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Transcript of Speakers

IV. The Profound Impact of Writing Instruction

A. Marcia Freeman: Teaching the Craft of Writing

Teach Writing Instruction

MARCIA FREEMAN:

I’ve talked about the curriculum, and I want to show you some real concrete examples

now of what I mean by that and how we teach writing craft to students.

Using the information from Brian Cambourne about how to teach writing craft, this a

general outline of what we do. I’m going to just go through this lickety-split with a real-life

example.

When we’re working with children, the delivery system of this cannot be we’ll just

teach kids craft willy-nilly. There has to be a cohesive way of doing it. In the program that

I’ve set up, even though it has the curriculum of what we’re supposed to teach, it is in

sequential order – generally K, one, two, three, four, five, and it builds.

The curriculum is designed like math. There’s adding, multiplying, dividing,

subtracting, geometry, fractions, that type of stuff. It’s the same thing in writing. There’s

organization, description, beginnings and endings, sentence, critical strands. I’m just going to

show you briefly about that.

But when you teach craft itself, I always start with description in the early months of

school for the big kids, the first few weeks of school; but K, one it’s almost built on

description and expository writing.



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Here’s what we do. Here’s what it means. I’m going to give you a little quick

demonstration of this. I think I’ll use this one; usually I do strong verse. Boys and girls,

we’ve been working on the attributes of color and number, and we’ve been talking about

attributes. Attributes are key to thinking, by the way. It’s particularly comparison. And

we’ve read this book Wetlands. Teachers know there’s two layers of a book – the content

about wetlands and the craft. You have to read the content first. If you’re trying to use the

craft, the kids are interested in the content, and they’re trying to match it to their background

experience. You have to have read this.

Kids, remember the book I read you about the wetlands. We’ve seen this before. If

I’m in an upper grade like seventh and eighth grade or sixth, we do the craft simultaneously

because they’re reading the text, and I don’t do it as a shared reading as I would in

kindergarten.

Boys and girls, remember we’ve already looked at this book for introductions for

hooks, and we remember this one was talking directly to your reader. That was one of the

techniques. But I want to show you something else that science writers do. Little kids, it

might be I just want to show you the skill; but bigger kids I’d say I want to show you what

science writers do. Science writers are introducing new concepts to children. And you can’t

just throw a new concept at a kid; it has to relate to what he already knows. So we use simile,

we use analogy. We’re saying, Here’s a new concept; don’t panic; it’s a lot like something

else you already know.

Boys and girls—when I wrote this and I defined wetlands and told about whether it

has trees, I wanted to talk about the sizes. Did you ever notice that when somebody says they



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have a big dog and you’re trying to visualize it; what’s big? A Chihuahua is big to an ant, but

to an elephant it looks pretty puny.

What writers do is they give you relative sizes. Here I talked about a wetland can be

as big as the Florida Everglades or as small as a ditch by a railroad track. That’s the use of

simile to show relative size, to show how huge it can be.

One of the things I wanted to show little kids is that a wetland is a huge nursery and a

source of food; it’s a source of food for us too – shrimp and cranberries. I wanted to tell them

that. The lousy writing would be, A wetland has lots of food. That’s terrible. What I did is I

put, Hey kids, this is a new concept, but it’s like something you already know. Wetlands are

like wilderness supermarkets. Kids know what’s in a supermarket – lots of food. That’s what

a wetland is like. And then I explain it has food for everybody, including us.

The hardest part about wetland concepts is this water. Why can’t we fill in the

wetlands? They’re ugly. Why don’t we just fill them in and build houses? They keep fresh

water on the land. Why? They sop up heavy rains like a huge sponge. Little second graders

understand that. They understand that. They say, Oh, I get it. That’s the use of simile.

Strategies to Introduce a Writing Lesson

I could also read to you Quick as a Cricket, which is a very good book on simile. So

I’ve talked about it, and I’ve showed them what real writers do.

Then I model it for students with a picture, perhaps. And I’ll say, The man’s hat is red

like a tomato. And I say things about the picture. Then I have them try it out orally. We

mustn’t ever forget this step. Writers should articulate what they write verbally first.



