizing its link to continuing an already-in-progress dialogue, proves to be useful across the disciplines.

Building a Knowledge Base

Any accomplished researcher will tell you that building one’s knowledge base is an essential component to producing successful research writing. As scholar of teaching and learning Nancy Chick notes , a student researcher needs to similarly “recognize the limit of one’s knowledge or ability,” and then devise a way to develop that knowledge. I often stress to my writing students the position of the bricoleur when I am encouraging them to move past the stage of collecting data and summarizing sources. The bricoleur moves in opposition to the master planner who waits for a vital source to solve everything. Customizable and hands-on library sessions are excellent opportunities for students to build their knowledge base and start to fashion connections between sources.

Researching as a Recursive Craft

Research occurs at every stage of writing: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing. More than a decade after being introduced to Booth, Colombe, and Williams’s The Craft of Research, I still use excerpts from Chapters 3 and 4 in my courses. A narrow topic, a focused research question, and a clear significance are frequently in flux as the research process (including advice, feedback, and coaching from instructors) develops. Because I ask students to choose their own topics for most assignments, they are often still perfecting essential aspects of their argument or subject matter as the final due date approaches—and that is often productive work. Students tend to take far more ownership of their projects the more they are allowed to radically revise and make crucial adjustments to their topics and questions.

Thinking about Thinking...about Research

One key to teaching writing effectively is to deliberately encourage self-awareness in students. If students can view research as a dynamic process, and can engage in metacognitive reflection on what choices they have made as they research, then there’s a significantly higher chance that they will remember and bring their refined research habits to future writing activities, both within academia and outside of academia.

Studies have suggested that “ the best reflection is often social/collaborative ,” and so often my goals for reflective lessons include cultivating that same spirit of conversation that researchers bring to academic writing directly to the classroom. In this way, students “plan, monitor, and assess” not only what they are learning, but how they are active agents in that learning . Students may not be aware when they enter a college classroom that they are choosing research methods every time they begin a research project; part of the instructor’s goals, then, includes not only working with students to produce polished and well-developed final works, but also to help students recognize that they made critical choices along the way.

Trying Out Digital Tools

Digital tools can fundamentally change how students conduct research in the context of academic writing. Stanford’s TeachingWriting Commons offers a good starting point for an introduction to digital annotation, while ZoteroBib and Refworks aid students in building bibliographies by collecting, importing, managing, annotating, and sharing bibliographic data. Beyond helping students locate and organize sources and annotate digital texts, data management tools have helped to reshape research disciplines in collaborative ways that are often public-facing and open access.

With recent shifts toward open-sourced materials for teaching writing, many instructors assign and incorporate selections from the Purdue OWL , college writing centers , and the extensive Writing Commons as required reading. Moving toward more Creative Commons licensed texts or shared free web resources offers students a compelling option in a world where guides to research can become quickly outdated and often cost hundreds of dollars.

Discover similar content through these related topics and regions.

Resources on Diversity, Difference, and Dialogue

Tools for research and writing.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 great research paper topics.

General Education

One of the hardest parts of writing a research paper can be just finding a good topic to write about. Fortunately we've done the hard work for you and have compiled a list of 113 interesting research paper topics. They've been organized into ten categories and cover a wide range of subjects so you can easily find the best topic for you.

In addition to the list of good research topics, we've included advice on what makes a good research paper topic and how you can use your topic to start writing a great paper.

What Makes a Good Research Paper Topic?

Not all research paper topics are created equal, and you want to make sure you choose a great topic before you start writing. Below are the three most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the best research paper topics.

#1: It's Something You're Interested In

A paper is always easier to write if you're interested in the topic, and you'll be more motivated to do in-depth research and write a paper that really covers the entire subject. Even if a certain research paper topic is getting a lot of buzz right now or other people seem interested in writing about it, don't feel tempted to make it your topic unless you genuinely have some sort of interest in it as well.

#2: There's Enough Information to Write a Paper

Even if you come up with the absolute best research paper topic and you're so excited to write about it, you won't be able to produce a good paper if there isn't enough research about the topic. This can happen for very specific or specialized topics, as well as topics that are too new to have enough research done on them at the moment. Easy research paper topics will always be topics with enough information to write a full-length paper.

Trying to write a research paper on a topic that doesn't have much research on it is incredibly hard, so before you decide on a topic, do a bit of preliminary searching and make sure you'll have all the information you need to write your paper.

#3: It Fits Your Teacher's Guidelines

Don't get so carried away looking at lists of research paper topics that you forget any requirements or restrictions your teacher may have put on research topic ideas. If you're writing a research paper on a health-related topic, deciding to write about the impact of rap on the music scene probably won't be allowed, but there may be some sort of leeway. For example, if you're really interested in current events but your teacher wants you to write a research paper on a history topic, you may be able to choose a topic that fits both categories, like exploring the relationship between the US and North Korea. No matter what, always get your research paper topic approved by your teacher first before you begin writing.

