Writing Put to the Test

Teaching for the High Stakes Essay

Amy Benjamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317923985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This book helps educators improve students' ability to write clear, coherent essays in response to on-demand writing prompts. While it focuses on students' abilities to succeed at on-demand writing, it also promotes the teaching of writing as an expression of art and self. For grades 4 -12, it provides examples of responses to narrative and persuasive prompts, and provides savvy advice about what scorers look for.

1

Introducing On-Demand Writing

The purpose of this book is to help educators like you improve your students’ ability to write clear, coherent essays in response to on-demand writing prompts. I hope to help you increase your students’ scores on VITs (Very Important Tests) without sacrificing sound pedagogy that leads to durable learning.

In this age of high-stakes testing, schools and school districts are compared to each other on the basis of scores on state-mandated tests. Schools that fall short of “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) are exposed and even denounced as “failing schools.” The SAT now requires an on-site essay in which students must defend a position in a well-organized, albeit short, essay. Learning to write through a process approach held sway in the 1980s, but writing on demand is what is now expected.

Whether writing on demand yields the best product, the most reflective thinking, or the finest use of language is irrelevant. Obviously, a better piece of writing is going to be produced if the writer has more time to spend on all of the stages of the writing process. Equally obvious is the fact that we write best when we care about the message. Writing on demand to an external prompt is not the natural way to communicate. However, taken for what it is, we need to make our students better at this particular skill.

On-demand writing is unlike the kind of writing that most of us like to teach: on-demand writing isn’t about creativity, nor is it about self-discovery. It isn’t about coaxing and sculpting prose that is a thing of beauty out of the lump of clay that is a rough draft. It isn’t about revision. It isn’t about editing. On-demand writing is about the writer’s ability to think and write quickly, and to execute the task within a time frame of 20 minutes, a half hour, or 45 minutes at most.

This is not to say that we should abandon teaching writing through process. Nor is it to say that we should have students write only to external prompts, rushing the process to complete the writing task within a time limit. On the contrary, students need to do plenty of writing of all kinds, for various purposes and genres, learning how to adjust language tone to address the expectations of various audiences.

This book will explain why and how we need to extend our writing process instruction so as to prepare students for the high-stakes essay.

1. Background: Where are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? Where are we today in terms of writing instruction and society’s expectations about what an educated person should be able to do? What are the trends in education that affect writing instruction? Within the profession, how is on-demand writing received? What supports are available? What oppositions confront us as we seek to improve student performance in the on-demand task?
2. Teaching through rhetorical modes: When we write to a prompt, we need to orient our minds to the particular type of language (rhetorical mode) that we are being asked to produce. Narrative-descriptive writing is substantially different from persuasive writing in terms of organization, syntax, and diction. Information-based writing, such as reports and explanations, has its own features. So the first task is for the writer to establish a firm grounding in the proper rhetorical environment.
3. Planning and organization: When time is of the essence, planning is a key skill. How do we help our students use the allotted time strategically?
4. Scoring: Scoring on most high-stakes tests is done by rubric. This part of the book explains the five key traits, what scorers are looking for, and how to instruct for each.
5. Assistive intervention: What are the most effective, efficient ways to assist struggling writers, including our English language learners? What do our strong writers know that our weak writers don’t know? Where do our weak writers need help the most? Included in this part of the book is a system that I call RxWrite. RxWrite is a collection of prescriptive lessons corresponding to key writing traits. Through RxWrite, you can direct your students to lessons and guided practice pinpointed to their demonstrated needs.

An Analogy: Rehearsal, Dress Rehearsal, Performance

Musicians and athletes perform on demand, but the quality of their performance is shaped by deliberate practice in the key components. Everyone expects a musician to tune up and warm up, to practice scales for speed and accuracy, and to approach new pieces with deliberation, replaying the tricky parts over and over. And then there’s the dress rehearsal, where the musician simulates concert conditions just to get the feel of running through the piece without interruption. Translated into the writing experience, the analogy would look like this:

Figure 1.1. Musician vs. Writer

Student Musician	Student Writer
Tune-up, warm-up: The musician establishes a special psychological space for music.	Conversation: The student begins to focus on the subject of the writing task by informally gathering ideas together and considering the issues: What do I know? Why do I care? What might I say?
Practicing scales and etudes: The musician builds and maintains the physical agility and mental acuity necessary to create music.	Prewriting experience: The student further develops ideas and builds knowledge through reading and continued discussion.
Sight-reading; analyzing the musical text: The musician interprets the symbolic language of musical text, recognizing its patterns, identifying tricky passages, and mentally translating the symbols into sounds.	Planning and organizing: The student considers the nature of the prompt and lays out an organizational plan which may include a word inventory, sketch or outline, and tentative thesis.
Rehearsal: Through “informed repetition,” the musician prepares the piece, concentrating on the hardest parts. The musician is assisted by an expert coach who gives feedback, modeling, and advice.	Composing (drafting, revising, and editing): Over a period of time, the student uses the recursive writing process to create a meaningful, coherent piece of writing.
Dress rehearsal: To instill confidence, the musician simulates concert conditions, pretending that an audience is present. Ideally, the musician is in the actual concert hall, under concert sound and lighting conditions.	In-class on-demand task: Given a task similar to that of the standardized test, and given simulated test conditions, the student responds to a writing prompt.
Performance.	On-demand writing task on a standardized test.

There are musicians who play for their own enjoyment or for the social experience of making music with others. They are not performers. And there are writers who write for their own clarification or expression. They are not published writers, and may or may not save what they write or have others read it. The practice that they get will make them more fluent. They are developing the level of performance that we call automaticity: the ability to function in a complex task without thinking about its discrete steps. It’s important for writers to function automatically on the high-stakes essay, and getting to that level requires regular practice. However, practice is not enough: the writer needs instruction, feedback, and expectations that the instruction and feedback will be applied toward a better product. At this point we should look at the tools of modern writing instruction.

Key Terms in Writing Instruction

When I was in high school back in the 1960s, most of the following pedagogical terms regarding writing instruction weren’t used among educators. In fact, if writing instruction was done at all, very little of it was thrown my way. I was given assignments, not instruction. Since the Bay Area Writing Project and the National Writing Project revolutionized the teaching of English language arts in the 1970s, educators have developed a lexicon to talk about the writing process. And since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, that lexicon has grown to include language about the high-stakes essay test.

Anchor Papers

Anchor papers are papers that the test-makers provide to show what they expect scores at different levels of the scoring range to look like. The test-makers comment on the anchor papers, explaining how they arrived at the grade. Evaluators are expected to read the anchor papers and their commentary carefully to come to agreement about how they are to judge the papers. This process must be done as a group immediately before individuals assign value to the papers. The examination and discussion of anchor papers is time-consuming, but it is absolutely necessary to maintain the integrity of the grades.

Diction

Diction is word choice. In academic writing, we expect the writer to use subject-area language that is as elevated, specific, and technical as possible. Most students need to learn academic diction through explicit instruction.

Document-Based Question

Going by the abbreviation DBQ, the document-based question is widely used in social studies classes. The experience of writing to answer a document-based question is that of an on-the-spot compression of a research paper, except that the sources are presented right there for the writer to use. Given several primary source documents—for example, political cartoons, advertisements, newspaper articles, public notices, or personal correspondence—the writer must put together an essay in response to a prompt. The writer is required to use the documents as supportive evidence.

Expository Writing

Often used in contrast to creative writing, expository writing exposes (explains, describes, justifies) a subject. The term itself, once a staple in English classes, is not used much anymore, but those who still use it do so with the expectation that everyone knows what they mean.

Five-Paragraph Essay

The five-paragraph essay is a convenient structure for on-demand writing. This structure, once a staple in schoolroom writing, now languishes in disrepute as a hackneyed form suitable for only the most perfunctory, desultory writing. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about the five-paragraph essay, except that weaker writers probably benefit by learning it as a structure, whereas stronger ones may find it limiting.

Formulaic Writing

The five-paragraph essay is an example of formulaic writing. By formulaic writing, we mean writing that fits into a recognizable standard structure. The writer places certain kinds of information in certain slots of a discursive structure. Some formulas are so rigid that they assign a number to every sentence. Although many people criticize formulaic writing for being uncreative, most experienced teachers find that formulas a...