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Then I invite the kids to try it out with writing. Then another time, instead of starting

with a book which takes up a bit of time, I might just do a shared writing or interactive or

modeled to start the lesson. Then, again, invite them to try it out, to approximate, to take the

responsibility of trying it, take the risk. And it isn’t until later when I’ve given them time to

practice this in their independent writing—maybe it’s a journal, maybe it’s their science notes,

maybe it’s in a literacy center where they’re practicing using similes—I show them other

books that contain it.

And here’s the funny thing. When you’re reading in a school that does writing craft

and a teacher starts to read, hands go up. Did you hear that? It was a simile. Did you hear

that? Hey, those were a series of commas. The kids start listening as writers, and they read as

writers. And they’ll come and say to you, Mrs. Freeman, Mrs. Freeman, you’ve got to see

this book. This writer does the same thing we do. That’s what they say – the writer does the

same thing we do.

We talk about boys. Back up to why we need to focus on nonfiction. We’re losing

the boys. We all know that. Boys are becoming disengaged with school. Why? Because

they’re not interested in Mrs. Squiggly Piggly stories. In a study done by Alan Dodge in

Georgia, it’s called “Brook Frenzy,” and it’s been replicated so many times. He’s about to

write a paper on it. He puts out all books, fiction and nonfiction, and says to the kids as they

come in, Pick any book you’d like. Go sit in a circle. The favorite book of all fifth grade

boys, Naked Mole Rats. Naked Mole Rats. Ninety percent of the children, boys and girls,

select nonfiction when freely accessible.



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What we’re saying is here are the kids tremendously interested in real life, their life,

and we’re asking them to read Mrs. Wiggly Piggly stories. I’ve gone in classes where

teachers have said to me, Come in and show me how to get my kids motivated. I’ll go in and

say, What are you working on? Well, we’re all writing fairy tales. These five boys are over

here cussing and swearing. Why? Can you get them to write? I said, I can’t get them to

write fairy tales. And why would I. I said, Give me the license to have them write whatever

they like, and I will show you something. I go over, and I interview them. I have them

writing about Naked Mole Rats and their dirt bikes and going fishing with their dad. Then I

teach them a skill. They’re not good at it, but when they’ve done it they say, Hey, that sounds

good; I can do a simile, I can do a series of commas, I can do focus. It breaks the whole I hate

writing. The favorite book of fifth grade boys; they pick it every time – Naked Mole Rats.

There isn’t anything in that title that doesn’t appeal to them.

Formative Assessment for Writing Instruction

Eventually, I say to the children, Boys and girls, we’re going to write a genre piece—

this is second grade forward—and these are the four target skills we’ve been working on. I’m

going to assess your piece for that. And we take that through the process with lessons, with

practice. Or I may give them a quiz. I can assess are they applying that to their writing. This

is what Brian Cambourne says – immersion, demonstration, let them take the risk, allow

approximation, response, and then we add assessment.

Let me just show you. We did this simile. Let me show you what kids do. This is a

lot of fun here. Here is a piece of the curriculum under description. These are the kinds of

literary comparisons that there are, and they are not the standard simile metaphor; there’s lots



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more. This represents what we do in kindergarten, and we move to fifth grade where

metaphor, which is more abstract, is appropriate.

The little kids are dealing with –er and –est words, and we introduce them to the word

like. This looks like. . . It’s red like a tomato. Then we introduce just like—same thing,

really, just a little more. Around first grade, we introduce simile, the formal type, as blank as

a . . . Then around second and third grade, we introduce it reminds me of. . . And a third

grader brought me this one. I accept contributions from all writers. A little third grader, we

had worked through these in his school including so blank that. . . My dog is so big that his

feet hang over the front seat of the car. That shows relative size. He came to me and he said,

Mrs. Freeman, would this be one of those things. He said, Spaghetti is the same as macaroni

only it’s longer. And I said, Ooh, I like that; let’s add it to the list.

Over the course of teaching the skills involved here over five or six years, look what

the kids have learned to do in terms of comparison, just comparison. And that’s just one piece

of the curriculum piece of description. The other is having to do with attributes.

