Steve Graham

Episode 28 To the classroom podcast

November 27, 2023

Jennifer Serravallo:

Welcome, Dr. Graham. I'm so glad to have you on the podcast today.

Steve Graham:

Well, thanks for inviting me. I really appreciate it.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I would love to get started by talking about a meta-analysis that you were a co-author on in 2017, about the effectiveness of literacy programs that balanced reading and writing. And you looked at studies where no more than 60% of the instruction was devoted to either reading or writing. So you're looking for kind of like an even balance. What were the general findings of this meta-analysis?

Steve Graham:

Let me put this in context first a little bit. This idea of taking a look at the effects of reading and writing instruction actually came out of looking at the effects of reading effects on writing separately and writing and writing instructions effects on reading separately. And quite honestly, that was driven by the fact that while we see a lot of reading instruction in schools, we don't see a lot of writing instruction. And if writing improves reading, then that potentially can increase its use in schools. And so we found in earlier reviews that when you have kids write about what they read, they understand it better. When you teach writing or you have students write a lot, they're reading comprehension and other skills improve and vice versa. When you have students read and you teach reading, writing gets better. So the question became, okay, if that's the case, what happens when you have programs that have a balanced approach in this?

So the good news of this about this was that when you have balanced programs like this where both reading and writing are emphasized, what you find is that not only does reading improve when compared to the counterfactual, the control conditions, which were mostly business as usual kinds of things, where probably reading got more emphasis in writing, but also writing improves as well. It was pretty robust in terms of its effects on outcomes for reading and writing. So when we looked at all reading outcomes collectively, they got better. But when we looked at reading comprehension, word reading, those kind of more specific skills, same kind of results. And same thing in terms of writing. Writing quality was better, writing mechanics were better. So in both cases it looked pretty good. So we see that as a good indication that if you want to get your strongest results for students

Jennifer Serravallo:

Do both.

Steve Graham:

Then it would be good for literacy to teach both of these in a relatively balanced way.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I think that makes good sense. And just for people listening that may not be thinking, how could that be? How could reading improve writing and writing improve reading? There's a lot of connected reciprocal processes between the two, right? Of course, spelling and phonics kind of go together, sentence construction, fluency maybe go together. Can we talk a little bit about some of these kind of obvious reciprocal processes that might explain how doing one reinforces the other?

Steve Graham:

One of the theories that would help explain why this is the case is called the shared knowledge theory. And the basic idea is that when you read and when you write both of these skills, if you'd like, draw upon the same cognitive resources, so you gave the example of spelling and word reading. So if you think about an alphabetic language, you have to be able to make the connections between sounds and letters. And that's somewhat reciprocal, not exactly in terms of spelling and word recognition, but you can see that in both cases you would draw upon that knowledge that you have about the alphabetic principle when both spelling and reading.

So increasing one in reading your alphabetic knowledge should have a reciprocal effect on spelling, the same thing with spelling and vice versa. And that actually ends up being the case when you look at it empirically. Another example of this would be if you think about writing, when you have to write in a particular genre, you have to know the purpose of that genre. You have to have a good sense of what are the basic elements like persuasive writing. At least in the West, we have a premise, we have reasons to support it, evidence and explanations of those reasons. 

We often deal with the counterfactual counter reasons and why those don't knock down our theory or our premise. And usually you're bringing all this together at the end in some way. Well, obviously if you're going to write a text like that, it's good to know what such text looks like, but also when you read it, those same elements provide a hook that helps you understand and organize the information that you're reading in a persuasive text.

So there's multiple ways in which this shared knowledge theory works out. Another way of thinking about this is that it's kind of rhetorical relations viewpoint. Both reading and writing are meaning-making processes. And so we don't always do this in reading, but sometimes you're very interested when you're reading in terms of what was it the author was doing here, how did he make this part of text speed up? Oh, I really loved how this richness of words and help me see and visualize this character. Well, if you do that kind of analysis, then that provides you with information that you potentially can use in your own writing. You have to make that conscious attention to do so. But also it flips back the other way when we're writing, and I think hopefully this is more the case in writing, we're thinking about who our audience is and what they need.

And so we may know something very well, and unfortunately when we write it out, we leave out important information that somebody who's not as familiar with this will need to know. And so by analyzing that, there's this connection between reading and writing that goes both ways. And so it's kind of another way of thinking about it. And then a third way that I think really plays out a lot, but we often don't think about this is what's called a functional approach. And that is we use reading and writing together for other tasks. And in schools it's for learning. And so we often think of these, oh, they're connected, but separate tasks. But when you are reading about, say, Napoleon, then it helps if you write about that because it helps you think about the ideas that you're considering or you're sharing or when we look at multiple sources and bring them together, but those operate together to help us create something where we may gain new insights. And so these are not necessarily separate tasks when we think about learning. They're integral parts that help us increase what we know about something and how well we understand it.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I think so, absolutely. I'll just tell you anecdotally, I write about reading and I write about writing and I go to conferences and I speak, and sometimes I'll be at the same conference doing sessions on both reading and writing. Reading is always more attended than writing. I've got books that are very similar in reading and writing. Reading is more popular than writing always. When you look at some of the commonly used literacy programs that are on state lists that are approved, there's a lot of people adopting new programs right now. On the whole, I think it's the same thing. I think we're still seeing a lot of reading. There's a lot of texts and text analysis and a lot of phonics. And then you look at the writing portion and I find it's often an assignment. You've read this passage, now write about it, but I don't see a lot of guidance for teachers around the teaching of writing. It's like the assigning of writing and the teaching of writing feel really different to me. And I'm wondering if you've had similar conclusions.