113 Good Research Paper Topics

Below are 113 good research topics to help you get you started on your paper. We've organized them into ten categories to make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Arts/Culture

Discuss the main differences in art from the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance .
Analyze the impact a famous artist had on the world.
How is sexism portrayed in different types of media (music, film, video games, etc.)? Has the amount/type of sexism changed over the years?
How has the music of slaves brought over from Africa shaped modern American music?
How has rap music evolved in the past decade?
How has the portrayal of minorities in the media changed?

Current Events

What have been the impacts of China's one child policy?
How have the goals of feminists changed over the decades?
How has the Trump presidency changed international relations?
Analyze the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
What factors contributed to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
What have been the impacts of states which have increased their minimum wage?
How do US immigration laws compare to immigration laws of other countries?
How have the US's immigration laws changed in the past few years/decades?
How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
What impact has the Affordable Care Act had on healthcare in the US?
What factors contributed to the UK deciding to leave the EU (Brexit)?
What factors contributed to China becoming an economic power?
Discuss the history of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies (some of which tokenize the S&P 500 Index on the blockchain) .
Do students in schools that eliminate grades do better in college and their careers?
Do students from wealthier backgrounds score higher on standardized tests?
Do students who receive free meals at school get higher grades compared to when they weren't receiving a free meal?
Do students who attend charter schools score higher on standardized tests than students in public schools?
Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
How does giving each student access to an iPad or laptop affect their studies?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Montessori Method ?
Do children who attend preschool do better in school later on?
What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
How does the US education system compare to education systems in other countries?
What impact does mandatory physical education classes have on students' health?
Which methods are most effective at reducing bullying in schools?
Do homeschoolers who attend college do as well as students who attended traditional schools?
Does offering tenure increase or decrease quality of teaching?
How does college debt affect future life choices of students?
Should graduate students be able to form unions?

What are different ways to lower gun-related deaths in the US?
How and why have divorce rates changed over time?
Is affirmative action still necessary in education and/or the workplace?
Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?
How has stem cell research impacted the medical field?
How can human trafficking be reduced in the United States/world?
Should people be able to donate organs in exchange for money?
Which types of juvenile punishment have proven most effective at preventing future crimes?
Has the increase in US airport security made passengers safer?
Analyze the immigration policies of certain countries and how they are similar and different from one another.
Several states have legalized recreational marijuana. What positive and negative impacts have they experienced as a result?
Do tariffs increase the number of domestic jobs?
Which prison reforms have proven most effective?
Should governments be able to censor certain information on the internet?
Which methods/programs have been most effective at reducing teen pregnancy?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
How effective are different exercise regimes for losing weight and maintaining weight loss?
How do the healthcare plans of various countries differ from each other?
What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
What are the pros and cons of genetically modified foods?
Which methods are most effective for improving memory?
What can be done to lower healthcare costs in the US?
What factors contributed to the current opioid crisis?
Analyze the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic .
Are low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
How much exercise should the average adult be getting each week?
Which methods are most effective to get parents to vaccinate their children?
What are the pros and cons of clean needle programs?
How does stress affect the body?
Discuss the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation?
How has New Orleans and the government's response to natural disasters changed since Hurricane Katrina?
What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
What were the impacts of British rule in India ?
Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?
What were the successes and failures of the women's suffrage movement in the United States?
What were the causes of the Civil War?
How did Abraham Lincoln's assassination impact the country and reconstruction after the Civil War?
Which factors contributed to the colonies winning the American Revolution?
What caused Hitler's rise to power?
Discuss how a specific invention impacted history.
What led to Cleopatra's fall as ruler of Egypt?
How has Japan changed and evolved over the centuries?
What were the causes of the Rwandan genocide ?

Why did Martin Luther decide to split with the Catholic Church?
Analyze the history and impact of a well-known cult (Jonestown, Manson family, etc.)
How did the sexual abuse scandal impact how people view the Catholic Church?
How has the Catholic church's power changed over the past decades/centuries?
What are the causes behind the rise in atheism/ agnosticism in the United States?
What were the influences in Siddhartha's life resulted in him becoming the Buddha?
How has media portrayal of Islam/Muslims changed since September 11th?

Science/Environment

How has the earth's climate changed in the past few decades?
How has the use and elimination of DDT affected bird populations in the US?
Analyze how the number and severity of natural disasters have increased in the past few decades.
Analyze deforestation rates in a certain area or globally over a period of time.
How have past oil spills changed regulations and cleanup methods?
How has the Flint water crisis changed water regulation safety?
What are the pros and cons of fracking?
What impact has the Paris Climate Agreement had so far?
What have NASA's biggest successes and failures been?
How can we improve access to clean water around the world?
Does ecotourism actually have a positive impact on the environment?
Should the US rely on nuclear energy more?
What can be done to save amphibian species currently at risk of extinction?
What impact has climate change had on coral reefs?
How are black holes created?
Are teens who spend more time on social media more likely to suffer anxiety and/or depression?
How will the loss of net neutrality affect internet users?
Analyze the history and progress of self-driving vehicles.
How has the use of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
Has social media made people more or less connected?
What progress has currently been made with artificial intelligence ?
Do smartphones increase or decrease workplace productivity?
What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
How is Google search affecting our intelligence?
When is the best age for a child to begin owning a smartphone?
Has frequent texting reduced teen literacy rates?