Teaching the Language of Description

Let’s look at what some of the kids do. I want to show you what kids do. And you’re

going to see that my writing has a lot of analyticalness to it. I’ve been called a reductionist. I

don’t know whether that was good or bad; it sounded like a bad thing, but I don’t agree. I’m

very analytical because of my science training, and here’s what I discovered.

When you teach science and writing, they have the same skills; there’s commonalities.

Kids come to us as wonderful observers, but they don’t have the language of description.

That’s our job. Once kids understand the word attribute—an attribute is color, number, size,



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temperature, whatever—we teach them the language of description starting K, one. Start right

away.

Once they can focus on attribute, they can make comparison. And making

comparisons is the hugest task and the best task of all. Let me show you something that a

researcher found, and I think it was Marzano. Is he somebody who’s good or bad? Let me

see where I found it. In a study that he did, it’s called “What Works in Schools: Translating

Research into Action,” of all the instructional strategies that affect student achievement,

identifying similarities and differences had the hugest affect size. And over here on another

chart I have the standard deviation. But you see that it’s a very important skill. Really.

Why? Because attribute is the active root of everything we do.

If you’re going to make a decision—plan A or plan B in Iraq—those military planners

had to look at the attributes of the two plans and see which was the more useful at the time. If

you’re going to buy a car, what do you do? You look at the attributes. What are the attributes

of cars that you look at when you buy them? Size, gas mileage, price of the tires, how long

they tend to last, anything, the popularity; what you’re going to look like in it as you drive it

down the street. Those are called attributes. Whenever there’s a problem and solution, you’re

always looking at the attributes. That’s how you make comparison. It’s a very important

learning skill.

Once the kids have the attributes, they can start making comparisons. Once you make

comparisons, you can sort and classify, which is how you organize expository writing. You

say, All these things belong together because they’re all about what whales eat; and all these

words and ideas go to together because they share the attribute of where whales live; and all



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these things that I’ve collected go together because they’re all about where whales live.

They’re clumping by attribute; they’re looking at things and saying, This is like this, and this

is like this. They all go in one paragraph or one section. That’s how we organize expository

writing. If we can’t identify attributes, we’re stuck. If we haven’t sorted and classified beings

in first grade, we’re stuck.

When we get to comparisons, I start with comparing things one to another, and then

we do actual comparison papers. You want to see some kids do this.

Teaching Comparison

This is a first grader, September. Alex runs like a cheetah. This teacher was very

smart because she did a big shared chart, and you can only do half the class because their

butts get tired sitting on the floor. She says, Those of you who have already contributed to the

chart, she gave them their little class picture. She said, You go write independently and

illustrate your contribution while the rest of us finish up the shared chart.

In an older class, these children had been introduced—one was an ESL student, and he

had never done anything like this before. I was amazed at what he had done. Victor is

practicing comparisons. We introduced him to three of them. This is late second grade class.

And his picture—they do it as pictures. He says, An ant is as small as dirt, and they bite as

hard as a mosquito. And it hurts badly. He actually has that; that’s good English. The ants

remind me of my little brother.

Justin is looking at a picture of a Kuala bear—and notice that the kids write practice

on their paper. This means anything goes, you’re trying it out, nobody is going to grade it.

They have to know this is practice; it’s like playing the scales. This is a picture of a Kuala



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bear, and his eyes are like marble. His claws are so sharp they would probably dig right into

the tree. His fur looks a little hard. He’s as small as a cereal box. They’re incorporating this.

Here is a finished piece, an assessment piece, in which the children were—and this is

from Stark County right down here. This little girl, Tiffany, writes. They were to describe a

special shell, and this piece was graded on their ability to do these things. My shell is three

inches across. It looks like a fan. The top and the middle are brown. The bottom is tan. It

feels like a roller coaster with ridges, and when you touch it your finger goes up and down. It

sounds like an ocean. It’s used for decoration. I got it when I was on vacation in Missouri.

This shell reminds me of the sea. This is a third grader writing this.

Isn’t that nice. Don’t you wish your high school kids could write like that?