Steve Graham:

Yeah, I think that's generally correct. I think there has been an emphasis more recently, and I think we're going to see more of this with say basal reading programs, et cetera to do this. But I think in general, when you take a look at this, there's a disconnect between the reading and writing programs. And so like you mentioned, we might write about something that we read, but we're not using reading often to guide our other kinds of writing activities. It kind of sets off to the side often as a process approach where we have kids come up with a topic or we assign one, they do a little bit of planning, they draft and then they revise. But there's not this interconnectedness that we might hope for in terms of writing and reading or reading for writing or writing for reading. 

And also we don't see that interconnectedness in terms of skills, like you said, analyzing texts. Well, that gives you a perfect example to read with a writer's eye so that you're looking at what did the author do here and then can I try that out in my own writing? And so I think historically we just have not seen those connections. I do think though that there is a stronger emphasis right now in terms of connecting, and I think we'll see this. I'm hoping we see this in future basal programs where you have reading, writing and learning deeply connected. So not just the reading and writing connection, but that reading, writing and learning connection that starting as early as kindergarten, quite honestly, we're using both reading and writing to facilitate learning. These are important tools for doing this and that they work together and that when we teach them, we make the connections. Now there's some challenges to that. So think about something like spelling and word recognition. So often in basal programs you don't see kind of formal spelling start until the end of first grade or the start of second grade. But you see word recognition, word attack skills being taught as early as kindergarten and first grade. And the reason for that theoretically is that recognition proceeds recall. And that is you can recognize say elements when you're reading quicker than you can recall them. So it'll present some challenges, but I'm seeing people do this now where they're teaching word attack skills or word recognition skills in conjunction with spelling skills at the same time.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Same. Yeah, I just had some guests on the podcast who were talking about a speech to print approach to phonics instruction where you actually begin with the encoding and move to decoding and then teach in a way that's organized around different spelling patterns really based on sound. So you would teach instead of teaching vowel consonant E for all the vowels you would teach the long E and all the spellings that you can have that connect to the long, I found it fascinating. It was new information for me. And I feel like this approach, like EBLI, Sounds-Write, Spell-Links, some of these are some of the programs they feel very new, they feel different, they make great logical sense, but they feel different.

Steve Graham:

Well, I will share with you that I have a 37-year-old daughter, and when she was in first grade, that’s basically the approach we used. 

Jennifer Serravallo:

I'd love to go back to something you were talking about earlier, which was you were thinking about how the reading and writing will be wrapped together with knowledge moving forward with a lot of the core programs that people may be adopting. And I think one of the things that there's been a lot of discussion about knowledge building to support reading comprehension. And there's a lot of conversation about how important it is that we have knowledge to be able to write well about a topic which makes good sense. I think the interpretation a lot of people are taking is then we should really closely control what kids are writing about in school, and they should only be writing about the topics that we're studying as part of our curriculum. What do you think about that?

Steve Graham:

I would disagree slightly on this. Okay. And maybe it's more than slightly. We'll see where I go with this. We've done a couple of studies where it is surprising how few studies actually look at the relationship between students' knowledge and writing output or writing outcomes. We did kind of an interesting study that Natalie Olinghouse who is at University of Connecticut led a couple of years back. And what we did was we initially tested, we took something that we thought students would know something about, generally, outer space, and these were kids in fourth grade, I believe, and we developed a test to assess their knowledge. You don't assess everything, but to get a general sense of their knowledge. And then we asked them to write three different compositions. One would be a story about outer space, another would be a persuasive text of some nature like promoting space exploration.

And another piece would be an informative piece. Now, in this case, we did not have students read source materials. This was from what was in their head. Now I'll come back to source materials in a second. What we found was that for persuasive and informative texts, the knowledge that you brought to the task made a difference. But for creating a story, not so much. And if you think about it, it makes a little bit of sense that with a story, you're creating your own narrative. And so you can add fantastical details. You don't quite have to stick to the facts as much, but for informational texts, for the quality of those and persuasive texts, it's a completely different situation. Now another thing of thinking about that kind of background knowledge is okay, what if you're having students write about things where you actually control one, what you ask them to write about, and second, you provide them with source material that you help them read and understand.