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Even great research paper topics won't give you a great research paper if you don't hone your topic before and during the writing process. Follow these three tips to turn good research paper topics into great papers.

#1: Figure Out Your Thesis Early

Before you start writing a single word of your paper, you first need to know what your thesis will be. Your thesis is a statement that explains what you intend to prove/show in your paper. Every sentence in your research paper will relate back to your thesis, so you don't want to start writing without it!

As some examples, if you're writing a research paper on if students learn better in same-sex classrooms, your thesis might be "Research has shown that elementary-age students in same-sex classrooms score higher on standardized tests and report feeling more comfortable in the classroom."

If you're writing a paper on the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might be "While the dispute between the North and South over slavery is the most well-known cause of the Civil War, other key causes include differences in the economies of the North and South, states' rights, and territorial expansion."

#2: Back Every Statement Up With Research

Remember, this is a research paper you're writing, so you'll need to use lots of research to make your points. Every statement you give must be backed up with research, properly cited the way your teacher requested. You're allowed to include opinions of your own, but they must also be supported by the research you give.

#3: Do Your Research Before You Begin Writing

You don't want to start writing your research paper and then learn that there isn't enough research to back up the points you're making, or, even worse, that the research contradicts the points you're trying to make!

Get most of your research on your good research topics done before you begin writing. Then use the research you've collected to create a rough outline of what your paper will cover and the key points you're going to make. This will help keep your paper clear and organized, and it'll ensure you have enough research to produce a strong paper.

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Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Four Strategies for Effective Writing Instruction

(This is the first post in a two-part series.)

The new question-of-the-week is:

What is the single most effective instructional strategy you have used to teach writing?

Teaching and learning good writing can be a challenge to educators and students alike.

The topic is no stranger to this column—you can see many previous related posts at Writing Instruction .

But I don’t think any of us can get too much good instructional advice in this area.

Today, Jenny Vo, Michele Morgan, and Joy Hamm share wisdom gained from their teaching experience.

Before I turn over the column to them, though, I’d like to share my favorite tool(s).

Graphic organizers, including writing frames (which are basically more expansive sentence starters) and writing structures (which function more as guides and less as “fill-in-the-blanks”) are critical elements of my writing instruction.

You can see an example of how I incorporate them in my seven-week story-writing unit and in the adaptations I made in it for concurrent teaching.

You might also be interested in The Best Scaffolded Writing Frames For Students .

Now, to today’s guests:

‘Shared Writing’

Jenny Vo earned her B.A. in English from Rice University and her M.Ed. in educational leadership from Lamar University. She has worked with English-learners during all of her 24 years in education and is currently an ESL ISST in Katy ISD in Katy, Texas. Jenny is the president-elect of TexTESOL IV and works to advocate for all ELs:

The single most effective instructional strategy that I have used to teach writing is shared writing. Shared writing is when the teacher and students write collaboratively. In shared writing, the teacher is the primary holder of the pen, even though the process is a collaborative one. The teacher serves as the scribe, while also questioning and prompting the students.

The students engage in discussions with the teacher and their peers on what should be included in the text. Shared writing can be done with the whole class or as a small-group activity.

There are two reasons why I love using shared writing. One, it is a great opportunity for the teacher to model the structures and functions of different types of writing while also weaving in lessons on spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

It is a perfect activity to do at the beginning of the unit for a new genre. Use shared writing to introduce the students to the purpose of the genre. Model the writing process from beginning to end, taking the students from idea generation to planning to drafting to revising to publishing. As you are writing, make sure you refrain from making errors, as you want your finished product to serve as a high-quality model for the students to refer back to as they write independently.

Another reason why I love using shared writing is that it connects the writing process with oral language. As the students co-construct the writing piece with the teacher, they are orally expressing their ideas and listening to the ideas of their classmates. It gives them the opportunity to practice rehearsing what they are going to say before it is written down on paper. Shared writing gives the teacher many opportunities to encourage their quieter or more reluctant students to engage in the discussion with the types of questions the teacher asks.

Writing well is a skill that is developed over time with much practice. Shared writing allows students to engage in the writing process while observing the construction of a high-quality sample. It is a very effective instructional strategy used to teach writing.

