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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Lead a writing revolution in your classroom with the proven Hochman Method
Building on the success of the original best-seller, this new edition of The Writing Revolution adds valuable guidance for teachers seeking a way to bring their students' writing ability up to rigorous state standards. As thousands of educators have already discovered, The Writing Revolution provides the road map they need, clearly explaining how to incorporate the Hochman Method into their instruction, no matter what subject or grade they're teaching and regardless of the ability level of their students. The new edition provides a reorganized sequence of activities and even more student-facing examples, making it easier than ever to bring the method to your classroom.
The Writing Revolution isn't a separate curriculum or program teachers need to juggle. Rather, it is a method providing strategies and activities that teachers can adapt to their preexisting curriculum and weave into their content instruction. By focusing on specific techniques that match their students' needs and providing them with targeted feedback, The Writing Revolution can turn weak writers into strong and confident communicators. In addition, the method can:
- Identify misconceptions and gaps in knowledge
- Boost reading comprehension and learning
- Improve organizational skills
- Enrich oral language
- Develop analytical abilities
The Writing Revolution takes the mystery out of teaching students to write well.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Foreword
Letter to Readers: What’s Different about
The Writing Revolution 2.0
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
What Teachers Need: A Road Map for Explicit Writing Instruction
What Writing Instruction Can Do for You and Your Students
A Brief History of The Writing Revolution
Why Many Students Don't Get the Benefits of Writing
Deliberate Practice Makes The Writing Revolution Revolutionary
The Six TWR Principles
How to Use This Book
Key Points
Notes
SECTION I: Sentences
CHAPTER 2: Sentences
What Makes a Sentence a Sentence? Correcting Fragments, Scrambled Sentences, and Run-Ons
Notes
CHAPTER 3: Sentence Expansion and Note-Taking
Expanding Students' Knowledge and Responses
Examples of Sentence Expansion in Content
The Power of Note-Taking: Key Words and Phrases, Abbreviations, and Symbols
Notes
CHAPTER 4: Sentences
The Four Basic Sentence Types
How to Develop Knowledge and Skills? A Good Question
Conjunctions, Complexity, and Clauses
Adding Complexity: Subordinating Conjunctions
Connecting Ideas: Transitions
Appositives: Another Name for a Noun
Out of Many, One: Sentence‑Combining
Using Sentence Activities to Teach Grammar and Conventions
Weave It In: Integrating Sentence Activities into Daily Instruction
Endnote
SECTION II: Writing at Length
CHAPTER 5: Planning before Writing
Offloading the Cognitive Burden: Why Planning Is Crucial
Identifying Topic, Audience, and Purpose
A Guide to Purpose: Three Types of Writing
Notes
CHAPTER 6: A Simple, Linear Guide
Defining Terms
Guiding Students to Create Effective Outlines
SPO: Text Structures
Turning an Outline into a Draft
Notes
CHAPTER 7: Revision
Revising versus Editing: An Important Distinction
Revision Activities
Editing: Last but Not Least
Notes
CHAPTER 8: Summarizing
The Power of Writing Summaries
Three Questions to Ask before You Begin
Two Structures for Summaries
Notes
CHAPTER 9: Moving On to Compositions
The Benefits of Outlining
The Transition Outline and Multiple-Paragraph Outline
Prepping for the TO and MPO
Introducing Students to the TO
Using a Transition Outline to Write an Essay
Incorporating Quotations
The MPO for Level 2 Students
Using the MPO to Draft and Revise Compositions
Research Papers
Notes
CHAPTER 10: Taking a Stand
Preparing for Argumentative Writing
Sentence‐Level Activities: Laying the Foundation for Arguments
Opinion Writing
Pro/Con Writing
Using Pro or Con SPOs and Paragraphs as Stepping Stones
TOs and MPOs for Pro/Con Compositions
The Argumentative Essay
Argumentative Terms
Review: Argumentative Writing Activities
Notes
SECTION III: How to Assess Writing and Adapt the Hochman Method to Your Classroom
CHAPTER 11: A Gauge and a Guide
Don't Guess—Assess!