So we've done a couple of studies looking at that, but we've still looked at the background knowledge that they brought prior to reading that source material. And guess what? It still makes a difference. So if you start with more knowledge about whatever you're going to write about. In this case, we were taking a look at things like they were writing persuasive texts and things like the importance of saving water or bicycle safety in terms of helmets. So slightly different kinds of things. Even so, with this text that they were reading with information about what happens if you don't have a helmet on, how people feel about it, et cetera, the background information that you brought with you still was a good predictor above and beyond your writing skills, your self-regulatory aspects of writing, like your skills and planning and your approach to writing, and also your motivational attributes, how you viewed writing in terms of your attitudes toward it, and your self-efficacy.

So I do think that at least correlationally the data is pretty strong that what you bring to the task in terms of your knowledge is important. The other thing that I would caution a little bit on this, I do think it's important to write about things that you know, and that we use source material to help students do that. That's in line with this idea of using reading and writing together to learn. So I'm very supportive of that.

But I also think it's important at times to provide students with choice about what they're writing about. Now, if you said to me, is there strong evidence that choice makes a difference in writing? I hate to say this because I like choice personally, and there's a good bit of evidence in psychology in general that choice makes a difference, but it's a very complicated situation in writing. We don't have a very strong foundation that choice makes a difference. But even so, because of the motivational aspects of choice, I think we want our kids to have choice, maybe not every time they write. And for some kids, choice might be a choice between multiple things because some kids have a great deal of difficulty, especially when they're young, making a choice. My daughter could spend three days making a choice to avoid writing basically.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I was going to ask if the lack of empirical evidence for choice being tied to motivation engagement was because it's been studied and not found to be correlated, or if it's just not been studied. Because I find that there's a lot less literature on the teaching of writing than there is on the teaching of reading.

Steve Graham:

So I think you're very perceptive in this last comment here. We have a study that came out I think this year or last year with college students where we provided choice and there were some effects, but when we looked at what was available, we located about 13 studies, and only about two or three of them actually had any kind of effect for choice. Now, what was I thought really revealing about this was that there's protocols in the choice literature, in psychology, in terms of how you do this kind of research that control things. They were not followed in any of those other 13 studies. Usually what you do in the choice literature is you also look at people's preference. So you can factor that in. We didn't find that in a single study that was previously done, which means that kind of in writing literature, we might not always have as much, but we're also maybe not looking at the way some of these things have been studied more broadly for a long period of time so that we control for extraneous factors that might influence our results.

Jennifer Serravallo:

So let's talk again about this idea of the difference between assigning writing and teaching writing. And you're the lead author on a number of practice guides, IES practice guides, that are available on the What Works Clearinghouse website, one for elementary writing instruction, and another for secondary writing instruction. I'd love to talk about what practices when it comes to writing instruction have strong evidence bases, or in other words, what does it mean to teach writing effectively? One of the first things that I saw in both of those practice guides was writing process. Can you define what you mean by writing process and why research has shown this to be an important aspect of writing instruction?

Steve Graham:

Yeah. So one of the things, and we have a new meta-analysis that just came out in Journal of Educational Psychology, looking at grade six to 12, and you're going to see that there as well. So one way of thinking about the process, about process of writing, is that by process we're talking about engaging in different production processes, is the way I would think about it. And so this is not going to be the terminology and the practice guides, but part of those production processes are conceptualization, what is it you want to do or how you've been assigned it. And even when we're assigned stuff, we set our own goals and do our own thing to some degree more or less. And conceptualization also will involve things about thinking about your organization, your purpose, your audience, et cetera. There's also ideation. You have to have something to say, which is something we've talked about.

And either it comes from in your head or it comes from the outside. You look at source materials, you interview people, you go on the internet, et cetera. We have to take whatever the idea is, whether it's an image that we've created of something that's happening in a story or a reason why we think something should be done. And we have to translate that into acceptable, an acceptable vessel sentence and the right words. And then we have to transcribe that in terms of text. And then at any point at any of those, we can reconceptualize, we can make changes. 

Now, the common wording that's used is we think about planning, drafting, revising, editing, and eventually publishing. And obviously in something like drafting, you're going to have an intermix between ideation, translation, and transcription, but it's hopefully going to be guided by conceptualization, right? So when we talk about these things and when we talk about planning, we're talking usually about your goals, the ideas that you come with, organizing, what they center around, conceptualization and ideation. And so it's engaging and making sure that people engage in those kinds of processes, whether it's using the terminology I just used or the planning, drafting, et cetera. 

Now, the other part of this I think is important to remember is we don't do all of these things on every kind of task we write. If you're leaving a note for your significant other about going out and going to the gym, you're not going to have to do a lot of planning or conceptualization. You're basically just going to scribble out, gone to the gym, be back at six 30. And there's plenty of tasks that we do on an everyday basis that involve only a couple of those processes. 

And so what students need to learn to do, in my opinion, is when to use these various production processes for specific tasks. And in schools, the way that we've done this is we put a heavy emphasis on using all of them around a process approach to writing. Now, on the other hand, there is some evidence that when you engage students in those processes, they do a bit better in their writing in terms of quality, et cetera. What's really powerful, however, is when you teach them strategies for carrying out those individual processes, like how do I plan a persuasive text? How do I plan a story? What are the criteria that I use to evaluate my own writing or evaluate somebody else's writing, either for revising or editing?