This little girl somewhere in the North. My picture has a caterpillar in it, and it’s as

prickly as a porcupine. It’s whiskers are as black as coal. It’s climbing up a tree. It’s head is

yellow as a dandelion. He’s as ugly as an ogre. Do you like bugs? I do. He reminds me of

seaweed.

You see these starts here. These starts were given to the child during a peer

conference. Instead of kids going like this, Will you be my peer partner? Blah, blah, blah,

blah. And they all go, That’s nice, I like it. And then she does it back to me. That

accomplishes nothing; that’s a waste of time other than we got to read our piece. Instead, I

read my piece to her and she connects to the content—we teach kids connect to the content.

She says, I’ve seen a caterpillar.

Now I read it sentence by sentence, and the target skill was similes or comparisons.

When I get here she says, Stop. I want to give a compliment to the craft. She gives me a



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sticker. That’s what we’ve done with peer conferences. We’ve totally taken away this, Here,

critique my writing stuff, which is the blind leading the blind in elementary school. What

we’ve done is we’ve said focus on connecting to the content and then compliment the craft.

Because the kid wrote aiming at doing this craft, give him a compliment every time.

Now, kids want to have peer conferences. And here’s the fun thing. This leads to

revision where blah, blah, blah, it’s nice, I like it. It does not because they can’t critique each

other’s. They can only recognize craft. When a kid only has one sticker, this kid can either

help them get a simile in the piece or you can do a lesson that says, Hey, how many kids

didn’t have many similes this first time we did it. Six kids raise their hands. Let’s look at

how you can add it after. Now we just address how can we put a simile in. You see the

revision is very goal oriented, very concrete; we’re only going to that one skill. This is how

you build up kids’ confidence.

Using "Contrast" in Writing

When they read this, they think they are such hot stuff. They think they’re the best

writers in the world when they do this. So you change the whole attitude. Little Victor’s

attitude about writing changed considerably.

Here’s a kid who puts it in a personal narrative. This is a genre block. This is the first

week of school, second week. They’ve done so much work in this school, they don’t even

have to start the year with a review of these peer conferences and things. There were four

target skills in this piece. The teacher taught them that a personal narrative has to be shaped

like a snake that ate a mouse with a very tiny ending and the bulk in the middle. The kids

decided she had done that. The target skills were simile—they had already studied it;



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contrast—that was a new one; the ending—it had to be shaped like a snake that ate a rate; and

the ending had to tell your feelings. That’s an ending technique for a narrative; that’s what

drives a personal narrative.

Here she goes. When I was in Disney World, I went on a ride called Tower of Terror

with my—oh, the convention was series of commas—father, cousin and two uncles. It’s an

elevator that falls for 13 stories free-fall. I was so scared that whenever I went up my face

turned white, and whenever we went down my face turned green. Isn’t that beautiful contrast.

Now that is after lessons in second grade on using antonyms in sentences. How can one little

dog give us such big problems? I lost my book. I looked inside, I looked outside. They do

lots of those until they get the feeling of contrast. Now, she says, I was clinging to my dad’s

arm like a water slug clinging to a fish tank. But what I didn’t know was that the people who

run the ride take pictures of you while you’re in there. Then—it should be when—When my

dad, cousin and my two uncles saw my picture they started laughing like a hyena. I felt so

embarrassed.

Did she hit all of the target skills? Yes. Does she get an A? Yes. This is an ordinary,

average student writing a personal narrative after a series of lessons, bringing in two lessons

she had learned the year before, adding to it and producing a little personal narrative. This is

what writing education is all about, applying craft to our writing.

Do you see there’s lots of room for creativity. People say, Well, if they’re following

this curriculum and you’re doing all these lessons, when do kids get to do free writing? All

the time, because almost all the children, unless they’re doing a report based on some science

work we’ve done or social studies, select their own topic. No one told her to write about the



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Tower of Terror. All she had to do was write a personal experience, narrative, and

incorporate four or five target skills that we had—some were new and some were review.