Using Writing to Monitor Learning
Maintaining Student Portfolios
Notes
CHAPTER 12: Revolutionizing Learning
Using Strategies Concurrently
Using TWR Strategies to “Revolutionize” Your Materials
How to Use TWR to Differentiate Your Instruction
Notes
CHAPTER 13: Putting the Method into Practice
Laying a Strong Foundation: Sentence‐Level Activities
Breaking Down the Writing Process
Pacing the Strategies: Using Your Judgment
Sequence of Activities through the Grades
Pacing Guides
More than a Writing Method: Using TWR to Advance Your Students' Thinking
Appendixes
A. Expository Writing Terms
B. Abbreviations and Symbols
C. Transition Words and Phrases
D. Proofreading Symbols
E. Student Revise and Edit Checklist
F. Writing Assessment Checklists
G. Single-Paragraph Outline
H. Single-Paragraph Outline
I. Summary Sentence
J. Pre-Transition Outline (PTO)
K. Pre-Transition Outline (PTO)
L. Transition Outline (TO)
M. Transition Outline (TO)
N. Transition Outline (TO)
O. Multiple-Paragraph Outline (MPO)
P. Multiple-Paragraph Outline (MPO)
Q. Multiple-Paragraph Outline (MPO)
R. Multiple-Paragraph Outline (MPO)
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Exhibit 3.1
Chapter 4
Exhibit 4.1
Exhibit 4.4 Three strategies for creating topic and concluding sentences
Chapter 5
Exhibit 5.1
Chapter 6
Exhibit 6.3 Three strategies for creating topic and concluding sentences
Chapter 7
Exhibit 7.3
Chapter 11
Exhibit 11.1
Exhibit 11.2
Exhibit 11.3
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Foreword
Letter to Readers: What’s Different about The Writing Revolution 2.0
Begin Reading
Appendixes
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for The Writing Revolution 2.0
“For years, I have recommended The Writing Revolution for the following reasons: powerful sequencing from sentence to composition, skills broken down into obtainable chunks, explicit, systematic instruction, writing assignments connected to class content, and focus on planning and revising. Teachers are supported and students emerge as writers. The Writing Revolution truly makes a difference, so schools, teachers, and students should follow this road map to excellence.”
—Anita Archer, author of Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching
“The impact of The Writing Revolution, which has expanded our understanding of how writing builds knowledge and taught us how to embed great writing lessons into daily instruction across content areas, has been profound. When Judith Hochman, Natalie Wexler, and Kathleen Maloney think there's more to say about how we produce strong writers, educators need to stop and listen. Drawing on thousands of hours of onsite work with teachers, The Writing Revolution 2.0 is a testament to the authors' belief that good writing instruction is within the grasp of all teachers and that, indeed, it must be their charge.”
—Barbara Davidson, president of StandardsWork, Inc., and executive director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign
“We've been inspired by the practical approach of the Hochman Method for over three decades and so have the many teachers we've shared it with. We couldn't be happier about this second edition since the practices laid out so clearly in this book will make every student exposed to them a more supple and lucid writer.”
—David and Meredith Liben, Reading Done Right, authors of Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension
“This guide needs to be on every educator's bookshelf! Grounded in The Writing Revolution's research on writing instruction, this supremely practical book provides teachers, administrators, and other practitioners with a robust guide for building students' writing ability and knowledge. This book is the best tool a teacher can keep in their toolkit.”
—Esther Klein Friedman, PhD, executive director of Literacy and Academic Intervention (retired), New York City Department of Education; literacy learning specialist
“As a principal, it was clear that students in my elementary school needed an organized system of instruction to improve their writing. My team of teachers fully embraced the Hochman Method and enjoyed collaboratively learning and planning writing lessons using the multiple reources provided in The Writing Revolution. Every principal and teacher should make it a priority to utilize the latest edition to advance their knowledge and understanding of how to effectively teach writing. Your students will develop a love of writing that will last a lifetime.”
—Gwendolyn Payton, instructional superintendent, DCPS
“The Writing Revolution 2.0 provides teachers with powerful strategies to embed explicit writing instruction into the content of the curriculum. These strategies equip children with the tools they need to be confident writers while also developing their comprehension and critical thinking skills.”
—Lori D'Andrea, literacy specialist, Greenburgh Central School District
“For many Australian teachers, The Writing Revolution has, like no other resource, raised their knowledge and provided educators with the tools they need. I observe the impact of this instruction on the quality of writing produced by students in settings ranging from remote communities to large metropolitan areas.”
—Dr. Lorraine Hammond, AM, professional learning and instructional coach, associate professor at Elizabeth Cowan University, School of Education, Australia
“The first edition of The Writing Revolution was a landmark publication. Not only was it packed with brilliant classroom techniques, its focus on sentence-level activities changed the way many people thought about teaching writing. The second edition has even more examples taken from the extensive work the authors have done in so many schools and includes important updates about assessment and comparative judgment. It is a must-read for anyone involved with teaching writing.”