When we teach those kinds of strategies, and particularly if they're genre specific, they have a huge impact on writing quality. Now, that doesn't mean that teachers don't combine the two together. So if I'm teaching a planning strategy, that means I'm expecting my kids to plan and they're going to need to draft. Now, it may be for a little while I suspend revising and editing as we initially learn to use this strategy, but I'm going to bring those back on board, or I may have a more general strategy. So when we talk about process, I think it's important to realize that we're talking about not only this kind of, we want kids to engage in these various production processes, but we want them to have strategies that are useful and effective and eventually that they make good decisions on which ones to use when, and they can use them flexibly.

Maybe a different way of thinking about them is as schemas. So if I have to write a letter of recommendation for somebody, I don't recreate the world every time I write a letter of recommendation. I have a basic format that I use: what they're applying for or what job they're applying for, my relationship with them, how I know them, how we've interacted. Every letter starts with that initial paragraph. That saves me recreating the world every time I do this. But the reality is these schemas don't cover all aspects of writing. Even for something like a story that you're writing, that you have something that helps you plan, you have to do some thinking along the way that takes you outside of these schemas or structures that help facilitate the process. So that's the other part of this is that we use these schemas, but we also have to be able to think outside the box if you'd like a little bit. So that's kind of the way I think of these processes a little bit more complicated than we just need to engage kids in doing each of these.

Jennifer Serravallo:

That makes a lot of sense. And I want to ask you more about strategies, but before we do, I think one thing some teachers might wonder is, and I think it depends on the purpose and the task of course, but how long do you spend working on one piece of writing, working through various stages of a process, and when do you just do it all in one sitting? How much? There's another question for balance. How much should we be thinking about helping kids through, let's say a month working on one piece over time and learning a bunch of ways to revise it and rethink it and edit it, versus should it be across a week versus on a standardized test? Or when I'm writing an email, I do all the process steps all within one sitting. Do you have any thoughts about timing?

Steve Graham:

Well, yes and yes to all of these things that you've just said. So basically what you need to learn as you move from being a novice to competence is you need to learn to use writing for various purposes. And some of those tasks are going to take a long time. So as an example, I was taught to write really by a seventh grade teacher in social studies. We did one large project, and when I say I was taught to write prior to that point in time, we just wrote little short things in class, and nothing wrong with that. They can serve very important learning purposes, but nobody had ever introduced me to writing on over a period of time on a topic, how to find information, how to evaluate it, how to organize it. And for me, that one time was enough to help me down the road because it stuck with me.

Now, some kids are going to need more than that, and I would argue that we need a couple of those kind of tasks every year that kids work on that take space over a long period of time. But we also want them to do writing, say when they're reading, that may be writing a short summary or a reaction to something that they've read that they then share with somebody else. And so those may not require all this kind of process that goes into it in terms of planning and stuff. You're basically writing to help you think about something that you're learning or something that you're reading. And then we also want to be sure that students can write for various purposes. 

And so in some ways in the US those have been defined by us by Common Core, whether they've been renamed by state, Common Core has been renamed or not, but that involves narrative writing, persuasive writing, and informative writing. Those are important skills that we want to take forward. I would include summary writing within that set as well, particularly highlighting it within the informative thing. And in those cases, that takes a bit more time because I do want to be planful upfront before writing and still remain planful as I write and maybe still remain planful as I revise, because things are going to change. I'm going to discover new things to say at each of those stages, whether it's stories, whether it's persuasion, or whether it's informative. So in a sense, the answer is I think a good program involves students engaging in writing of different extended links for different purposes.

Jennifer Serravallo:

And what happened to poetry? Where did poetry go?

Steve Graham:

Well, I think one of the things that happened to poetry is Common Core doesn't mention it. And so what happens is, and I think the way to interpret Common Core is that it's suggesting, here are three. So let me back up on this a little bit. A number of years ago, we took a look at, I think 10 states to see what their writing goals were for students, and it was all over the board. I mean, the number of different kinds of writing tasks that you might have to do in elementary school if you were to satisfy these 10 states, not really possible. So what Common Core did in a potentially positive way was reduce the number of tasks. What Common Core did in a potentially negative way was reduce the number of tasks.

So I think of Common Core as a suggestion of things that we should focus in on, but it is not the do all and end all, and it presents itself as research based. Quite honestly, it is intellectually based. So if you look at the progression, if you go look at persuasive writing in 12th grade, you go to 11th grade, they've just taken one thing out of what they did in 12th grade and all the way down, and somebody made the decision to place more emphasis on persuasive writing and informative writing at all grade levels, even young grade levels, which I don't think is a bad thing. But what we're seeing in some of our work now is that we're seeing a disappearance, not just the poetry, but also we're starting to see in middle school and high school, much, much less emphasis on narrative writing.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah, I'm seeing that as well, and I'm actually starting to see it in elementary school. I think along with this push toward knowledge building curriculum and then only writing about the knowledge that you're getting from the curriculum, the most natural way to do that is, I mean, you could be creative and do poems about it or stories about it, but I do see that there's this tendency to lean on expository writing more than narrative, for sure.

