I’ve been teaching students in grades 3 through 6 for nearly 20 years, and writing has always been one of my favorite things to teach. I am a very reflective teacher. I'm always setting goals for myself and trying to keep on top of the new research that's coming out. When I'm working with my students I like to think about what evidence can prove that I’m using the right move.
When I discovered REL Mid-Atlantic’s writing toolkit, the timing couldn’t have been better. I was already planning new units and was able to incorporate some of these instruction practices into those plans. Just knowing there was a research-based toolkit focused on writing instruction was incredibly exciting. Although it was originally designed for use in a professional learning community, I decided to start using it independently as a reflective tool to look more closely at my own classroom instruction.
As I worked through the initial reflection on current practice, I thought about whether my teaching was aligned with the recommendations and where I had room to stretch. I felt confident with the content in module 2—teaching the writing process. Where I saw room for growth was in module 1—creating classroom conditions for writing. There was already a lot of good writing happening in my classroom. But I wasn’t always explicitly and intentionally making that instruction visible for the kids and helping them see that they were writing across subjects—in math, science, and social studies.
So I knew I needed a little more support in enhancing that writing time. This helped me think about: Am I really doing this for 30 minutes? Are my kids really writing for 30 minutes? And am I building a community of writers?
One of the toolkit resources I used was the integrating writing across subjects activity from module 1, session 1. This tool helps teachers brainstorm ideas for writing projects across subject areas, including specials, to implement more writing time throughout the day.
I’m a general education teacher, so I am the teacher of record for reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. At the time, I was just about to start new units and modules in almost every subject area. Going through this part of the module gave me an opportunity to think about how I can take advantage of my time in the content areas and begin to make it explicit to my students that they were writing, give them more support in their writing, and help them realize that writing doesn’t always have to be big pieces that we take through the whole writing process.
Here’s a little bit of my thinking as I started to delve into my next units of curriculum.
Tool to plan writing across subjects
The toolkit and resources within it really work with any curriculum. I’m using it to help me enhance what I’m already doing. My English language arts (ELA) unit is actually a social studies unit informed with financial literacy. I thought about a couple of project ideas that could leverage my time with the kids and get them writing, whether it was at the sentence level or something a little meatier or that might require more iterating. As you can see within the financial literacy row, I started with just using the book that we’re reading and jotting on a post-it note. Then I had a second idea of making a list of needs and wants and their costs. And that leads us to the third idea of writing a narrative about a kid entrepreneur.
Then for math, we’re working on fractions. This is a topic for kids that often leads to a lot of misconceptions when they’re 7 or 8 years old and encountering this for the first time in their life. Thinking about that, can we create a survival guide of misconceptions in which kids could add examples? We’re big fans in my classroom of which one doesn’t belong, the popular exercise where you see four different images or math ideas and either everything doesn’t belong or everything can belong. You have to write a claim with evidence and reasoning. We’ve always done that orally and built out conversation, but then I thought, why not use that as another opportunity for kids to write a claim? We do this in lots of ways in ELA, so that was another cross-curricular connection. Finally, for math, I thought we could make a class collection of fraction word problems.
In the past few weeks, as I’ve really homed in on the time I’m spending writing, I’ve seen that many of my students are more connected. We’re seeing writing as a pathway, and vocabulary is being used—and being used more precisely, which I absolutely love! I also have multilingual learners in my classroom, so getting all students to use some of the words in math—for example, not just using “number” anymore but using “factor”—has been great.
One big takeaway for me is that I’m seeing kids understand that writing doesn’t just happen during our writing period. It’s not separated, and it’s not siloed. Working with the toolkit, I found that even though I’ve been teaching for a long time, there’s always more to learn, and a tool like this will really allow you to think about what you’re doing and what your next steps are. And to always keep the kids, their work, and their hearts at the core of what you do.
Marina shared these reflections during a REL Mid-Atlantic webinar. Watch the full recorded event to hear from other educators, writing experts, and REL staff for more ideas on how to use the toolkit to support evidence-based writing instruction.