Can I use this as diagnosis for diagnostic techniques? Okay, Jeff says we should. And

that’s exactly what this teacher did. Guess what she thought might be the next lessons that

this child needs in personal narrative or any writing. Once you learn craft, then you begin to

say, Okay. You cannot say to this kid there’s lots of things wrong with this. If you say

anything is wrong with it, that’s what I have to do in instruction. What do I need to instruct

this child in?

PARTICIPANT:

How to write a paragraph.

MARICIA FREEMAN:

Paragraphing. Yes, she just did it on a computer and pressed enter for every single

sentence. What else besides when to paragraph?

PARTICIPANT:

Possessives.

MARICIA FREEMAN:

Possessives. Yes, she’s ready for possessives because she’s trying to use them.

Whenever a kid tries to use something, that’s when you say, Oh, I’ll help them out.

That was the next lesson that the teacher did – when do you paragraph in narrative.

It’s not like expository where it’s clumps. Who knows when you paragraph in narrative?

Most of the teachers don’t, I’m sorry to tell you. You always do it after. You never ask



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children to paragraph as they write narratives. Even grownups can’t do it. What do you do

afterward? Where would you put P or that little symbol?

PARTICIPANT:

Whenever you move to a new idea.

MARICIA FREEMAN:

Kids don’t understand what you mean by idea. They haven’t a clue when you say a

new idea. They just don’t know what it means. Can you be more specific? That’s exactly

right, but what kind of an idea?

PARTICIPANT:

Well, I would probably storyboard this with them.

MARICIA FREEMAN:

You could storyboard it, a change of scene. Okay. Very interesting. PATS for

paragraph. Everybody pat yourself on the shoulder. Boys and girls, I want you to remember

PATS for paragraph – change of place, change of action, change of time, change of speaker.

Could we paragraph this now if you put that up? PATS for paragraph. Change of place,

change of action, change of time, change of speaker. So, yes, if you say to the kids, Sit with

each other, read them over and put PATS in front of you and stick a P when you think the

action changed or the setting changed, the place setting, or the time changed or there were

people talking. That’s what you do; you do it as an after, you do it as an editing, not while

you write.



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Spelling is NOT Writing

Let’s look at a bigger kid. Let’s look at a fourth grader who was trying to do two

things; trying for metaphor—and these kids are working on voice. I was in a school—I work

with a school that is so wrapped up in writing education that if you went into it would knock

you over. There’s writing everywhere. Everything’s writing. They write in math, they write

in social studies, they write in science, they do target skills. A little girl came up to me and

said, Mrs. Freeman, I see target skills everywhere. These kids said to me, We want to know

about voice. We want to know about voice.

This kid was working on metaphor, and this other little girl got some voice. He wasn’t

sure about the voice, but he wants to do a metaphor, and he struggled with it. But he got some

others. The picture reminds me of a rock I climbed at Bear Mountain. It’s as big as a

dinosaur. The boy in the picture looks like a mouse compared to the rock. It probably feels

rough, and the boy feels smooth. He’s trying every texture. This is practice writing. Practice

writing is not graceful, and we don’t even ask kids for graceful writing. The boy is tan, and

the rock is brown. The rock is called a boulder. And he struggled and got it. This boulder is

a giant’s egg. And it isn’t, it’s a rock. He hit it. It’s when you say something is.

This little girl got voice. We were working on voice here and working with simile.

The raccoon reminds me of a cat because cats tend to wash themselves a lot. Raccoons are as

cute as a puppy. His color is not that bright, but they’re interesting. This raccoon is a good

fisherman. He’s as fast as lightning. You gotta be quick to catch a fish with your hands.

When a writer turns to his reader, steps outside his writing and editorializes about

what he’s written, that’s one component of voice. She did it.



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You notice that she spells raccoon incorrectly. We’re not trying to raise a nation of

spellers; we’re trying to raise a nation of writers. There are children—what good does it do to

be a speller. I’m not a speller; I’m what you call a double recessive nonspeller. It runs in my

family. My father is a carrier of the gene; he can’t spell. But my mother has two, so that half

of the kids, seven kids, four can spell and three can’t. I married a speller because that’s what

you do when you can’t spell. He’s a carrier because one of our kids can’t spell and one can.