—Daisy Christodoulou, director of education, No More Marking
“The Writing Revolution transformed my thinking about the power of writing and how it can improve outcomes for students in all content areas. As a former STEM teacher and school and system leader, I am grateful that the authors have brought the science of writing so effectively to classrooms.”
—Jean-Claude Brizard, president and CEO, Digital Promise Global
“Teachers, district leaders, superintendents, and stakeholders—anyone who wishes to witness the transformative power of content-embedded explicit writing instruction—will benefit exponentially from The Writing Revolution 2.0. When it's fully embraced and taught campus-wide, even the hardest-to-reach subgroups succeed, prosper, and excel, acquiring the tools and strategies they need to write well!”
—Serena White, interim superintendent of Monroe City Schools
“Simple and brilliant. Practical and insightful. The Writing Revolution 2.0 is canon in how to teach the structures of writing while enabling students to express their individual identities.”
—Anthony Cosentino Jr., principal, Public School 21—The Margaret P. Emery Elm Park School
Copyright © 2024 by The Writing Revolution 2.0. All rights reserved.
Jossey-Bass, a Wiley brandPublished by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
ISBNs: 9781394182039 (paperback), 9781394182046 (ePDF), 9781394182053 (ePub)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hochman, Judith, author. | Wexler, Natalie, author.
Title: The writing revolution 2.0 : a guide to advancing thinking through writing in all subjects and grades / Judith C. Hochman, Natalie Wexler.
Description: San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024007513 (print) | LCCN 2024007514 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394182039 (paperback) | ISBN 9781394182046 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394182053 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Report writing—Study and teaching. | Critical thinking—Study and teaching. | Composition (Language arts)—Study and teaching.
Classification: LCC LB1047.3 .H633 2024 (print) | LCC LB1047.3 (ebook) | DDC 808/.0427—dc23/eng/20240314
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024007513
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024007514
Cover images: © Jeni Iv/Shutterstock, © chrupka/ShutterstockCover design: Wiley
To Toni-Ann Vroom and Dina Zoleo, for their unwavering dedication and outstanding leadership in the dissemination and implementation of the Hochman Method.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, we want to acknowledge the co–chief executive officers of The Writing Revolution, Dr. Dina Zoleo and Dr. Toni-Ann Vroom. Together with team members Christine Teahan, Alexandria Chalonec, and Tania Hasselwander-Chang, they read the manuscript multiple times, displayed endless patience, and made excellent suggestions based on their experience training teachers in the Hochman Method and working with schools that are using it. We are forever grateful for their cooperation and talent.
The TWR courses and its Resource Library, created by members of the TWR team, supplied us with many of the materials we used to illustrate the strategies and activities in this book.
We also learned a great deal directly from educators who have implemented the Hochman Method. Reviewing assessments, visiting schools, listening to teachers and administrators, and looking at countless activities based on TWR strategies helped inform many of the changes in the second edition. Teachers throughout the United States and beyond shared their work, asked questions, and made suggestions that were invaluable in adding to our knowledge about effective writing instruction.
We owe debts of gratitude to several other individuals. Our editor at Jossey-Bass, Amy Fandrei, was supportive, responsive, and patient throughout the process. Maureen Forys helped us immeasurably with the design of the book, and her guidance and positive attitude inspired us throughout the process. Rachel Monaghan's editing and guidance were indispensable. Djamika Smith, TWR's associate creative director, was an important contributor to the book-designing process. Robyn Travers's experience teaching the Hochman Method for many years made her an excellent resource for editing expertise and feedback.
Last, but not least, we appreciate the support of our families and friends and their recognition that our mission is an important one. In particular, two of us—Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler—owe a deep debt of thanks to our husbands, Steve Hochman and Jim Feldman, for their support.
About the Authors
Judith C. Hochman is the founder of The Writing Revolution, a not-for-profit organization serving educators both in the United States and internationally. She is the former superintendent of the Greenburgh Graham Union Free School District in Hastings, New York, and the head of The Windward School in White Plains, New York. Dr. Hochman is the founder of the Windward Teacher Training Institute and the author of many articles and books on the topic of writing.
Natalie Wexler is the author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System—and How to Fix It (Avery 2019). She has a Substack newsletter, Minding the Gap, and her writing on education has appeared in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other publications. She was the host of the first season of the Knowledge Matters podcast, a six-episode series called Reading Comprehension Revisited.