‘Four Square’

Michele Morgan has been writing IEPs and behavior plans to help students be more successful for 17 years. She is a national-board-certified teacher, Utah Teacher Fellow with Hope Street Group, and a special education elementary new-teacher specialist with the Granite school district. Follow her @MicheleTMorgan1:

For many students, writing is the most dreaded part of the school day. Writing involves many complex processes that students have to engage in before they produce a product—they must determine what they will write about, they must organize their thoughts into a logical sequence, and they must do the actual writing, whether on a computer or by hand. Still they are not done—they must edit their writing and revise mistakes. With all of that, it’s no wonder that students struggle with writing assignments.

In my years working with elementary special education students, I have found that writing is the most difficult subject to teach. Not only do my students struggle with the writing process, but they often have the added difficulties of not knowing how to spell words and not understanding how to use punctuation correctly. That is why the single most effective strategy I use when teaching writing is the Four Square graphic organizer.

The Four Square instructional strategy was developed in 1999 by Judith S. Gould and Evan Jay Gould. When I first started teaching, a colleague allowed me to borrow the Goulds’ book about using the Four Square method, and I have used it ever since. The Four Square is a graphic organizer that students can make themselves when given a blank sheet of paper. They fold it into four squares and draw a box in the middle of the page. The genius of this instructional strategy is that it can be used by any student, in any grade level, for any writing assignment. These are some of the ways I have used this strategy successfully with my students:

* Writing sentences: Students can write the topic for the sentence in the middle box, and in each square, they can draw pictures of details they want to add to their writing.

* Writing paragraphs: Students write the topic sentence in the middle box. They write a sentence containing a supporting detail in three of the squares and they write a concluding sentence in the last square.

* Writing short essays: Students write what information goes in the topic paragraph in the middle box, then list details to include in supporting paragraphs in the squares.

When I gave students writing assignments, the first thing I had them do was create a Four Square. We did this so often that it became automatic. After filling in the Four Square, they wrote rough drafts by copying their work off of the graphic organizer and into the correct format, either on lined paper or in a Word document. This worked for all of my special education students!

I was able to modify tasks using the Four Square so that all of my students could participate, regardless of their disabilities. Even if they did not know what to write about, they knew how to start the assignment (which is often the hardest part of getting it done!) and they grew to be more confident in their writing abilities.

In addition, when it was time to take the high-stakes state writing tests at the end of the year, this was a strategy my students could use to help them do well on the tests. I was able to give them a sheet of blank paper, and they knew what to do with it. I have used many different curriculum materials and programs to teach writing in the last 16 years, but the Four Square is the one strategy that I have used with every writing assignment, no matter the grade level, because it is so effective.

‘Swift Structures’

Joy Hamm has taught 11 years in a variety of English-language settings, ranging from kindergarten to adult learners. The last few years working with middle and high school Newcomers and completing her M.Ed in TESOL have fostered stronger advocacy in her district and beyond:

A majority of secondary content assessments include open-ended essay questions. Many students falter (not just ELs) because they are unaware of how to quickly organize their thoughts into a cohesive argument. In fact, the WIDA CAN DO Descriptors list level 5 writing proficiency as “organizing details logically and cohesively.” Thus, the most effective cross-curricular secondary writing strategy I use with my intermediate LTELs (long-term English-learners) is what I call “Swift Structures.” This term simply means reading a prompt across any content area and quickly jotting down an outline to organize a strong response.

To implement Swift Structures, begin by displaying a prompt and modeling how to swiftly create a bubble map or outline beginning with a thesis/opinion, then connecting the three main topics, which are each supported by at least three details. Emphasize this is NOT the time for complete sentences, just bulleted words or phrases.

Once the outline is completed, show your ELs how easy it is to plug in transitions, expand the bullets into detailed sentences, and add a brief introduction and conclusion. After modeling and guided practice, set a 5-10 minute timer and have students practice independently. Swift Structures is one of my weekly bell ringers, so students build confidence and skill over time. It is best to start with easy prompts where students have preformed opinions and knowledge in order to focus their attention on the thesis-topics-supporting-details outline, not struggling with the rigor of a content prompt.

Here is one easy prompt example: “Should students be allowed to use their cellphones in class?”

Swift Structure outline:

Thesis - Students should be allowed to use cellphones because (1) higher engagement (2) learning tools/apps (3) gain 21st-century skills

Topic 1. Cellphones create higher engagement in students...

Details A. interactive (Flipgrid, Kahoot)

B. less tempted by distractions

C. teaches responsibility

Topic 2. Furthermore,...access to learning tools...

A. Google Translate description

B. language practice (Duolingo)

C. content tutorials (Kahn Academy)

Topic 3. In addition,...practice 21st-century skills…

Details A. prep for workforce

B. access to information

C. time-management support

This bare-bones outline is like the frame of a house. Get the structure right, and it’s easier to fill in the interior decorating (style, grammar), roof (introduction) and driveway (conclusion). Without the frame, the roof and walls will fall apart, and the reader is left confused by circuitous rubble.