Steve Graham:

Well, and in some ways, if writing is not your thing, poetry's not easy. I mean, you can do it.

Jennifer Serravallo:

No, it's not.

Steve Graham:

A haiku. That's pretty simple, right? Everybody can do a haiku, but poetry can be very sophisticated and very complex. I'm not saying haikus can't be because they can, but they're also something that anybody can pretty much do and can be involved in and could be used as a learning activity. I think Common Core, this is one of the places where it's diminished, and this is always the problem with setting up competencies, is that it focuses attention in a particular way, but it also means that on the things where the light shines, they tend to be done more, where it doesn't shine, they tend to be done less. And I think some of those decisions are, you could quibble, you could argue, you could say, I don't think that's a good decision.

Jennifer Serravallo:

So let's talk now some more about strategies. I think people are really used to hearing the word strategy when we talk about reading, especially reading comprehension. When you talk about a writing strategy, can you just give a definition and maybe an example?

Steve Graham:

So writing strategies are basically kind of the mental and potentially physical operations that one engages in mainly in terms of conceptualizing what they're doing when they write, gathering ideas, and also reconceptualizing. So if I wanted to put this, in other words, if we're thinking about planning there, the kind of operations that you would use in terms of setting goals, gathering information and calling it, and organizing it in terms of what you're going to use and what you write. And in terms of revising, it would include things like what criteria you're going to use to evaluate what you're going to do and the processes that are involved in making those revisions. We could probably extend that to drafting, but we'll keep it on planning and revising. And I think one of my favorite examples would be a strategy that we developed, Sue Depa and I called Stop.

And basically it was with about fourth to sixth grade kids, and what we were trying to get them to do, because we see kids, you give 'em a writing or something, maybe you say, well, I want you to plan in advance, most of 'em are often running, right? There's like a three second pause and they got their pen on the paper and they're writing. So the stop did two things. One, it was meant to remind you to wait a minute before you jump off and run. And the first S asked them to, or not the first S, the only S, in Stop asked them to suspend judgment. Now, basically what we were asking to do is generate ideas on each side of the argument -- that might be two sides, three sides, but generate as many ideas they could. That could be done individually, it could be done with pairs, it could be done as a whole class.

And then we'd ask them to take a side. Now I actually think they take a side before, that's the T in stop, but they have to make a decision about which point of view they're going to write from. And then the O is to organize your notes. And we did something really simple. We asked them to go through the side that they picked that they were going to argue from. And in this case, that's what we were focusing in on is putting together a single argument versus where you might've approached this with not taking a side. You could just present all the different things. But here we asked them to go through and pick the things that they thought would make the most strongest argument with the people who are going to be reading this. And they would star each one. And then they would pick a couple of things from the other side that they felt they needed to refute, and then they would organize them with a numbering system.

So fairly simple plan as a result of thinking and generating ideas around this. And then the last thing, the P was to plan and keep to write and plan more. So because one of the things we sometimes see kids do once they have a plan, they're done, they're not doing any more planning, they're just getting that plan on paper, and we want them to keep thinking as they write. And so that's a fairly simple heuristic if you'd like, for doing an opinion essay about what you believe. Now that could be expanded to include writing from source or other material, but you see what it's doing. It's helping you organize the mental operations that are involved around planning before you write, and then with a reminder to keep doing it as you write. 

And revising an example might be as simple as this: with very young kids that what you're going to do is you're going to be reading, somebody else is going to read you their paper, and you're going to go through after they've read it, and any place that is not clear to you, you put a question mark, any place you think more information is needed, you put a carrot, you know like we see, and then we work with kids in terms of how to share that information by starting off by saying, I really liked your story, telling them one or two things you really liked about it. And then coming back in a conversational point and saying, at this point in the story, I didn't really understand what you meant there. Can you tell me more? And then same thing, there wasn't enough information here for me. What else can you tell me about this? So it's kind of delivered in a nonthreatening way, but again, that's a heuristic for approaching the process of revising that can easily be changed. You can add new criteria, take criteria out, but the basic structure remains the same. You listen, you evaluate, and you share back what you think in a positive and constructive way.

Jennifer Serravallo:

So it just breaks down for kids in really clear steps, exactly what they can be doing in order and helps walk them through that with a little bit more independence. And I love how you talk about strategies being aligned to process. Also, it sounds like the strategies are aligned to different goals you might have for them, like how to organize their writing, how to elaborate or add detail in their writing, how to, you know. So there's just a lot of different ways that strategies can support writers and support their eventual independence with these different tasks.