Kathleen Maloney is the chief operating officer of The Writing Revolution, where she brings her passion for literacy and experience in education to her role, overseeing the organization's daily operations and strategizing its future direction in collaboration with the co-CEOs. Before joining the team, as an English teacher and literacy coach, she used the Hochman Method in her own classroom and led its schoolwide implementation.
Foreword
Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler's The Writing Revolution is a timeless book that is grounded in practical wisdom, refined by application in thousands of classrooms, and supported by learning science. It meticulously describes how to effectively teach a skill that is, and will always be, profoundly important to students. It's a book that stands the test of time.
Perhaps fittingly, this foreword, originally published in the first edition of the book, remains as relevant to me now as it was when I first wrote it. It is a personal reflection of encountering many of the ideas in The Writing Revolution and testing them with my own children. Every application of the principles within the book reaffirms their enduring value.
I am not alone in my high regard for this book. Since its publication, hundreds of thousands of teachers have read and used it with great success. It has, honestly, become something of a sensation.
However, while the book remains timeless, the world—both in society at large and within schools—has been rapidly changing. Recognizing this, and in light of Hochman and Wexler's dedication to updating the entire text, I will add a few new thoughts of my own at the end of the original foreword.
A few years ago our family spent a couple of months in London. My kids were thirteen, eleven, and six at the time, and I had work there, so we decided to take the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live in one of the world's great capitals. We paid regular visits to the British Museum, combed through the food stalls at Borough Market, and traced on foot the remains of the city's medieval wall. There were day trips to Bath and Cambridge. We even had a local—pub, that is, which really should go without saying.
It was an incredible experience, thanks in no small part to what I learned at a lunch I had with one of the authors of this book before we left. I'd read an article about Judith Hochman's work at New Dorp High School in the Atlantic a year or two before, and it had stayed with me. Hochman espoused embedding writing instruction in content. She thought sentences were overlooked and rarely taught. She thought syntax—“syntactic control”—was the link to unlock the connection between better writing and better reading. She believed in the power of deliberate practice to build reading skills. Her work was technical and granular. And the results were hard to ignore. It was the kind of thing I was drawn to.
A friend had connected us and I drove down to meet her—with what soon revealed itself as her typical graciousness, she had invited me to her home near New York City—and the result was one of the most memorable days of my working life. I remember scratching notes furiously on page after page of my notebook, trying to capture everything she observed—about writing, its connection to reading and thinking, and why so many kids struggled to learn it. Over and over Hochman would hit on an idea that had been swirling in my head in inchoate wisps and put it into a clear, logical formulation of practice. Here was the idea you were fumbling with, described perfectly; here was how you'd make it work.
I couldn't write fast enough, but I remember thinking that when I got home, I would read everything she'd written. This, however, turned out to be the only disappointment. There wasn't, until now, any place where the ideas Hochman had talked about were written down in one cohesive place for a reader like me. I was left with the observations in my notebook, the hope that Hochman would someday write the book you are now holding, and her sentence expansion activities.
It was these activities that were the gift that transformed our trip to London. Hochman had spent about twenty minutes riffing on the idea the day we met. The sentence was the building block of writing and thinking, the “complete thought,” we agreed, but if you looked at the complete thoughts students produced in their writing, they were too often wooden, repetitive, inflexible. If the task of wrestling ideas into written words was to memorialize thinking, students—at least most of them—did not often have control of a sufficient number of syntactic forms and tools to capture and express complex thoughts. They could not express two ideas happening at once, with one predominating over the other. They could not express a thought interrupted by a sudden alternative thesis. Their ideas were poor on paper because their sentences could not capture, connect, and, ultimately, develop them. That last part was the most damning of all. One way to generate complex ideas is to write them into being—often slowly adding and reworking and refining, as I find myself doing now as I draft and revise this foreword for the tenth or twentieth or one hundredth time. Because students could not say what they meant, and because, as a result, they did not practice capturing and connecting complex ideas with precision in writing, they had fewer complex ideas. Or they had ideas like the sentences they wrote: predictable, neither compound nor complex. What might have been a skein of thought was instead a litter of short broken threads, each with a subject-verb-object construction.
Hochman's solution was regular intentional exercises to expand students' syntactic range. You could ask students to practice expanding their sentences in specific and methodical ways, and they'd get better at it. Crucially, she pointed out, this must be done in a content-rich environment because “the content drives the rigor.” Sentences need ideas pressing outward from inside them to stretch and expand their limits. Only rich content gives them a reason to seek and achieve nuance.