Once LTELs have mastered creating simple Swift Structures in less than 10 minutes, it is time to introduce complex questions similar to prompts found on content assessments or essays. Students need to gain assurance that they can quickly and logically explain and justify their opinions on multiple content essays without freezing under pressure.

Thanks to Jenny, Michele, and Joy for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching .

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5 High-Impact Writing Strategies for the Elementary Grades

Simple, effective exercises can help elementary students develop the foundational writing skills they need for their academic journey.

Elementary students writing at their desks

When considering writing as part of the instructional day, teachers may think only of the type of writing where students engage in storytelling or informational pieces. While the ability to leverage student choice and produce fiction and nonfiction text is beneficial for all grade levels, it’s important to consider how writing can be incorporated and layered across all content areas, as well as develop the deep foundational understanding to prepare young writers for authoring texts.

For us as teachers, it’s vital that we share a common language and understanding about the types of high-impact writing strategies that students can engage in and how to effectively implement them in the classroom.

1. Handwriting in the Early Grades

In the digital age, prioritizing handwriting education during phonics instruction remains instrumental in nurturing well-rounded learners and sets them up for success when more stamina is required of them. The tactile experience of handwriting establishes a profound connection between language and sensory perception, contributing increased cognitive development .

Teachers can adopt a common path of movement language (language used to describe how to form the letters) when teaching the letters. In addition to that, providing students with multisensory ways of forming the letters helps create a strong understanding of the letters’ features.

A practical example of this type of instruction is having students trace a lowercase a in a tray full of salt, repeating the path of movement language, “over, around, down.” Then, students practice writing the letter using a pencil or dry erase marker. As the teacher models the directionality, it’s important to ensure that students know what “over,” “around,” and “down” mean and look like and that the teacher is using on-the-spot intervention for correction.

2. Dictated Sentences

Utilizing dictated sentences in elementary phonics instruction holds profound importance in nurturing early literacy skills. This strategy serves as a powerful bridge between decoding individual phonemes and comprehending them within a meaningful context.

For example, in a phonics lesson where students are practicing decoding and spelling words with a short i vowel and have practiced reading the high-frequency words they and the , the teacher may end the lesson with students writing the dictated sentence, ”They will fill the big bin with wigs.”

This method encourages the application of phonics knowledge in real-word scenarios, promoting fluency and automaticity. In addition, dictated sentences provide a valuable opportunity for students to hone their listening skills, enhancing their ability to discern and reproduce distinct phonetic elements accurately and to authentically apply irregularly spelled high-frequency words in context. This practice benefits students of any grade level working on phonics skills.

3. Writing to Read

Another foundational type of writing that prepares students for more demanding types of writing in later grades is writing to read. This is an interactive approach to early writing instruction where the teacher models early literacy and print concepts starting as early as prekindergarten through early kindergarten. Through collaboration with the students, the teacher models drawing pictures and sentence creation.

Teachers can start by engaging students in a conversation around an event in a book or nursery rhyme they read together. Then, the teacher offers a prompt: “In the story, the characters went to play at the park. That gives me an idea for a story. What kinds of things do you like to do at the park?” Students can share multiple ideas for the story, and the teacher chooses one to model.

While the teacher explicitly models drawing and develops a sentence about the drawing, the students offer ideas on where to start writing, count the words in the story, identify the sounds they hear as the teacher spells out each word, and notice where spaces will occur. The more that students engage in this type of instruction, the more responsibility we can hand over to them, and they can write the story along with us. As students are given more opportunities to apply early writing principles and rereading strategies, they begin to understand the reciprocal relationship between reading and writing.

4. Reading to Write

When the foundations for early writing have been established, students can quickly move into another layer of high-impact writing, which is writing about the texts that they’re reading.

Even starting in kindergarten, encouraging students to write and/or draw in response to reading across multiple content areas is a valuable strategy that helps deepen comprehension and understanding of a particular topic, as explored in Linda J. Dorn and Carla Soffos’s book Teaching for Deep Comprehension .

These “writing about the reading” prompts require students to analyze, synthesize, and connect ideas, fostering a deeper understanding of the material. For example, if first-grade students are working on story elements, after reading a story, a student might write, “The character in the story is a bear who lives in the forest. The problem in the story is that he is sad, but he solves his problem when he learns to be happy.”

This expression encapsulates comprehension, language reinforcement, and academic vocabulary. As students progress through grade levels upward to 12th grade, the scaffold of giving the students a prompt for writing about the text should decrease as they develop enough self-regulation to write about their own thinking.

5. Writing About Learning

Similar to reading to write, this strategy is solely focused on writing about what the student has learned, why the learning is important, and when to use the learning. This type of writing can happen as early as kindergarten, but in a highly scaffolded manner that mostly focuses on articulating why the learning is important.