Steve Graham:

Ultimately, what you're looking for is for people to be more strategic when they write. And so initially, when you start off writing, if you're a kindergartner, first grader, your basic strategy for planning is brainstorming ideas. And now brainstorming seems like it's been around for a long time, but it popped up in the 1950s. I'm not saying people didn't brainstorm before this, but in the academic literature and creativity, and then it kind of took on this life of its own. And we all know what brainstorming is, even if we did it before. But it's a pretty simple strategy. You can do that as a kindergartner, first grader. And then the strategies as people progress through an area, whether it's writing or another domain, tend to be more complicated and tied to a genre area. But then as you move towards competence and expertise, then you basically create your own strategies.

And so one of the things I want to emphasize here in my own work with Karen Harris, my wife, we may teach one of those two strategies like we were talking about, but we give students input once they've learned the strategy on how it will work better for them, because we don't want them to be using it in a blind way. We want them to evaluate what works for them and make suggestions, what is an improvement. And so in Stop, that plan and that part about writing and planning more, that actually came from students. That was something we noticed. But we were talking with a classroom of students and one kid said, I need to keep planning while I write. And I thought, that's a great thing. And they revised the strategy that they were using. But we want kids to be reflective and we want them to be smart about the use of this. If you teach something and they're still using the same thing two years later, then in some ways you failed at the task because you want these things to be upgraded over time. And with evaluations by kids on when to use what, with what particular writing task.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I think that's such a helpful reminder that the goal is to be strategic, that they're temporary scaffolds. Eventually we want them to not have to apply conscious attention, and maybe they learn a new strategy as writing gets more sophisticated. And this on the practice guide has strong evidence, the strongest, the strongest recommendation. What is the general research base on this?

Steve Graham:

Strategies typically when they're taught, involve a gradual release model. So we share what the strategy is with kids, we talk about why it might be helpful. We might talk about what they're doing now and how this differs, but we make sure they know what the purpose of it is and what it is. And then teachers model how to do it. And they may do that more than once. And then students get assistance until they can apply it independently. So in all strategy instruction, that's an important key is independent use and this gradual release model doing it. So when strategies follow that model, and we'll just call that our general strategy model, they're quite effective. They're probably more effective when they add to elements to this. One is we make sure that students have all the knowledge they need to apply the strategy. So if you're doing something in persuasive writing, it's good to have in your head a model of what a good persuasive piece looks like. That's going to make that strategy stop a lot more effective. 

But it's also important that we help students acquire procedures for regulating the use of that strategy, the writing process, and sometimes the behaviors that they have that get in the way of using those strategies. And so basically that model is one that's developed by my wife, and it's referred to as self-regulated strategy development, but it uses a gradual release model. The strategies are typically genre specific, and the upfront part is making sure they have the knowledge that they need to use the strategy effectively. And then involves things like goal setting to use the strategy or to do certain things in your thing, self-assessment, self reinforcement, and sometimes self instruction to help you deal with things that might be getting in the way or self-statements that you might use. 

And so when you look at the strategy instructional literature, what you find is that the effect sizes, when you add the self-regulation components, increase by about, again, for the nerd, about a half a standard deviation, but it's a substantial increase by doing and adding those self-regulation procedures. So we get really strong impacts on writing quality and other aspects of writing when we do all of those things together. And in fact, in this new secondary meta-analysis we looked at, I didn't see a lot of newer studies that didn't include those components. Even if they don't call themselves self-regulated strategy development, there's kind of this consensus, I think, without actually coming together and saying this, where we're seeing these elements in the last 10 years and virtually all of the instructional studies, at least at the secondary level involving strategy instruction.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Well, thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Graham. I've really enjoyed chatting with you.

Steve Graham:

Thank you. And I enjoyed it as well. And I think your questions were really perceptive.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Oh, thank you so much.

I now welcome my colleagues Lea Leibowitz and Macie Kerbs for a discussion about practical takeaways for the classroom. I loved that conversation. I thought he gave a lot of really helpful citations, but also really practical examples that I could visualize in the classroom. What are some things that struck you?

Macie Kerbs:

I think for me, just the importance of teaching writing on a daily basis and how the reciprocity with teaching reading and how it affects our ability to learn, that it's not enough to just do reading. We have to have writing in there regularly. Kids have to be writing a volume of pieces across the school year, a lot of different types of purposes because not only does it help their writing improve, but it's also going to help them as readers. And it was just a great reminder, especially right now where writing is taking a backseat in a lot of places. Because of this push for more structure in our reading programs, writing tends to get squeezed in the day. So I'm glad he just brought back to, brought us back to why it's important to include both reading and writing.

Lea Leibowitz:

I also like how he discussed the need for having writing to be something that takes place sometimes over an extended period of time, sometimes in one time when, and just to play off of what you're saying, Macy, about this whole reciprocity piece about the connectedness between the reading, the writing and the knowledge building, having our social studies in the middle school and high school buildings, social studies teachers and science teachers seeing themselves as teachers of literacy as well because they're such a place for reading and writing and those quick writing opportunities to help the students develop their background knowledge and their vocabulary about these topics that they're supposed to be studying at these grade levels.