One example of a Hochman sentence expansion exercise was called because-but-so. The idea was deceptively simple: you gave students a sentence stem and then asked them to expand it three different ways—with the common conjunctions because, but, and so. This would help them to see each sentence as constantly expandable. And it would, as Hochman writes in this book, “prod them to think critically and deeply about the content they were studying—far more so than if you simply asked them to write a sentence in answer to an open-ended question.” It would build their ability to conjoin ideas with fluidity. It would help them to understand, through constant theme and variation, the broader concepts of subordination and coordination.
I want to pause here to digress on the seemingly underwhelming concepts of coordination and subordination. I will ask you to stifle your yawn as I acknowledge that they are easy to dismiss—ancient, faintly risible, uttered once long ago by acolytes of sentence diagramming in the era of chalk dust. They smack of grammar for grammar's sake, and almost nobody cares about that. Teachers instead seek mostly to make sure the sentences work and dispense with the parsing of parts. It is so much simpler to tell kids to go with “sounds right” (an idea that inherently discriminates against those for whom the sounds of language are not happily ingrained by luck or privilege) or to make the odd episodic correction and not worry about the principle at work.
But coordination and subordination are in fact deeply powerful principles worth mastering. They describe the ways that ideas are connected, the nuances that yoke disparate thoughts together. It is the connections as much as the ideas that make meaning. To master conjunctions is to be able to express that two ideas are connected but that one is more important than the other, that one is dependent on the other, that one is contingent on the other, that the two ideas exist in contrast or conflict. Mastering that skill is immensely important not just to writing but to reading. Students who struggle with complex text can usually understand the words and clauses of a sentence; it is the piecing together of the interrelationships among them that most often poses the problem. They understand the first half of the sentence but miss the cue that questions its veracity in the second half. And so without mastery of the syntax of relationships, which is what coordination and subordination are, the sentence devolves—for weak readers—into meaninglessness.
For weeks I reflected on the power of these simple activities for teachers and students, but my reflections were not limited to my role as an educator. As a father I was intrigued as well, and I suppose this is the truest test of an educational idea.
Fast-forward to London some months later, where I found myself for three months essentially homeschooling the Lemov children, those regular and long-suffering subjects of a thousand of their father's teaching ideas. To keep them writing and thinking I had them keep journals, and in those journals I found myself using and adapting Hochman's exercises. They were the perfect tidy-wrap summation to a long day out exploring.
Here are some early because-but-so exercises I rediscovered a few weeks ago in my then eleven-year-old daughter's journal.
I gave her the sentence stem: “The Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city . . .”
She wrote:
The Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city, because
at the time, citizens didn't have the knowledge or equipment to stop the fire before it spread
.
The Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city, but
London survived and thrived
.
The Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city, so
many people had to live in temporary homes until the city was rebuilt
.
After a visit to the Museum of Natural History, for the sentence stem “The length of T-Rex's arms is surprising …” she wrote:
The length of T-Rex's arms is surprising, but
this may have been a mid-evolutionary stage and had they lived for another million years their arms might have disappeared altogether
.
A few weeks later I gave her this sentence stem: “Farleigh Hungerford Castle is now in ruins …”
She wrote:
Farleigh Hungerford Castle is now in ruins because
of weathering and age
.
Farleigh Hungerford Castle is now in ruins, but
it is arguably even more interesting now (while in ruins) than ever before
.
Farleigh Hungerford Castle is now in ruins, so
you are able to use some imagination when envisioning the castle at its peak
.
We made these exercises a part of our daily lives, and as we did so their confidence and the range of syntactical forms my kids used in expanding their sentences grew, as did the ideas they developed and encoded in memory.
Another sentence expansion activity Hochman proposed to me in her living room—and describes at long last in this outstanding book—is deliberate practice using appositives: brief, sometimes parenthetical phrases that, like the phrase you are reading, rename or elaborate on a noun in a sentence, and can be surprisingly complex. Mastering this idea enables students to expand ideas within a sentence, adding detail, specificity, or nuance in a manner that subordinates the additional information to the overall idea of the sentence. With appositives mastered, students can link more things into the dance of interrelationships within a sentence, reducing the redundancy and disconnectedness of multiple repetitive sentences, and the Lemov kids reflected on their travels through the music of appositives as well.
After a visit to Cambridge and its historic university, I asked them to use Hochman's appositive exercise with the sentence: “In Cambridge the ‘backs’ are in fact the ‘fronts.’” You may not understand that sentence at all—it refers to the fact that when you punt down the River Cam, you face what are called the backs of the historic colleges, but this name is ironic because the buildings were mostly built to be seen from the riverside—the backs. My daughter's sentence expansion captures this with a smooth elegance that supersedes the laborious description you just read. She wrote:
In Cambridge, a small town with a world-renowned university, the backs, the sides of the colleges that face away from the street and therefore onto the river, are in fact the elaborate entrances, the fronts.
