The Learning-to-write Process in Elementary Classrooms

Suzanne Bratcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136606465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text models for teachers how to help children learn and write by establishing comfort with writing, building confidence, and developing competence. Several themes run through the learning-to-write-process presented in this text:
* Writing is communication;
* Writing is a powerful tool for learning;
* How children feel about their writing and themselves as writers affects how they learn to write;
* Teachers are coworkers with students; children from many backgrounds can learn to write together.
The text sythesizes what we know about how children learn, how we write, and what we write into a process of teaching children to write. It is intended to serve as a starting place for developing theories of how to best teach writing.

Part I

The Learning-to-Write Process

1

Learning to Write

When my daughter was three, we took a swimming class for parents and tots. The teacher was a young man in his late teens who had won lots of swimming meets. He was much too young to have had any instruction in the art of teaching, and if the letters he sent home to parents were any indication, he had had very little instruction in the art of writing. Yet it was from this teenager named Tim that I began to learn how to teach writing.

First, Tim had us get in the shallow end of the pool. We splashed each other gently and laughed a lot. Some of the children waded right in and were splashing hilariously in no time; others, like my daughter, hung back on the steps and had to be coaxed. Once everyone was happy in the pool, Tim played water games with the children. He threw a beach ball into the pool and had the children jump in after it. He showed them how to tiptoe deeper and deeper into the water until it was just under their chins. He played tea party on the bottom with them, opening his eyes to see if theirs were open too. In short, he got the children comfortable with the water, with him as their teacher, and with each other as companions. Before he began formal swimming lessons, Tim made sure his students felt safe in the water. He established comfort.

Once the children felt safe, Tim showed them how to float on their backs. The parents hopped in the pool and helped. Following Tim’s directions, I held my daughter up, first with both hands, later with one, finally with none. I’ll never forget the surprised look on her face when she realized she was floating by herself. After that she learned quickly to jump in the water and flip onto her back, sure that the water would hold her up. The first lesson Tim introduced was one at which he knew the children could all succeed. He built confidence.

When floating felt almost natural, Tim introduced the children to a swimming skill that would allow them to go places in the water—he showed them how to kick their legs to do the backstroke. Imagine 15 three-year-olds swimming madly all over the pool—on their backs! In a few lessons, Tim had made these small children safe enough in the water that they could be trusted to swim where they wanted to go in the pool, even in the deep end. He developed competence.

Perhaps these stages—comfort, confidence, and competence—are simply the stages of swimming lessons. Or perhaps not. Think about learning language. Think about how children learn to talk.

When babies are first born (sometimes even sooner), adults begin making them comfortable with language. We talk to children long before they can understand the words we use. Then when a child starts to talk, we respond with praise. Remember the first time a child you know said, “kuh-kuh”? What happened? Somebody said, “Oh, listen! She said kitty!” The child did not really say kitty; she did not even say anything very close. She only got the first sound, but the adult did not say, “Oh, that’s not right! Say Siamese cat.”

As children receive praise, they build confidence. They take risks with new sounds. Soon they actually say kitty. They become confident about their ability to talk.

As children get older, adults expect “proper English.” And it develops—without drills and tests and tears. Adults teach children by repeating the construction correctly. If a child says, “I brung my books home,” the adult says, “You brought your books home?” Usually the child says, “Yes, I brought my books home,” and that is the end of it. Competence develops.

If we look farther afield into learning theory itself, we find support for a comfort-confidence-competence progression in Abraham Maslow’s work (1970). Most of us have studied Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as they explain motivation: physical needs must be met before safety needs become important; safety needs must be met before love and belongingness needs become important; love before esteem; esteem before cognitive; cognitive before aesthetic; aesthetic before self-actualization. In other words, before children can deal with the cognitive challenges of writing that develop their competence, they must feel safe, they must feel as though they are part of a community of writers, and they must feel respected: they must be comfortable and confident.

The work of social-cognitive theorists like Albert Bandura (1978) tells us that people learn by watching others and that the environment in which they learn makes a difference in how quickly and how effectively they learn. Furthermore, their work tells us that accomplished performance in any area requires more than learning and retaining information. Accomplished performance requires a conviction that one can accomplish the task undertaken and a self-regulatory system of goal setting and self-evaluation. In other words, Bandura’s work suggests that for learners to become accomplished, they must feel confident and they must be in charge of their own work, where they are going and how well they are doing along the way.

The work of writing teachers like Donald Graves (1983, 1994), Lucy Calkins (1983, 1994), and Anne Dyson (1989, 1993) documents many of these general learning principles in children learning to write. In both Writing: Teachers and Children at Work (1983) and A Fresh Look at Writing (1984), Graves described classrooms as writing communities: comfortable, safe communities of children and teachers working together. In A Fresh Look at Writing, he described developing children’s competence through mini-lessons, self-evaluation, and higher expectations. In The Art of Teaching Writing (1994), Calkins emphasized the importance of accepting children’s individual learning and encouraging ownership of their writing through revision. In Lessons from a Child (1983), she commented on the natural confidence first graders have about their own writing. In Multiple Worlds of Child Writers: Friends Learning to Write (1989) and Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School (1993), Dyson let us see the importance of the writing communities children build with each other.