Jennifer Serravallo:

I loved that detail about his seventh grade social studies teacher as an example of a content area specialist who sees writing within that discipline as a critical thing to teach. And also to keep in mind there are things that are unique about how to write in science and things that are unique about how to write in social studies. And there are things that are unique about creative writing and story writing and poetry that maybe the ELA teacher should be taking on.

But I love this idea of all of us working toward common goals around writing. I think too, when these things get squeezed out, sometimes it's the argument that there's not enough time. How do I fit it all in? But I wonder, he didn't talk about this, but I was wondering about how it could be so much more efficient if we did see reading and writing as pairs, if we saw the reciprocal processes. Because when you teach children, for example, a strategy for how to determine main idea in reading, and you tell them, for example, you could look to the headings and read each section, and then go back and put the headings together and think, so what is it mostly about? Then when they go to write, they think, oh, I should have headings to direct my reader and my headings have to give a clue to what that main idea, what it is that I'm really trying to say in this piece. It's almost like it saves time because you don't have to repeat yourself. You're like, remember that thing we did before in reading? Well, it's kind of the same thing. We're going to do it now in writing. So maybe it doesn't have to feel like it's an extra thing. Maybe it actually is more efficient to bring these things in together. And I think he made a compelling case that each of them individually supports together.

Macie Kerbs:

Yeah, I think the interconnectedness between all of that is so important. And I remember having units that the reading and the writing didn't align and I felt so stressed during the four to six week period. Maybe we were writing, I remember one year we were writing fiction stories, but our reading unit was nonfiction. And then when we got into the next unit, it happened to align perfectly, and I found so much more time in my day. So I really think if we can look at our literacy block as a whole instead of seeing these silos between reading and writing, then we can pull literature that connects the two, like our mentor texts can span across both blocks. And then if you add the element of our science and social studies content on top of that, I mean, gosh, it's just building the background they need. It's helping them make connections between the two so they don't see it as all these separate siloed subjects.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Let's talk about how he defined strategy, which I totally agree with, this series of cognitive or metacognitive steps that help you work through process and the example he used that really each of the steps in Stop would be a different step of the writing process. And in my experience, while there are some kids that that would be enough for, I always had children that needed things broken down even further. So if one of the steps was the O, organize your writing, would need a strategy for how exactly do I organize my writing? What exactly do I do to take all the information that I have and put it into some kind of format. Or P, continue to plan, how do I plan? And those how-tos I think are even more supportive for kids that need those steps that don't yet have automaticity with the process or don't yet have a deep knowledge base of that particular genre.

Lea Leibowitz:

While he was talking about that, I went to the organizing and structure chapter in The Writing Strategies Book. And I was thinking to myself for a child who is struggling with organizing the writing and doesn't know exactly how to approach that, how helpful a specific strategy would be, such as 5.24, which is outline, re-outline, and then an outline again. Or something, draw your layout or layout the pages to see the architecture. And then it got me to thinking, well, if a child is using that strategy, and he also describes strategies as being something you outgrow, that maybe later on or in a different genre, although organizing and he needed was something he struggled with and that one strategy help, the next time he gets to a place in a different genre or a different class where he has to organize, he might need a different strategy.

Jennifer Serravallo:

And can I just tell you that strategy, the "Outline, re-outline, outline again," I used that to write The Writing Strategies Book. So as somebody who's written more than a dozen books, even when I was writing that book, I was like, should I organize it according to process? Should I organize it according to genre? Should I organize it according to goals? And I kept changing my organization until I felt like I got to the right one. So in some cases, yeah, I think you do outgrow them, but in other cases, I feel like as the task becomes more challenging, like I'm now writing a 400 page book. I have to really make sure my organization's on point before I get started, or it's going to be a big mess when I'm revising. You might pull that strategy back out or you move from your ELA class to your history class where maybe the history content's a little bit challenging for you, so you're going to pull that strategy back out and use it again. 

Macie, what are you thinking?

Macie Kerbs:

I was thinking about the level of teacher support in all of these too. And so how sometimes it's a strategy that makes a difference and sometimes it's varying our support. So maybe we're starting out by modeling the process and we're creating a class lab report, for example, just creating a text together where the students might be orally contributing, but I'm doing most of the physical writing and composing of the text, and then we lean into maybe interactive where I'm handing pieces over to the students, so they're having control of some of the work, but I'm still heavily scaffolding all the way to this place where perhaps they're doing it independently with a little bit of modeling as an example but most of their work is independent, and even further an inquiry approach where they're looking at a text and thinking of how they might do it. So I think we have to think about where our students are following on that continuum of how much support they need, what age level they are, if they've had exposure to the genre before, if they've seen a lot of text. I know I really like to start most of my units with an immersion into the genre, so we can really feel it first. But making those decisions as a teacher requires us not only to think about what strategies they need to be successful, but the layer of support I need to offer to different students based on their abilities as writers and their comfort level in that genre.

Jennifer Serravallo:

You touched an important point. Thank you, Macie. Yeah, and I'm also thinking about how that level of support could vary within the classroom. I could think about as I teach my whole class, here's where I think most of them are, but then I still have to be ready to pull small groups, to meet with kids with different needs, and to have strategies ready for that variation within the class as well.