I put the appositives she added in italics. Note here a few things that are interesting about this sentence from a teaching and learning perspective:
It includes three different appositives, which my daughter used to expand her description of Cambridge, turning it from a sentence whose meaning was locked in code—what the “backs” and “fronts” meant is very specific to Cambridge—and unlocked it for readers less familiar with the subject. This form of explication is common to papers written in academic discourse and is a key academic skill. But even so the three appositives are surprisingly complex.
The second appositive, which explains what the phrase “the backs” means, is in fact a compound appositive. First she includes the idea that the backs are the sides of Cambridge's colleges that face away from the street. The phrase stands up as an appositive by itself, but then she adds—via subordination—a second appositive explaining that the backs are also the sides of the buildings that face the river. Necessity is the mother of invention. In her effort to explain what she knows and enrich the sentence sufficiently, she's expanded her range, experimenting with a doubly complex form of appositive.
The third example is even more interesting. In it, my daughter has reversed the common order of appositive formation. Usually the noun in a sentence is followed by an appositive phrase that expands on it. But here she has instead put the appositive in front of the noun: the sides of the colleges that face away from the street and therefore onto the river, are in fact
the elaborate entrances
,
the fronts
. She has flipped the form and is again experimenting with her growing proficiency. No grammar lesson in the world could socialize her to understand and apply compound appositives and inverted appositives, but there she was within just a few weeks crafting carefully wrought sentences.
As our time in London went on, I began experimenting with new sentence expansion activities, and they became a bit of an adventure for my kids—could they express an idea that mattered and also meet the challenges of construction I set for them?
Could they, after visiting Kew Gardens, write a sentence about medicinal plants, starting with surprisingly and another sentence using the word medicinal and some form of the word extract (i.e., extracting, extraction)? Could they write a one-sentence description of the view from Primrose Hill starting standing atop but not using the name Primrose Hill?
In this sense our time in London was an exploration of the power of several themes that you will find constantly referred to in this book. Hochman and Wexler's study of these themes will be immensely useful to you as an educator, I believe.
The first theme is the idea that if we want students to be great writers we have to be willing to sometimes teach writing through intentional exercises. Writing responds to deliberate practice, and this concept is demonstrably different from mere repetition of an activity, which, as Hochman explains, is how many schools attempt to teach writing. Let me restate that in the plainest terms: merely repeating an activity is insufficient to get you better at it. This is why you are still as poor a driver today as you were when you were twenty-four. You drive to work every morning without intentional focus on a specific aspect of your craft. You don't get feedback. You don't even know what the skills of driving are, really. And so you never get better. You get worse, in fact.
Research—particularly that of psychologist Anders Ericsson—tells us that for practice to improve skills, it has to have a specific and focused goal and must gradually link together a series of smaller goals to created linked skills. It must also be structured in awareness of cognitive load theory—it has to be difficult, to pose a real challenge but not be so difficult that learners engage in random, nonproductive guessing to solve problems and not so difficult that the brain shuts down. As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham points out, the brain learns best when it is challenged in a manageable amount. Finally, deliberate practice requires all-in focus, and that is maximized in a short and intense burst. This book's proposal of sequences of adaptable high-quality exercises that can allow for deliberate practice should be adopted immediately by nearly every school.
Second is the idea that writing, thinking, and reading are indelibly linked. They are the three tasks of idea formation and so there is far-reaching power for all of these domains in focusing on the craft of formation. “I write,” Joan Didion famously observed, “to know what I think.” Related, then, is the idea that revision is not especially separable from writing. This much I know as a professional writer: as soon as this sentence emerges on your laptop screen you are planning its revision, and helping students to master this hidden phase of writing is necessary to ensuring that students develop refined ideas, not just hasty first-blush ones. This book's study of revision's wherefores and whys will be invaluable to schools.
Third is the idea that there is a scope and sequence to all this. The numinous task of writing can in fact be taught step-by-step with a bit of intentionality if you have Hochman's wisdom and knowledge to guide you. Now you don't have to invent it. The tasks and activities are outlined and organized for you here. You can move directly to execution.
