Student Writing: A Teacher's Secret Weapon During COVID-19
Editor’s Note: Before the pandemic, writing was deprioritized in education but now with remote/hybrid learning writing can be a great tool to keep students of all levels engaged while learning (especially virtually). 2016 Camelback Ventures Fellow Blair Pircon (Founder of The Graide Network) offers these helpful tips for educators on how to do this successfully.
When much of society shut down in March, something else unprecedented happened, too. Students stopped going into school, and they also stopped writing. You saw it play out in the headlines: stories about plummeting student engagement, persistent online learning debacles, and chaos and confusion around grading and homework policies. At The Graide Network, we saw this play out first hand as student writing assignments declined by more than 200% in March and April.
Writing came to a halt as educators struggled with three key challenges: 1) overwhelming workloads and competing priorities, b) a lack of planning, alignment, and common expectations, and c) minimal accountability. Writing falls in a tricky category of important but not urgent things on a teacher’s plate. Teachers, like all of us, are often pressured to prioritize the urgent tasks, even if some of them are less important. This is especially true when navigating the global health crisis and part of the reason why writing has been unintentionally deprioritized since the start of COVID-19.
Even before COVID-19, students weren’t writing enough and outcomes were poor. A recent analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data showed that only 25% of middle school students and 31% of high school students spent enough time writing. With even less time spent writing in 2020, it’s alarming to think that high school seniors could be more poorly prepared for college and career level writing than they were previously (only 27% of 12th graders were rated proficient writers).
As schools open for the new year in whatever format, it is imperative that parents, teachers, and administrators are aware of the barriers to effective writing instruction and know how to overcome them.
Barrier #1: Teacher Time. Teachers have a lot on their plate this year. Even pre-pandemic, two-thirds of teachers cited time and workload pressures as the number one barrier to writing and feedback, despite knowing how important these are for their students. Teacher time will be scarcer than ever as educators navigate the myriad of challenges brought on by COVID-19. Here are our top recommendations to overcome this barrier:
Learn new tools and technology that will save you time and allow you to work more efficiently.
Don’t go it alone! Ask colleagues, read blogs, or join teacher groups online to find the best time-saving tips, practices, and resources.
Build a schedule to help balance and manage your time and priorities.
Be aware of the signs of burnout and prioritize self-care to stay healthy and energized.
Barrier #2: Alignment. There is an urgent need for alignment and consistency across schools, departments, and grade level teams this year so teachers don’t spend precious time and mental energy on goal-setting and mapping themselves. Instead, teachers should be empowered to focus their time on how to best support their students.
Collaborate with your department or grade-level team to create common writing goals and an aligned writing plan at the beginning of the year so you aren’t doing this alone or adjusting on the fly throughout the year.
Build writing into daily and weekly schedules so you, your team, and your students are aligned on writing expectations and practices.
Work to find or build common, high-quality rubrics across your department.
Barrier #3: Accountability. Having pre-planned data points, checks, and resources in place can help teachers and administrators stay committed when the school year gets hectic, or in this case, when there’s an unexpected event.
Build collaborative time into the schedule to share, analyze, and discuss student writing data as a department or grade-level team. This can be added into a department meeting or PLC or it can be something you do less formally in small groups
Sharing writing data with students and parents, offering time for 1:1 conversations
Once you’re aware of and working to overcome the barriers, it’s time to get students excited about writing. Use creative writing prompts, encourage students to write with family members or buddies, and look for ways to showcase and celebrate student work.
Like any skill, becoming a good writer requires practice and feedback. In study after study, feedback is shown to be one of the most effective teaching strategies out there. Students who receive fast, effective feedback achieve two years of growth per year. If there ever was a time to invest in strategies that can accelerate student learning, this is it.
For additional support or resources on feedback, please visit my company, The Graide Network. We’re really proud of our work in this area and would love to help your school.
As coronavirus presents increased workloads for teachers and a pressing need to combat learning losses for students, keeping up with feedback is more important and more difficult than ever. The Graide Network founded by Blair Pircon helps build better writers by providing timely, effective feedback on student writing via a qualified network of online teaching assistants. The Graide Network recently released a new Administrator Dashboard, knowing school administrators would need more tools and information to align teachers and understand student progress. The platform has also rolled out new features to make it easier for teachers to use The Graide Network remotely with students.
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