From our observations of children and the work of learning theorists and writing researchers, we can posit a learning-to-write process that begins with children feeling comfortable in the writing classroom, feeling accepted no matter what their cultural and linguistic background might be, no matter what their current level of skill with writing might be, feeling a part of a community of writers that includes their peers as well as the teacher. From the foundation of comfort we can watch children begin to build confidence, knowing how to write, drawing on the strengths they already possess, hearing honest praise about the strengths they have as writers. Once we see children feeling safe and sure of themselves, we see them free to pursue competence, free to take ownership of their writing, free to learn to evaluate what they have written themselves and make their writing better, free to take risks that push the boundaries of what they have already learned about writing.

The process of learning to write is not a series of stages or steps. Comfort and confidence grow together; competence breeds confidence and comfort. As we look at these components of the writing process one at a time, perhaps we can avoid the temptation of thinking of this learning-to-write process as a series of stages by thinking of it as a wheel like the one in Fig. 1.1.

Fig. 1.1. Comfort-Confidence-Competence Wheel.

If we label the inner rim of the wheel comfort, the spokes become confidence, and the outer rim becomes competence. For the wheel to move, all three are required. Without the inner rim, the wheel won’t stay together. Without the spokes only the rim can move—and it won’t bear much weight! Without the outer rim, the ride is bumpy at best. But when the wheel begins to roll, the rims and spokes blur together. The wheel is just a wheel, moving as one entity. In the same way, when children are comfortable, confident, and competent, they begin to go places as writers.

In the Classroom

Listen for a moment to third-grade teacher Paula Nelson talk about the learning-to-write process:

Learning to write doesn’t happen in just one year. As elementary teachers we have the job of bringing children to the writing process, but that is a process in itself. We just see a little chunk of this learning because we have our students for only one year. We never know what impact it makes later.

Listen to this story about one of Becky White’s sixth graders:

I had a student two years ago—he was a great student. He wasn’t exactly scholarly, but he really got into the writing process. At open house this year he gave me a little booklet he had written for me over the summer. He asked me to wait to read it until I was alone, and what he wrote let me see a longer part of the learning process. He wrote:

I’ve got a problem. You see, all my life I have been the kind of kid that, like, do this, okay, you know, no questions asked. But you have made me think. You have made me ask myself why. You know, like, why am I doing this? What does this mean? You’ve made me ask and answer these questions I’ve never answered before. I used to be like a robot—what are my next instructions? You’ve made me write these pages. You’ve told me to tell me my problems or to write to you about my troubles. You have told me to trust you and I sure hope I can. I have decided to write a book about my life when I am older. I was taught not to ask questions but just do it and you yourself said to follow the Nike logo, but I know now it is okay to wonder. Now I know why and how.

That’s what we do for kids with writing. It goes beyond the one year we have them in our class.

Chapter Summary

As we teach children to write, we need to think about how they learn as well as about how people write. The work of Maslow and Bandura helps us understand learning as a progression of meeting needs and an interaction between social context and individual cognition. The work of Calkins and Graves helps us observe how real children in real classrooms learn to write. By synthesizing the work of these various researchers, we can think about learning to write as a process of comfort (overcoming fear), confidence (knowing what they do right), and competence (learning how to do new things or old things better). If we think of the learning-to-write process as a wheel with an inner rim of comfort, spokes of confidence, and an outer rim of competence, we can avoid the trap of thinking of this process as a linear set of stages.

Applications

1. Think back to some skill or art or craft at which you have become proficient. Trace your learning of this art and comment on whether or not it falls into the comfort-confidence-competence model. If it does not, comment on what model it does fall under or why you think it varies. If it does, trace your comfort, confidence, and competence process for this art.
2. Think about something you have taught a child (like swimming). Try to map out how the child learned following the comfort, confidence, competence model. Comment on similarities or differences.
3. Read Calkins’ Lessons from a Child and map out your own writing development (Part II) as a child. If you have a child of your own or know a child well, try to map out that child’s writing development.
4. Think about your writing development beyond elementary school. Comment on your present levels of comfort, confidence, and competence with writing. Trace how your teachers helped (or did not help) your writing development.

2

Establishing Comfort

“Since the beginning of the year, I’ve changed my feelings about writing. It has been funner than I thought.”

—A sixth grader

The Theory

Comfort is safety. It is feeling relaxed. It is feeling accepted. It is belonging. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is built on the foundation of physical well-being and safety. Our classrooms need to be as physically comfortable as we can make them. Children who are hot or cold or in some other way physically uncomfortable cannot learn to write. Maslow told us that once our physical bodies are taken care of, our social natures need tending: we need to feel love and a sense of belonging. Having someone to listen to us without judging establishes comfort. Being part of a group establishes comfort. Graves (1983) showed us a classroom community that included tea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes to the College Instructor
• Part I: The Learning-to-Write Process
• Part II: Reasons to Write
• Part III: The Teaching-Writing Process
• Appendix
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index