From Practice to Transfer

A Backstory: 

A Backstory

It’s soccer season, and with two daughters who play on our town’s travel team, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the soccer field. Naturally, as I watch them practice drills, scrimmage, and play games, my mind drifts to how the work happening on the field mirrors the work that can, and should, happen in our classrooms.

Every soccer practice begins in a similar way, with players practicing core skills through drills. They might dribble through cones, pass with a partner, or work on another skill their coaches have prioritized. But coaches know that players also need opportunities to practice those skills in context. So, they scrimmage.

As they do, coaches watch closely, offering feedback through their words, modeling, asking questions, and providing in-the-moment coaching. They notice what players are doing well, where they’re struggling, and what might help them take the next step. The drills matter, but so does the opportunity to put those skills to work in a more authentic context, with responsive coaching happening along the way.

At the beginning of this school year, our literacy coaching team provided district professional development for our K–2 teams, inviting teachers to think about this same balance in the context of writing. How can we support students in developing the foundational skills of writing while keeping our eyes on the bigger picture, what Melanie Meehan describes as “freedom” in her post, Foundational Skills and Composition: Finding Common Ground?

Why It Matters

For our August Blog Series, I wrote a post entitled Explicit Instruction and Responsive Instruction: Finding Common Ground. In this post, I explored how explicit and responsive instruction can work together rather than exist as competing approaches. I keep coming back to this idea.

I keep coming back to this idea because I think it matters deeply when we think about foundational skills.There can sometimes be a false choice between teaching foundational skills explicitly and giving students opportunities to write authentically.

We need both.

Students need direct, intentional instruction in handwriting, spelling, high-frequency words, grammar, punctuation, and other foundational skills. They need opportunities to practice those skills until they become increasingly automatic.

We also need to give students opportunities to use those skills in the context of real writing.

And we need to notice whether they do.

The Details

So, what does this look like in practice? How do we make space for explicit instruction while also giving students meaningful opportunities to write, apply what they’ve learned, and make decisions as writers? The graphic below captures the balance I aim to help teachers think about. The real work happens in the details, in the small instructional decisions teachers make throughout the writing process.

1. Teach Explicitly

We can’t hold students accountable for skills we haven’t explicitly taught.

This may sound obvious, but it is an important place to begin.

If we want students to use correct letter formation, we need to teach and model letter formation.If we want students to write complete sentences, use punctuation, or apply grammatical conventions, we need to teach those concepts clearly and give students opportunities to practice them.

Explicit instruction gives students the foundation they need. But foundational skills don’t need to take over the writing classroom. A short, focused lesson can introduce a skill. Students can practice it. And then they can take that knowledge with them into their own writing.

This is where I think about the soccer drills. A player might spend ten minutes practicing passing. But the coach isn’t thinking, Great. We practiced passing. We’re done. The coach is thinking, Now let’s see you use that pass. Our foundational skills instruction should work the same way.

2. Find Opportunities for Transfer

This is where accountability becomes important. When students move into independent writing, the skills we’ve taught don’t disappear. They come with them.

This doesn’t mean we expect perfection. It doesn’t mean we correct every error on every page. And it certainly doesn’t mean that foundational skills become the only thing we notice about a student’s writing. It means that we pay attention to whether students are applying what they have been taught.

Imagine a second grader who has spent time learning and practicing a set of high-frequency words. During a word study lesson, she spells said correctly. But when she writes independently, she consistently writes sed.

Or perhaps we’ve explicitly taught students how to form letters and space their words. During handwriting practice, a student demonstrates control and legibility. Yet his independent writing is difficult to read because he writes quickly and doesn’t attend to letter formation or spacing.

The question becomes:

How do we help students understand that the skills we practice are skills they are expected to use?

• This might mean naming the expectation before students write:

“Today, as you write, I want you to pay particular attention to the high-frequency words we’ve been practicing. These are words you know, so I’m going to expect you to spell them correctly in your writing.”

• This might mean providing time at the end of writing time for students to check their work to make sure they’ve met expectations:

“We’ve been working really hard to use mostly lowercase letters when we are writing. Take a few minutes to reread your writing from today. Use your editing pen to fix any uppercase letters that may need to be lowercase.”

• This might mean giving feedback that holds students accountable:

“I noticed you had many places where you added punctuation to your writing today. See if you can go back and do that on all of your pages.”

In each of these moments, we’re doing more than correcting an error.

We’re helping students make the connection:

3. Ongoing Feedback

Noticing how students are transferring skills to their independent writing helps us determine what happens next. Next steps might include:

• A quick writing conference to remind a student of a skill we want them to consistently use.
• A reminder or a tool that prompts students to apply a skill independently.
• A small group with a bit more explicit instruction and coaching toward transfer.
• A new challenge because a student is ready for the next thing.

We aren’t simply teaching a skill, checking whether students can demonstrate it in isolation, and moving on. We’re watching to see whether students are carrying that learning into their authentic work.

One Final Thought

In soccer, the drills matter. But the drills aren’t the game.

Our writing classrooms are not so different. We explicitly teach the foundational skills students need. We give them opportunities to practice. Then we give them opportunities to write, to make decisions, solve problems, and put those skills to work.

Then, we watch and notice what students are carrying with them.

The goal isn’t for students to simply demonstrate foundational skills during a lesson. The goal is for those skills to become part of what students can independently do as writers.

That’s the scrimmage. That’s where we get to see what the drills have made possible.