To manage your class, engage students
Informal writing prompts work

Informal writing prompts are tools to promote learning and assist with formative assessment. However, informal prompts serve an additional function as a classroom management tool.

Students who are actively engaged in learning have little time to cause classroom management problems.

Learn about all the ways informal writing can help you in my ebook Shape Learning, Reshape Teaching: An English Teacher's Guide to Using Informal Writing with Teens and Adults.

For purchase information, visit the sales page.

Improve student engagement

The typical ELA curriculum is not most teens' and adult students' idea of fun stuff.

Much of it is highly abstract; sometimes the examples that are concrete don't appear to fit the rules. (Usually that's because students misunderstood some key term back in third grade.)

Informal writing prompts are one way to foster student engagement with the class content without overwhelming the students with too much abstract material at one time.

Putting abstract ideas into their own language enables students to develop their understanding on their terms. Informal prompts provide occasions for students to do those translation tasks.

Keep the class together

Unlike lectures and typical class discussion in which only a few students participate, informal writing prompts involve everyone in the class.

The universal participation requirement keeps the class on task better than a presentation without a hands-on component.

Because the writing is brief and students are not penalized for wrong answers, getting participation is rarely a problem. Even kids who struggle with writing can manage to write for two minutes on a clearly defined, narrow topic.

Focus attention with writing

Engage students in answering informal writing prompts frequently enough to keep their attention from wandering for long.

It's helpful to have a few generic writing prompts to pull out when you see attention beginning to shift from Wordworth's use of metaphor to their latest text message.

For example, one generic prompt might ask students to compare new information with previously learned information.

Another generic prompt might ask students to translate into their own words what you just said and give an example.

Build knowledge with writing

If the subject you are teaching is complicated or builds step by step, give more opportunities for writing than with a less complex topic.

Don't be afraid to have students write for two minutes out of every 10 minutes of class if that's what it takes for them to learn essential material.

(You know better than to have students write about something that's nonessential, don't you? I certainly hope so.)

You could, for example, ask students to define in their own words the term you are teaching and give an example. That addresses problems arising from misunderstanding material. See an example of how this works with a grammar topic.

The payoff for you is that students who experience success as learners are more likely to want to learn something else, which further reduces management problems.

My book Shape Learning, Reshape Teaching uses informal prompts on writing mechanics topics to illustrate uses of informal writing.

Improve oral discussion quality

If your class discussions are flat, with only a few stellar pupils volunteering any comments, using informal writing prompts could help.

Research shows that when an informal writing activity precedes class discussion, the quality of the class discussion goes up. More students speak out and there’s more substance to what they say.

Researchers don’t know why the combination works, but it seems to hold true across the curriculum and at all educational levels.

Boost perceived course value

Informal writing helps convey the impression that your class content is useful in the long-term. Students think if something is not worth writing about, it's not worth learning.

Even when they don't like a subject, students report test and quiz situations are times of peak concentration and challenge. Mind you, they don't say they think tests and quizzes are fun; however, they perceive them as being worth doing.

What's more, students think tests and quizzes are more relevant to their future careers than activities that are more fun.

Enable remote monitoring

Even good students often need help structuring complicated projects done outside of class. Informal writing is an efficient way to monitor such projects.

For the monitoring to succeed, students need:

• An informal prompt (or prompts) to guide their responses.

• A schedule for reporting.

• Instructions on how/where to submit their progress reports.

Suppose your students are working on a term paper Each week that students are to work on the paper, you might provide two or three questions that could be answered in 140-characters. Have each student report via microblog posts no later than midnight on Tuesday and Friday of each week.

You could use a similar procedure to track team projects. Or you could have each team select one person each week to report to you via blog, memo, or email on the team's progress. Again you would need to provide prompts, schedule, and instructions.

Using informal writing to track students' progress in developing research paper topics is discussed on another page of this site.

Give formative assessment

Part of what students learn from informal writing prompts is whether they can recall basic information. However, if prompts are well-written, they make students think about what they recall so that they reach a deeper level of understanding.

Students are more likely to use writing as a tool for learning after they personally experience how putting ideas into their own words helps them to understand better.

Later, when you skim the responses to the informal prompt, you will see what you need to teach or re-teach.