For your students to master any strategy for any part of the
writing process, whether it's one of the nine strategies I teach
or some other one, they will need ample time to practice
applying the strategy after they have memorized it.
The rule of thumb is that people need to do some activity (like
brushing their teeth or putting the car keys on the peg by the
back door) 28 times in a row to make it a habit.
Teaching strategies
When you teach any strategy, you must teach rather than
present. Students must understand what they are doing and
why they are doing it.
Students also need to experience how the strategy accomplishes
something they want to do. That something might be passing English,
or it might just be getting to soccer practice early.
You also must monitor students' use of a strategy. If
students don't use it well, or don't use it at all, you have to
reteach.
Informal writing prompts are a formative assessment tool for
monitoring students' progress toward mastering writing strategies.
Shape
Learning, Reshape Teaching tells you how to use them to
assess, teach and keep the class together.
Calculate practice required
If
you use the five-paragraph essay as your vehicle for teaching
a strategic nonfiction writing process, you can readily calculate
the number of writing assignments in which students will need
to use a particular strategy before you could reasonably expect
students to use it appropriately and comfortably.
The classic five-paragraph
essay uses ripple strategy three times per essay. Thus, you
can reasonably expect students to need to use ripple strategy
in nine or 10 essays before they use the strategy appropriately
and comfortably.
By contrast, building a thesis statement from a topic
is a task done once per writing prompt. Thus, you can reasonably
expect students to need to write thesis statements in response
to 28 writing prompts before they use the strategy appropriately
and comfortably.
I find college students writing six times a week take about 20
weeks to become competent at using all nine writing strategies together
in a single writing process.
If you don't have students write five paragraph essays regularly
(by which I mean completing at least one essay every other week),
you have almost no chance of having students master essay writing strategies.
Learning
to write takes practice over time.
Habitual use brings speed, efficiency
Once using a particular planning strategy becomes a habit, students
can focus their attention on a problem and quickly examine all
important facets of that problem. Moreover, their brains will
keep working after the students have gone on to other activities.
The brain-priming function of employing writing strategies
lets writers' brains continue working to solve a writing problem
while the students are at soccer practice or play rehearsal.