Fourth is the idea of embedded in content. Writing is a learning activity as much or more than a discrete subject. It operates in synergy with ideas—the need to express them is, after all, the reason for being for what is otherwise an unnatural and artificial activity. This book will help you to make every classroom in your school “writing intensive” and therefore learning intensive. If I could wave a magic wand over America's schools and cause one change that would drive the most demonstrable improvement to learning and achievement, I would almost certainly wave that wand and conjure up small bursts of intense, reflective, high-quality writing in every class period or every hour across America's schools.
Perhaps last is my own lesson from London: that writing, when taught well, is a joy. You build something real and enduring every time, and this is a source of pleasure, as is the unexpected form it takes. Successful writing gives its practitioner the mystery and satisfaction of constant invention and construction. When you look at the page and wonder, “Now where did that idea come from?” you know you are doing it right; you know your mastery of the craft itself is now guiding you. In that sense this is a magical book, one that can help you achieve a sea change in the minds of the students in your classrooms.
I previously mentioned the changing world in which the timeless skill of writing must be taught. One of the most significant changes since the book's first edition relates to technology, particularly the universal adaptation of the smartphone and the looming presence of AI. It's worth considering how these developments impact the relevance of the ideas in The Writing Revolution. Spoiler alert: they only underscore their importance.
Smartphones have led to the fracturing of students' attention. Smartphones have fractured everyone's attention, but given that students' brains are still developing, they are especially prone to this. This phenomenon affects in all subjects and content areas but doubly so with writing. As Hochman and Wexler note, writing places significant demands on executive functions and working memory. The costs of giving in to distractions, failing to sustain effort, and veering off topic are especially high. Writing and rewriting require constant self-monitoring persistence and sustained focus over time.
Effective instruction, such as that provided by The Writing Revolution, which builds and reinforces these essential skills, becomes even more crucial in combating the distractions posed by smartphones. The book's model can be deliberately adapted to cultivate stamina and persistence, providing a structured approach to developing attention skills.
Moreover, in a world where distractions abound and moments of introspection are increasingly scarce thanks to push notifications, the TWR model can be adapted to deliberately focus on building stamina and persistence. The flexible exercises, tools, and framework offered in The Writing Revolution can be used to structure longer writing sessions and socialize students to help increase their attention skills. Writing gives students a way to slow down their brains and access deliberate thinking, a skill that we cannot afford to let slip away.
Sustained writing is especially valuable when it ends in a final product students feel proud of. The model of careful, deliberate planning of a longer piece is immensely valuable if we want students to see the value of persistence. The planning process in The Writing Revolution makes the next step clear and actionable, keeps focus top of mind, and allows students to build executive function skills. Put a star next to that chapter, as I know you will want to revisit it often.
I also recommend you frequently reread the chapter on revision tasks. One of the biggest benefits of shorter, sentence-length writing exercises is the ease with which they can allow for immediate study and revision. The shorter the writing, the more quickly and easily we can model that this is how we take an idea and reflect on it, refine it, and develop it. This allows us to implicitly tell students that their first response may not be complete, which is a useful message in a “hot take” world. Techniques like Show Call can be invaluable in facilitating immediate study and revision, fostering a culture of continuous improvement in student writing.
AI presents another set of challenges for educators, particularly regarding the integrity of work done outside the classroom. This may lead to resurgence in in-class, on-demand writing assessments across various subjects. Bell bottoms and vinyl records made their triumphant return to cultural relevance, and this is your sign to not sleep on the blue book!
This likely rise of in-class, on-demand writing across all subjects as a necessary tool for assessing students' own thinking and knowledge will only put a greater value on writing, and the fact that much of this writing will necessarily be time-bound and done under a bit of pressure will instill the good habits of planning and execution. The executive function skills required to define, pursue, and stay focused on a topic will also be some of the most essential in the next era of schooling.
While writing is a timeless skill, it has never been more relevant or important than today, and so, too, is the ability to teach it well. Enjoy the book. Read it deeply, experiment with it, and take pleasure in how it helps you help your students.
Doug Lemov
Doug Lemov trains educators at Uncommon Schools, the nonprofit school management organization he helped found. He has also authored Teach Like a Champion (now in its 3.0 version) and has coauthored the companion Field Guide, Reading Reconsidered, and Practice Perfect.
Letter to Readers: What’s Different about The Writing Revolution 2.0
In the years since the first edition of The Writing Revolution came out in 2017, much has changed. But teachers' need for a clear guide to explicit, carefully sequenced writing instruction is as great as ever—if not greater.