So we got two double recessives. And you knew it by the time you were in third grade. I

never passed a spelling test in my life. That’s one of the reasons I was sent into science.

You’ll never be a writer. That was another thing that was wrong with my writing. You’ll

never be a writer, go into science.

Spelling is not writing. I am a writer. I have 30 books in print, I write articles, I’m a

writer. I make my living as a writer. And it isn’t because of my spelling. I married a guy

who could spell, my one son who can’t spell paid his little brother a nickel a page through

high school. When he went to college, he paid his roommate a dollar a page, inflation, and

never turned in a paper that was misspelled, but he himself did not do it because he couldn’t.

You need to be aware that you’re harping on the case of kids who are genetic nonspellers and

will never be able to spell. This kid might be one, but I don’t think so. I think she just

doesn’t know raccoon because her other spelling is quite good. That’s a word we teach her.

Now we get to the writer who you all know as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,

Rick Bragg who writes for the “Saint Petersburg Times.” And he writes in the newspaper

about the oyster industry in Florida. Down here he talks about chugging softly, this boat

pushes the narrow oyster boat over Appalachiacola Bay, gently intruding on the white egrets



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that slipped like paper airplanes just overhead. Oh, he used a simile. And the kids say, We

can do that. It’s very important.

I show teachers, See, no matter how old you are, you’re supposed to use this craft. I

always tell teachers you have to have these, you have to have these. And I always say get

novice ones and pretty good ones but not gifted writers. You always have to have two of

these per lesson. What you’re saying is, Hey, last year, look at what these kids did. If you

just show them this, they’re saying, Well, he’s a Pulitzer Prizewinner. I can’t do that. But if

you say, Hey, look what this kid did, the kids will say, I might be able to do that. They have

to see student models. Are there errors? Can you show this if there’s errors? Of course you

can. Practice. This is a practice piece, boys and girls, and look what she did with simile or

comparisons.

All teachers need to have student models to show other children what the possibilities

are. You can’t just do this to kids. This writer uses them, blah, blah, blah. And they’re

saying, Yeah, well he’s a grownup. What do you expect? I can’t do it. Back to drawing. I’m

not going to write because I can’t compete with that. No, they bring it to you and say, Hey,

look this author used a simile just like we did last week. Models. Models form nonfiction

and fiction and student models.

There’s an example of what it means to have a progressive, articulated curriculum.

You start small and you build and build and build, just like adding, subtracting, multiplying.



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Encourage Students to Model Good Writing

Why does this writing craft approach succeed? Number one, it’s very concrete. The

skills are very concrete. Secondly, there’s instant feedback. The kids immediately get the

stickers for the craft, so they know they’re improving. All of the models come from reading.

I want to point something out to you written by Robert Scholes. Robert Scholes of

Brown University, S-C-H-O-L-E-S. This is from the “New Haven-Yale University Press.”

And he says, “Our aim should be to help students learn how to produce a good, workman like

job with a written essay whenever they need to.” Isn’t that a good goal. “It means mastering

the medium through the study of models.” And, he says, “Students who are asked to write

anything at all must have a chance to see what a good one looks like.” Instead of assign and

assess, it should be here’s what it looks like when it’s sort of well-done. They have to see

that.

I was afforded that privilege when I was in Cornell. In one class, a professor said, I

don’t want any of your stupid sophomoric reports. He said, Come to my office. There are ten

papers there that got As in the last three years. Come up there, study them and model yours

afterward. Copy it, essentially. You can copy everything but the content, because we were

doing genetic studies of our own family, so you can’t copy someone else’s. But he said,

Model yours after that. And that was the first time I ever heard anybody say, This is what a

good one looks like.

In high school, my two sisters’ work was collected and kept from me in case I should

copy it. Audrey and Paul went through English three and four ahead of me, and the English



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teacher kept their papers because they had a younger sister coming up, didn’t want her to copy

it. I never got to see what a good one looked like.

He says, Use bad examples that you create on your own; don’t use kids’ bad examples.

But here’s what he says about craft. “Even in creative writing class, craft is all that can be

taught.” It’s all that can be taught is craft. What the writer does with it is his business.