Students up to 12th grade can benefit from writing about their learning because it keeps the purpose of what they’re learning in various content areas relevant and promotes quick retrieval of the information.

This strategy also promotes metacognition , because it helps learners organize their thoughts and reflect on their learning process. For instance, a second-grade class could collaboratively study the nature of bees in a nonfiction text. Then, because the teacher focuses on the skill of identifying and explaining main ideas and details, a student may write, “I learned the main idea by using headings and key details. Knowing main ideas helps us understand the most important information in a text.”

SUBMIT A STORY IDEA

Overcoming the 'curse of knowledge': A Q&A with Eller's Nooshin Warren on writing clarity

Nooshin Warren's research suggests the better someone knows a topic, the more difficult their writing about that subject can be to understand.

Nooshin Warren, assistant professor, Department of Marketing

The Writing Clarity Calculator scores writing on active, concrete and understandable language.

Nooshin Warren's research has discovered why many of us struggle when we read academic writing: The better someone knows a topic, the more difficult it can be to understand their writing. Her study, " Marketing Ideas: How to Write Research Articles that Readers Understand and Cite ," also found that scholars tend to write less clearly when writing about their own research as opposed to other people's work, and that research papers written more clearly tend to be cited more often in research citation databases.

Warren, an assistant professor in the Department of Marketing in the Eller College of Management, says subject experts often communicate unclearly in part because they forget that they know more about their research than their audience.

Warren spoke with Lo Que Pasa about a phenomenon that she calls the "curse of knowledge," how it impacts scholars and non-scholars alike, and about a website that may be able to help.

Did your own experiences reading research papers as a student and as a faculty member play any part in wanting to do this research?

Yes. As a Ph.D. student, specifically a nonnative (English) speaker and writer, I had the same struggles. Naturally, at first, I attributed it to my lack of experience or expertise. But I learned this particular struggle is almost universal – not only in my field but also in almost every other area. As a researcher, I thought what I wrote was clear, but when friends would read it, they would have trouble understanding. I began thinking, do we like to write or talk in ways that no one understands to show our expertise or impress our reviewers? Among the research team, we said no, we want everyone to understand it. So this might be a bigger problem than just the four of us.

What is the "curse of knowledge" and how does it make academic writing about research difficult to understand?

It is the very sneaky reality that we think what we know is as easy for others to understand as it is for us to understand. This bias, unbeknownst to us, affects how we explain what we know to others. Because we know a lot about our topic, we don't think that it's unclear. In our research, even academics – almost all of them that we surveyed – said they at least sometimes have difficulty understanding the writing in academic journals.

What are researchers doing that results in unclear writing?

We realized that the curse of knowledge seeps into writing in different ways – abstract, technical and passive writing.

Academics and experts in certain areas tend to explain them in a more holistic and abstract way. They are less adhering to details. If you have tried teaching a skill that you have mastered – like skiing – to others, you might have this experience if you explain the move or turn as one big action instead of breaking it down to smaller movements.

Technical language is more straightforward and common to observe. People in a group or experts in an area have their own vocabularies and they tend to forget or not even realize that these words may not exist in others' vocabulary set. If you have ever talked to a physician, lawyer or a teenager you probably have noticed this issue!

The most common issue in academic writing and literature is passive voice. As an expert it is easy to know who has done what, where and when. Experts forget that others may not have this information and therefore experts write their sentences without introducing the actors of the actions. It can be the simple difference between saying "It was hypothesized" versus "Researchers hypothesized."

Although your study focused on scholarly writing, how can it apply to anyone looking to communicate a complex subject clearly?

I believe this issue applies to any subject or aspect of life, from teaching mundane skills to a toddler, to a scientist explaining the physics of a product to a design engineer.

In all aspects, we should be cognizant of this existing bias and remind ourselves of times we did not have the expertise we currently hold and do our best to explain more clearly to our audience.

How does the website your research team created, the Writing Clarity Calculator , work, and how can it help people write more clearly?

Our website has embedded data that calculates how concrete and active your writing is, and how common the language is that you use compared with the set of references the website holds. Currently this set reference contains only academic papers written in the marketing literature's top tier journals (the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Consumer Research ). However, the website has the capability to expand and use the same logic for other disciplines as it gathers more references and grows. At this moment, the website is at its infancy and hopefully with the help of the American Marketing Association we will develop and expand it.

Warren's co-authors on the paper included: Caleb Warren , associate professor in the Department of Marketing; Matthew Farmer , a research associate in the Department of Marketing; and Tianyu Gu, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Utah. You can learn more about the research on the University's news website.

Resources for the Media

Economic Research - Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Focus on the Taylor Rule

This handout provides instructions on building the graph below and includes writing prompts for out-of-class assignments.

From the FRED Blog

The post “ The Taylor Rule ” discusses how the output gap and current inflation can guide monetary policymaking.

