What To Do When Your Students Can’t (or Won’t) Write About Reading

A BACKSTORY: I tried everything during my years as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher. I modeled. I scaffolded. I anchor charted. I asked my kids to letters and responded to every single one. I used annotations and post it notes and journals and every fun writing instrument under the sun, but nothing ever seemed to have the intended impact. My students just never became more than mediocre at writing about their reading. And that’s if they wrote at all.

I’ve learned a lot since then about both reading and writing, and realize in hindsight that there were a few simple teaching moves that would have made a world of difference for both my students and me when it came to improving their writing about reading.

WHY THIS MATTERS: Writing about reading improves comprehension and builds students’ writing skills. The work that is done in elementary classrooms is the precursor to the literary essays students will write in middle and high school. But the less successful this work is, the less impact it has on students.

Instructional Move #1: Clarify and Share Expectations

It’s easy to look at kids at the end of a reading lesson and give a familiar reminder: “Don’t forget to write about your reading today.” It’s also very likely to result in a pile of writing that lacks most of the things we hope to see in their work. By being clear–to ourselves and to our students–about what we expect and why, students will begin to work toward a meaningful target.

How It Works: Explicitly name the purpose for the work and the process for getting there. The process may include stopping and jotting ideas, writing long about one significant idea/thought/quote/question, or sketching thoughts in a notebook. The purposes for writing about reading are many: to think more deeply about a text and what it means to the reader; to capture big ideas as they unfold; and to see how thinking shifts and evolves over the course of a text or across similar texts.

Test It Out: If we ask students why they are writing about a text and they can’t tell us more than “because my teacher said so,” it’s time to examine our clarity.

Instructional Move #2: Center Writing About Reading as a Unique Genre

Similar to writing letters or developing opinion essays or pouring a favorite memory into a personal narrative, writing about reading is a genre. Each genre has its own unique structures and formats and expectations, so it matters that we introduce this work to students as a genre of its own.

How It Works: Many of the best genre writing units start with immersion; writing about reading should do the same. Share exemplars with students and discuss what works and doesn’t work. (For middle and high school students, Penny Kittle has some amazing examples of this work on her website.) Give students a learning progression and the knowledge to self-evaluate their skills so they can see the ways in which they can improve at this genre of writing.

Test It Out: Do you see learning progressions or examples of writing about reading in your classroom that students can use to understand this genre at a deeper level? If not, work with students to build tools and resources that support this genre.

Instructional Move #3: Invite Talking Before Writing

Having the opportunity to rehearse before writing is a critical part of the writing process and shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to writing about reading. Just as Melanie Meehan shared in last week’s #TWTPod Tip for Tomorrow, “the more that [kids] can [share ideas] verbally, the better they’re going to be able to write it.” Oral rehearsal isn’t just a scaffold for workshop writing; kids need to be able to practice and plan their writing no matter what they’re working on. Writing about reading is no exception.

How It Works: Embed time in instruction to have kids talk before they write about their reading. If they’re writing about a shared text, include a turn-and-talk opportunity during the whole group lesson. If they’re writing about an independent read, schedule a mid-workshop break for them to share ideas with a partner. And if they’re writing as part of a book club, shift writing to after the discussion rather than requiring something they need to bring to the group with them–the purpose of discussion, after all, is to construct meaning and explore new and deeper ideas.

Test It Out: Listen to students as they share their ideas verbally prior to writing. If they struggle to articulate what they want to write, they will likely need extra support to generate ideas and put them on paper.

TRY IT OUT: Try going through the process by practicing your own writing about reading, clarifying your understanding of the genre, and being intentional about the written assignments that accompany reading tasks.

GO DEEPER: Check out these two 2020 posts by Betsy Hubbard (part 1/part 2) for a toolkit designed to support middle school students as they write about reading.