We may hear that students are motivated to write, or that their writing is more “authentic,” when they have a real purpose. We may observe that when students publish their work online, they enjoy getting comments from their classmates, teachers, family members, and even strangers who read their work, and they become more interested in writing. But I wonder about the students’ perception of audience, and how much thought they put into the needs and expectations of their readers.

Since the read/write web has interactive potential, I believe that online publishing gives teachers a powerful opportunity to help students think about their audience. From what I see, though, the writing that my students now choose to publish online is much the same as writing that they’ve always done. I’d like to see them demonstrate some awareness of their audience by clarifying the context for what they’ve chosen to write, and to make revisions on their own.

A chapter called Becoming Strategic [pdf] from the book, Strategic Writing by Deborah Dean, has me thinking about how to help my students become more thoughtful writers. Dean outlined 3 kinds of knowledge that are important for writers:

  • Declarative knowledge - knowing about something; writers need to know the difference between nouns and verbs, what adjectives are for, and what a paragraph is, among many other things. Writers must also know something about their subject matter.
  • Procedural knowledge - knowing how to do something; writers must know they should begin sentences with capital letters, how to use topic sentences, and how to summarize their ideas, etc.
  • Conditional knowledge - knowing when; writers have to make decisions about word choice, and the expectations of their readers, given the context for any given piece of writing. They have to think about the effect that whatever they write may have upon their imagined audience.

After I read this, I thought about my own writing, and I realized that I’ve given little direct instruction to my students in thinking about issues that will help them to become strategic writers, themselves.

Dean said that

Just doing something doesn’t automatically make us better at it, especially if we do whatever it is under duress or unwillingly or without concern for effectiveness, the way too many students approach writing….Repetition combined with instruction or direction or modeling or scaffolding can help, though. And that’s what teaching strategic writing should encourage—not just assigning writing but practicing it with strategies and then considering the effectiveness of those strategies. It means teaching writing rather than simply causing it.

And I was reminded of Bill Kerr’s recent blog post, immersion plus, in which he made a case for effortful study.

I just said, immersion works. But immersion doesn’t always work. I’ve spent time working in factories and knew workers there who had lived in Australia for 20 years and who still spoke poor English…. Just putting in more hours (immersion) is not the same as effortful study with clear goals to improve one’s understanding.

The goal of strategic literacy learning is to help students develop an understanding of how texts work, and to learn to produce a variety of text forms for different audiences and purposes. Dean offered specific ideas for helping students to become reflective writers. Summarizing her list of techniques, these are a few of the several she offered:

  • Using a metaphor to develop an idea
  • Using art to generate ideas
  • Using drawing to clarify or organize ideas
  • Using questioning to develop ideas
  • Talking to develop an idea
  • Researching to develop content
  • Imitating a model’s voice and word choice
  • Using sentence types to establish a tone
  • Developing vocabulary skills
  • Practicing sentence-level skills: combining, moving, adding

Many of these are ideas that I’ve used with students all along, but without the conscious intent of helping them to gain more control over their writing or to deepen their own thinking about their decision making as they write. I’ve mostly focused on teaching about declarative and procedural knowledge, and overlooked the conditional. School writing has traditionally been for the teacher alone, as a demonstration of learning, and it hasn’t demanded that students develop strategic knowledge. But publishing on the web makes this type of knowledge something to consider in writing lessons.

I believe the evidence for this kind of thinking would be most observable in the students’ willingness to revise, and in the questions they spontaneously ask themselves, or me, or their peers about their own work. I see little evidence of that in their writing now.

To develop these critical habits of mind in my young students, I’m going to try an analog technology - Response Journals (spiral notebooks) - an idea that came out of my parent conferences last week. Students, interested parents, and I will do some regular note-passing with journals that students keep on their desks all day. We’ll all write in them, and they’ll be a direct communication link between home and school.

These journals will give me a place to prompt students to think about the specific needs of a known audience - the parent - who may need help understanding the context of what they report. Comments from parents and prompts from the teacher may help them learn to become mindful of the effectiveness of their written work.

If they develop a strategic stance toward their writing, I expect to see students make spontaneous revisions in their written work, and to explain why they’re doing them. It’s a new teacher research project for me.