From the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

The essay “ Policy Rules and How Policymakers Use Them ” discusses several monetary policy rules that have received attention in the academic research literature.

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Educating Your Child About Sexuality and Relationships

April 01, 2024

By: Eileen T. Crehan, Ph.D., and Xihan Yang, M.A.

Categories: Families , Sexuality & Relationship Ed. , How To

Sexuality and relationship education includes a wide range of information: changing bodies, dating, kissing, gender identity, being turned down for a date, healthy relationships, and more.

We know that teaching sexuality and relationship education is the best way to keep kids healthy and safe. Despite this knowledge, we are not given a lot of information about how to take on these conversations. In fact, parents/guardians of autistic children and teens often share that they have a high level of concern about approaching these topics well and feel under-resourced to do so.

Keep in mind if you are a parent who TRIES (timing, reflection, information, engagement, support) to educate your child, then you are a parent who is doing this well. We are here to help with suggestions from our research and clinical work over the years.

Timing: Start earlier rather than later.

Sexuality and relationship education includes a lot of complex pieces. Topics like consent, privacy, and understanding their personal sensory profile can and should take a long time for people to learn, especially because these concepts can get more nuanced as people age.

Ideally, that means everyone would start learning as early as possible. For example, teaching about consent and boundaries while teens and pre-teens are experiencing adolescent hormones and peer pressure is easier when you have already helped your child build a foundation of saying and hearing “no” in friendships. That being said, it is never too late to chat about sexuality and relationship education.

As a parent, you don’t have to figure out how to start these conversations by yourself. There are lots of resources available (see our list below). You will also notice natural openings to discuss sexuality and relationships, like, for example, when a television show storyline is about sex or relationships or if a book your child is reading has something about relationships as part of the plot.

Reflection: Educate yourself.

You might be excited about providing this information to your child. You might be uncomfortable. It’s likely you’re a little bit of both, depending on the topic. The more comfortable you are, the easier these discussions or teaching moments will be. If you are not caught off guard by a question that requires an immediate answer, see if you can identify areas where you could use some more practice or knowledge. Use the resources yourself first. For example, if you are using visuals or picture books with your child, practice reading and saying the words aloud. Keep in mind that what you learned as a teen may not be updated for today’s world, such as terminology about sexual orientation and gender identities .

All of us have been asked a sexuality and relationship education question that we are unsure of. This is a great opportunity to model how to find good quality information online or from a trusted book together. You do not need to be an expert on everything.

Information: Understand what topics are important to cover.

The National Sex Education Standards identify seven areas that are important to cover for all children and adolescents:

Consent and healthy relationships
Anatomy and physiology
Puberty and adolescent sexual development
Gender identity and expression
Sexual orientation and identity
Sexual health
Interpersonal violence

We know from autistic adults that gender identity, sexual orientation, consent, and boundaries are key areas they wish they had received more sex education on . Additionally, sensory aspects of development and relationships are often highly important to autistic people but are not topics that are covered in most sex education curricula. Finally, sexuality is hugely culturally bound. Expectations and taboos from your own cultural community around dating, relationships, and sexuality may be information your child learns from family or even unintentionally, but likely is not directly addressed in school.

Your child may know more than you think (or may think they know some things that are not quite accurate, which is common as kids develop). Asking “what do you know about that topic?” or “what do you think about that situation?” can be a good place to start a conversation. Sexual health is part of the curriculum at some schools; television and media often include relationship messages; and kids and teens also observe those in relationships around them. You must find a balance between not skipping important information, like names of body parts and what changes will happen during puberty, and recognizing that kids have access to sexuality and relationship topics much earlier these days than when you were growing up. Checking what your child knows also allows you to gently correct definitions or ideas that might be incorrect. For children who use communication devices, for example, being able to label their genitals is really important both for autonomy and for safety reasons.

Engagement: Make a plan.

Sometimes, with all the other things parents have going on, sexuality and relationship education can slip to the bottom of the to-do list, despite its importance. We know from research studies that there is no specific person in charge of making sure sex education happens, leaving medical providers, teachers, and parents with a murky path to get sex education done. Find an accountability buddy, maybe another parent with a similarly aged child, or pick a recurring event to check in on your sex education goals at least yearly, such as an annual check-up or the first week of school. Writing out your goals and plans can be a good visual prompt. Here is a simple team chart that we use to make a coordinated plan.

Everyone also has their own comfort levels in discussing sexuality related topics. You may not feel comfortable talking to your child by yourself or your child may not feel comfortable talking to you about this. You do not have to teach them by yourself. Assigning this job to someone else (or something else, like a book or video) may be a better option. It is common to feel uncomfortable and shy during the education process and you want to plan ahead. Other family members, like cousins and in-laws, especially those closer to their age, can also help. Consider building on educational practices that have been effective for your child in other areas to help support best learning. It is also wise to tie this education to an event or activity that you or your child are already familiar with, such as a family game.

Support: Make use of resources that work for you and your child.

There are plenty of materials and resources to be used in multiple environments. Your child may already receive lessons about gender and sexuality at school. If not, you can always ask for those to be provided. The Individualized Education Plan (IEP) is rarely used to address sexuality and relationship education, but it is something you can advocate for.

You can also use online resources, especially if your child thrives when they are learning by themselves. You can look for books, webinars, comics, and sex education groups, whatever learning format works well for your child in other topics would be good to investigate.

Information about sexuality and relationship is important for health, safety, and happiness. As providers of this information, we can reflect on our own knowledge and comfort, make a plan, and use existing resources to make sex ed happen.

OAR’s Sex Ed for Self-Advocates : A website specifically for teens and young adults

Amaze.org : An extensive collection of brief engaging videos about a wide range of health topics

Autism Relationships Workbook : Written for and by autistic individuals, with a focus on boundaries and assertiveness

Our research lab maintains an ongoing list at the bottom of this page .

Autism Acceptance Month is Here!

OAR supports local communities with valuable resources, assists autistic individuals preparing for employment, and raises funds to support autism research studies. You can…

April 2, 2024

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Micro-Lisa! Making a mark with novel nano-scale laser writing

Low-cost polymer receptive to low power laser.

High-power lasers are often used to modify polymer surfaces to make high-tech biomedical products, electronics and data storage components.

Now Flinders University researchers have discovered a light-responsive, inexpensive sulfur-derived polymer is receptive to low power, visible light lasers -- promising a more affordable and safer production method in nanotech, chemical science and patterning surfaces in biological applications.

Details of the novel system have just been published in one of the highest-ranking chemistry journals, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, featuring a laser-etched version of the famous Mona Lisa painting and micro-braille printing even smaller than a pin head.

"This could be a way to reduce the need for expensive, specialised equipment including high-power lasers with hazardous radiation risk, while also using more sustainable materials. For instance, the key polymer is made from low-cost elemental sulfur, an industrial byproduct, and either cyclopentadiene or dicyclopentadiene," says Matthew Flinders Professor of Chemistry Justin Chalker, from the Flinders University.

"Our study used a suite of lasers with discreet wavelengths (532, 638 and 786 nm) and powers to demonstrate a variety of surface modifications on the special polymers, including controlled swelling or etching via ablation.

"The facile synthesis and laser modification of these photo-sensitive polymer systems were exploited in applications such as direct-write laser lithography and erasable information storage," says Dr Chalker from the Flinders University Institute for NanoScale Science and Engineering.

As soon as the laser light touches the surface, the polymer will swell or etch a pit to fashion lines, holes, spikes and channels instantly.

The discovery was made by Flinders University researcher and co-author Dr Christopher Gibson during what was thought to be a routine analysis of a polymer first invented in the Chalker Lab in 2022by PhD candidate Samuel Tonkin and Professor Chalker.

Dr Gibson says: "The novel polymer was immediately modified by a low-power lasers -- an unusual response I had never observed before on any other common polymers.

"We immediately released that this phenomenon might be useful in a number of applications, so we guild a research project around the discovery."

Another Flinders College of Science and Engineering PhD candidate, Ms Abigail Mann, led the next stage of the project and is first-author on the new international journal paper.

"The outcome of these efforts is a new technology for generating precise patterns on the polymer surface," she says.

"It is exciting to develop and bring new microfabrication techniques to sulfur-based materials. We hope to inspire a broad range of real-world applications in our lab and beyond."

Potential applications include new approaches to storing data on polymers, new patterned surfaces for biomedical applications, and new ways to make micro- and nanoscale devices for electronics, sensors and microfluidics.

With support from research associate Dr Lynn Lisboa and Samuel Tonkin, the Flinders team conducted detailed analysis of how the laser modifies the polymer and how to control the type and size of modification.

Another co-author Dr Lisboa adds: "The impact of this discovery extends far beyond the laboratory, with potential use in biomedical devices, electronics, information storage, microfluidics, and many other functional material applications.

Flinders spectroscopist Dr Jason Gascooke, of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF), also worked on the project. He says the latest discovery would not have been possible without the tools afforded by Federal and State Government funding for the national facilities of Microscopy Australia and the ANFF in SA, as well as Flinders Microscopy and Microanalysis.

Electronics
Materials Science
Mobile Computing
Computers and Internet
Electron microscope
Polyethylene
Electrical engineering
Solar power
Vehicle propulsion

Story Source:

Materials provided by Flinders University . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

Abigail Mann, Lynn Lisboa, Samuel Tonkin, Jason Gascooke, Justin M. Chalker, Christopher Gibson. Modification of Polysulfide Surfaces with Low‐Power Lasers . Angewandte Chemie International Edition , 2024; DOI: 10.1002/anie.202404802

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