Macie Kerbs:

I'm also thinking about our students who are neurodivergent and how different tools are really helpful for them across the day. But even visual scaffolds. I know my son really is successful when he has a visual reminder of what to do. And so some of these strategies for just engaging in the writing process, setting some of these goals for maybe stamina or volume, a visual cue could be so helpful for those students. And we're not necessarily taking that away because we know it's a tool that they're going to need to be independent, but instead of handing the strategy to them and them blindly doing it, like Steve Graham was talking about, really having them own it. So maybe they're thinking about the strategy that helps them be successful, or maybe they're just drawing the visual examples as a reminder, or maybe they're helping create the steps. I think the more we can turn over to our students to own, the more they'll internalize it as a process that works for them, so that when they leave our classroom, it's something they're taking across their life as a student and an adult.

Lea Leibowitz:

It makes me, as we're talking about all the flexibility and attention to each individual that teachers need to have, how tricky it can be if you are not a writer yourself. So it brings me back to the research done by Dr. Harris, about effectiveness of professional learning is involving the first step of putting the teacher into the seat of the student and engaging the teachers in the work that they eventually will be the teacher of. And I think for those that are listening, that feel kind of lost or how am I going to know what strategy for what kid? I think the best thing you can do is spend time being the writer yourself and give these strategies a try. Sit down and see what works for you. See what you do that is putting a roadblock. See what happens when you're writing and a roadblock shows up. What's your next step? And just having yourself in the seat of the student is going to, I think, help to make you feel more confident, be more fluid, be more efficient and effective in the writing, the teaching of writing that you do.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Absolutely. Hands down, the hardest genre for me to teach is poetry. And I think it's becauseI don't write it. I tell stories to my kids, sometimes we write them down, obviously I write informational texts, I write persuasive stuff all the time, blogging or emails that are trying to persuade people of things. But when do I sit down and write poetry? Not so much. So when I'm a guest teacher in a classroom and they're writing a poem, I'm like, deep breath, here we go. So I feel like you can trust me. You can trust me. I know some things about poetry, but it's definitely the hardest because I don't write it as often. It's not as automatic for me.

Macie Kerbs:

That's so interesting. I feel the opposite. So I love poetry, but I live my life in song, so I am just musical to my core. I just feel it. I see it in my children a lot, that same whatever it is. I just was a natural musician. I was writing songs from really age eight on. My dad does the same thing. It is just kind of who I am. It's so much part of my identity. And then writing expository text was really hard for me. I think it was the critical feedback I received as a student paralyzed me a bit from trying new things. And it wasn't really until I got into my doctorate program that I started feeling comfortable as a writer and owning that title because I was getting positive feedback. I was collaborating with people. I was learning how to use mentor texts in a way that was towards the purpose of my writing. Whereas before anything that was creative, I felt confident, but if I had to convey my knowledge, it was different. And it really is the difference of a teacher fostering that in a positive, uplifting way versus a teacher kind of making it more formulaic and structured and feeling like I didn't know quite how to add who I was to that piece.

Lea Leibowitz:

So interesting.

Jennifer Serravallo:

It is. I didn't know that about you, Macie. And I think it goes back to what we were talking about around agency, whether or not it was choice of topic, but even just having choices within the composition and being able to make decisions. If you're learning about how to incorporate flashback in your narrative, saying to kids, try one, and you don't have to keep it if you don't like it, rather than saying, everyone must have three flashbacks. So having choices I think matters a lot.

Lea Leibowitz:

And weaving in what you just said, Macie, this idea of spending time studying the mentors, which Steve spoke to and how helpful it is when we are as a reader, studying what writers do, it's helping us understand more as a reader, but then it also can in turn help us to become better at that kind of writing. So saving that time. I wonder how many teachers don't spend the time studying the mentors, because they feel like they just have to get the product, the task completed, the students' writing on the paper, but how much more supportive students would feel and more prepared they would feel starting a writing piece, having first spent time studying it as a mentor text and why that time is so valuable and should not be next.

Macie Kerbs:

I think another layer of what you're talking about too is making sure the products that students are completing, we are modeling what that looks like. So the mentor texts we're selecting looks like the piece that they're producing. So a lot of times we pull picture books in, but the students are writing these like short story-esque type pieces, and so it doesn't look like the pieces that we're writing.

And then similarly, the digital platforms of how to publish. Sometimes we're not modeling that for the students. And so how important it is to make sure what we're modeling through our own writing and through the mentor text resembles what our students are going to produce so they have a really clear picture of what that structure is, and then the rest of it having choice within that of how many flashbacks or how you're using figurative language. But I think the more clear we can be in that structure or the product or the options of products, I think the better for students. So they are not feeling like that's ambiguous to them.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Well, thank you both so much for joining me today. I've loved this conversation and I hope teachers listening have a lot of practical ideas for their own professional learning, and also as you step in front of students and support them with their writing. Thanks, Lea. Thanks, Macie.

Macie Kerbs:

Thanks, Jen.