Melissa Forning, who’s a writer and a consultant, just went to the University of

Vermont, Vermont College’s fine arts and children’s writing. She just got a master’s last

month. And the whole two years that she was involved with it, long distance and then

appearing on campus, all they taught her was craft. Fine arts degree, master’s degree in

children’s writing, and the only thing they taught her was craft. After that, it’s up to you.

That’s what we can teach because it’s concrete. This is information that backs up that

whole idea of teaching craft.

Encourage Students to Model Good Writing

What I love about it is the effect on reading. I’m going to end with an example of how

teaching writers craft affects reading. It has to do with this thing called inference. When

children are asked a question on a reading performance test, whether it’s A, B, C, D or

whether they have to do the work themselves, they have to infer things from the text. Here is

a simple lesson, and then we will just tidy up here.

It’s a simple lesson called, Don’t Hit Your Reader Over the Head. This is how it goes.

I tell students that readers like to figure out things for themselves. That’s the joy of reading;

that you’re thinking while it’s going on. And we ask you as writers to give them clues and let

them have fun. Here’s an example of us hitting the reader over the head. We went surfing. It



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was fun. I have the kids go, Boing—you’re hitting your reader over the head. The reader, at

this point is having zero fun. They’re just sitting there like a bump on the log.

What do writers do? Writers give to clues. Here are the clues. We went surfing—get

rid of that, it was fun. And this is what some seventh graders in Sarasota County told me

makes surfing fun. No swimmers were in the way—so it was wide open. An offshore wind

blew up some pretty huge waves. Some were getting a good curl to them. You could ride

them halfway down the beach. Okay.

We say to the student, you write, the surfing was (a) lonely; (b) boring; (c) fun; (d) all

of the above or none of the above. Now what does the reader infer from these clues? Right?

You would not say this is terrible. Just the fact that there are no swimmers in the way doesn’t

make the thing lonely. They’ve done the inference.

Here’s some little kids trying it in a young grade. Practice. These are fun. Practice.

The Nelsons have a dog. He is mean. Everybody—boing, we hit reader over the head. This

is what the kids wrote. He’ll growl at you when you just walk by. He’ll play with you when

you’re just playing. He’ll bite you when you’re just playing. He bit my baby sister because

she had a dirty diaper. These are second and third graders; they’re into bathroom humor.

Here’s Monica. The Nelsons have a dog. He is mean. He rips your socks, and he eats

your shoes. He will try to bite you. He will eat your homework.

This kid could not resist. He’s a mean dog to do that. He had to sum it up; this is my

favorite. The Nelsons have a dog. He’s mean. He bit the mailman. He’ll bite people. He’ll

bite your tushey when you run away from him. He’ll growl at you too.



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I show that to the boys and girls, and then I’ll say, Answer the question on the test

booklet. Can they figure out that the dog is mean? Absolutely. When kids have gone

through this exercise and give clues to their reader, when they’re faced with inference they’re

saying, Oh, I know what I’m looking for; what is he trying to get me to think. Do you see the

reciprocity there?

Shanahan says that children aren’t often enough brought to a realization of author’s

choices because they’re not taught craft like this. And when they are made aware of author’s

choices, it changes the whole way they read.

This is an exercise that teachers do, and we learn that there’s this reciprocity between

reading and writing. So don’t hit your reader over the head.

Staff Development for Writing Instruction

There are lots of other things I could rattle on about here, but what I want to point out

is that it’s time for us to look at the staff development. How do you get teachers to

understand all of this and learn this craft? And, of course, it’s staff development. We all

know that.

You all know that if I come to your district and give a two-day workshop that when I

leave about 10 to 15 percent of it will be put into play. Right? The highest is about 15

percent. They say around 10. Some gung-ho teachers will do a little more; some teachers

will do zero – it hasn’t affected any change in their behavior.

How do you get a whole staff to do this? You do it through study groups. NSDC and

ASCD all say that the best way to affect change is collaborative study groups. Educational

research is the status that affect collaborative study groups on effective ways for a school to



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achieve, development and implement new concepts and practices. NSDC, which is National

Staff Development Council, and ASCD, say onsite staff development through study groups is

the way.

Here’s some of the advantages of it over having somebody come in with this one shot.

I don’t even do it anymore. I was so thrilled about being there teaching writing. I used to go

do workshops all the time. After a while, I saw there was nothing happening. It’s a waste of

my time essentially. I would say, Read my book as a follow-up. Then schools would try and

lure me back with tales of taking me fishing in Alaska and all that stuff. But not much

changed. I would talk to the principals, Do you see change? Oh, yeah, some of the kids are

doing target skills. But that isn’t what we’re after.

The advantages of study groups is it’s onsite, the teachers control it. The teachers

control the organization and the facilitating it. There’s flexible structure. There’s mentoring

opportunities. When you have teachers that are absent at Marcia’s workshop, there’s a couple

of teachers who are never going to hear it. And you all know, you’re all familiar with

teachers going to a workshop or a conference. They’re supposed to come home and teach the

rest of the staff. Fat chance; right? What is that? About this much? That’s the 15 percent

that gets done.

Teachers have a hard time learning from one another. You have to come from across

the river or railroad track to be an expert. They’re saying, How come they think they know so

much about it. It’s strange what teachers do professionally. But when they’re in it together,

in a study group where they’re supporting one another, you get a much different feeling.



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It’s goal-oriented. It’s an opportunity to go directly into your class and try out the

strategies, which is the model of study groups. You come together, you read or you see

something, you go back to your classroom, you try it out. Then you come back and say, How

did it go? Let’s share our best practices. That’s how you affect change. Having people come

in and just talk once is pretty useless.

Conclusion

That’s what I’ve done when I teach writing. That’s what I’ve done is find a way to

deliver this content to teachers, and I’ve come up with the study group format over videos.

What we all have to do is, number one, we have to realize that writing can be taught as

an academic subject, and that process alone is useless. You have to meld it with craft.

What children do with craft depends on their vocabulary, their age, the experiences

they’ve had; but all children can become competent writers to make growth in writing skills if

we bring it to them in a systematic, cohesive, articulated curriculum and use the model

method of Brian Cambourne.

Do you have any questions that you’ve been thinking of that you would like to address

to me?

PARTICIPANT:

You mentioned William Zinzer.

MARICIA FREEMAN:

William Zinzer. He’s the one who wrote On Writing Well. And we all had it in

college if we took writing. I didn’t, but my husband had it in his course. On Writing Well.



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And he has a wonderful book out called Writing to Learn. It’s a 1988 book or something; it’s

marvelous. It talks about writing across the curriculum.

That’s what we’re aiming for here. If a child can do five ways of writing, he can write

about anything. Everybody think of this. If you can write an opinion paper, an informational

paper, you can write across the curriculum.

Here’s writing across the curriculum and, Zinzer, that’s what his whole book was

about – that writing is thinking. If you can write an informational report—magazine article

style; that’s called information writing—if you can describe a process, if you can write a

comparison paper, if you can write an opinion paper and you can write a persuasive essay—

coming out of high school, if you can do those—you can write about anything. You can write

about art, science, drafting, cross-country running. All if you just in your mind pick a topic

and say, What would a report of that type look like? What could I describe the process?

Let’s just take running. I was a marathoner and a track coach. Informational writing –

going to write an article about cross-country training. Lay it out. I’m going to do process

description—I’m going to write an article for Runner’s World, “How to Train for the Boston

Marathon.” The process you go through. I’ll write a comparison paper—What’s the

difference between sprinters and long-distance runners and the musculature that you require?

An opinion paper—Everybody should be running. A persuasive paper—We need a new

rubberized track in our time; the cinder one is too much maintenance. No matter what I do, if

I can write in those five styles I can write about anything—you can write about flutes or

cross-country running or anything.



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Those are the main nonfiction writing that I’ve addressed. Does that fit every

standard? Yup, except personal letter writing. You won’t find much in my program about

that. Did I answer your question. Anything else?

I want to thank you for spending the morning with me. I hope that you will all take a

different look at writing and staff development at this point. Thank you so much everybody.

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