We've seen the emergence of artificial intelligence programs that can spit out an essay in less than a minute—one that is better written than what many high school and even college students can produce, and is hard to detect as a computer's creation. This development has led some educators to conclude that it's no longer possible to assign writing since there's no way of ensuring students will turn in their own work. Others have urged that artificial intelligence be used the way a calculator is for basic operations in a math class: given a bot-created piece of writing, students can edit and refine it, devoting their energies to higher-order elements of writing like voice.
Unfortunately, there's no shortcut to enabling students to become better writers. For one thing, many students lack the basic writing skills that would enable them to be good editors. More fundamentally, the writing process is a learning process. If students are merely trying to revise a piece of writing they haven't produced, they're likely to retain less information and have a shallower understanding of the material. They may even struggle to understand the text they're revising if they're not familiar with complex sentence structure. Explicit writing instruction of the kind described in this book, woven into everyday classroom teaching, is the most effective way to ensure that students acquire the skills and knowledge they'll need to succeed academically and beyond—even if some will inevitably choose to rely on artificial intelligence for help in drafting a piece of writing at some point.
Against the background of these developments—and drawing on the expertise of The Writing Revolution organization's faculty, who have trained thousands of teachers in the method and work with partner schools that are implementing it—we have made a number of changes in this new edition. Although the first edition has reached far more teachers than we ever anticipated and has been met with a gratifyingly positive response, we felt there were aspects of the book that could be improved.
If you're familiar with the original version, the changes you'll see in this version include:
The addition of two new outlines, the Pre-Transition Outline (PTO) and the Transition Outline (TO), as possible steps between the Single-Paragraph Outline (SPO) and the Multiple-Paragraph Outline (MPO).
It's become clear to us that many students who have learned to outline and write paragraphs are ready to embark on lengthier writing but not yet equipped for the demands of the MPO, which requires students to compose challenging introductory and concluding paragraphs when converting their outlines into drafts. The TO requires only a thesis statement at the beginning and a concluding statement at the end, along with notes for body paragraphs in between. Students who are not ready for the TO or MPO formats can use the PTO to help them begin thinking about the requirements of MPOs and essays.
Changes in the sequence of sentence activities.
Sentence expansion is introduced earlier than in the previous edition. When young students learn to expand a bare-bones sentence into one that is more complex, it helps them learn to provide the kind of information readers need for comprehension.
The introduction of transitions as sentence activities
. Previously, transition words weren't introduced until the chapter on revision. Using transition words is an important element of revision, but students benefit from using sentence activities to learn and practice the strategy.
More illustrations of all strategies.
We hope these examples will help readers adapt the strategies to whatever content they're teaching.
Questions for book discussion groups.
We've become aware that many educators are reading and discussing the book collaboratively, and we hope these questions will serve as a guide. Those who read the book on their own may also benefit from them.
More online resources
. Readers will be able to access updated customizable templates as well as examples of activities embedded in frequently used content. They'll also have access to posters, sample pacing guides, and assessment resources.
An expanded discussion of assessment.
We've added material on formative and summative assessments, and on how to administer writing prompts at the beginning, middle, and end of the year and evaluate students' responses.
Whether this book is your introduction to The Writing Revolution's method or you've been applying the method from your well-thumbed copy of the first edition for years, we hope you'll find these changes helpful—and that you'll soon be seeing your students grow in confidence and ability.
Throughout the book we've included student writing samples. Some of these samples are from actual students (under pseudonyms or first names only), and others were created by The Writing Revolution staff members. Some educator and student names have been changed, and in other cases, and where noted, we've used real names with the individual's blessing. Some anecdotes and classroom examples, although based on actual experience, incorporate invented characters and events.
CHAPTER 1Introduction: Why You Need a Writing Revolution in Your Classroom
At the beginning of the school year, Ms. Cappiello was about to give her ninth graders their first writing assignment. Her expectations were low because in previous years, she'd found that students might have no trouble carrying on a conversation, but it was a different story when it came to writing. Even by the end of a school year, the papers they turned in just didn't make sense.
“It's not like there are good papers and bad papers,” she had confided to a colleague the previous spring. “It's like, I can't even understand most of these papers.”
According to the curriculum, her students were supposed to write an essay at the end of every unit. They would also be expected to answer essay questions on state tests. But how was she supposed to teach them to do that, Ms. Cappiello wondered, if they couldn't even write a paragraph? In the past, many of her students had still struggled to produce coherent sentences. And Ms. Cappiello's training hadn't included anything about how to teach writing.
To gauge her new students' writing abilities, Ms. Cappiello asked them to compose a paragraph about how a character changes in a novel, story, or play. Most of their paragraphs started with a sentence that sounded like something they would have said if they were answering orally.
A student named Michael wrote:
