When it comes to teaching writing, there’s a ton of different ways to approach it. Without a set plan or proper training, it’s hard to avoid modeling mistakes. In this post, I’ll show you some common mistakes and what to do to avoid them.
Mistake #1 - Not Being Explicit
If we don’t have a writing curriculum, it can be very easy to just tell our students what we want to see in their writing. Think about friendly letters. How many times have you gone over the parts of a letter only to see their letter writing and most of your class is missing some of the parts?
Believe it or not, when it comes to writing instruction this is quite common.
How to Avoid It
In order to see what we are telling students actually show up in student writing, we need to be very explicit. Tell students what the parts of a letter are, but then model where they go. Talk to them about what’s important with each part. Write a letter in front of them talking out loud to yourself about what you are doing and why. Repeat this over several days.
At the beginning of your letter writing unit use a writing template that guides your students where to put their letter parts. Then gradually take it away, especially if you are teaching second graders and above. Being able to see if they can put the parts correctly is a big indicator if your lessons were successful.
Teaching writing is all about telling students what you are doing, showing them (modeling it), and having them practice it. Consistently doing these three steps for each lesson will result in a big improvement in your students’ writing.
Mistake #2 - Not Having a Clear Plan
Because teaching writing doesn’t usually come with a curriculum like math and reading, it can be easy to teach without having a clear plan. However, when we are modeling writing without a clear idea of what we want (or need) to teach it can be easy to teach too much.
Imagine you are teaching a writing lesson about personal narratives but you didn’t sit down and plan out your unit. Instead you sit down with your class and start writing a story on your easel. First you take a few minutes to brainstorm an idea. Next you start writing and find yourself talking about starting with capital letters, using spacing between words, word choice, dialogue, and ending punctuation. Then you start in on your detailed drawing.
You go to release your class for independent writing only to look at the clock and discover you’ve been teaching for 35 minutes and students only have a few minutes left to actually write. You decide to just transition into the next subject and promise yourself you’ll give students time to write tomorrow.
How to Avoid It
We’re going to create a clear path for our writing instruction. First you need to know what your students already understand about writing. GIve them a writing pre-assessment. Next, you’ll analyze the skills you see using a checklist such as my FREE K-3 Writing Skills Progression Chart.
Once we know the skills our students need, we’ll compare them to what the standards say about where our students should be by the end of the year. The gap between what they know and what they need is where we will list out the skills we need to teach. Then we plan mini lessons to start teaching and practicing these skills.
Related Post: Using a Writing Pre-Assessment
Mistake #3 - Not Modeling WRITING Mistakes
Students need to see our mistakes. When we do not model our writing mistakes, we are missing out on the opportunity to teach our students how to fix the mistakes. Imagine modeling a writing lesson in front of your first grade class and you neglect to misspell any words. The next day you return to your modeled writing and want to teach a lesson on editing. How? There are no mistakes to correct.
How to Avoid It
I like to model writing for my students in a similar manner to how they might write. This means I misspell common words they way they would spell or I’ll intentionally leave off periods and capital letters. Maybe I’ll end sentences using “It was good” like they would. Then when I go through the revising and editing process I can show them how to fix it.
Related Post: Editing and Revising Teaching Methods
Mistake #4 - Not Allowing Students to Copy
Oh how our students love to mimic our writing! When students are unsure of themselves or they are not strong in spelling and writing, they will copy our work. I know our goal is not to have 20 perfectly executed stories that look and sound EXACTLY like what we have modeled, but in all honesty most students will start to branch off and write on their own.
How to Avoid It
In the lower elementary grades, it’s not easy to avoid having students copy your work. Although it’s not ideal to happen throughout the whole school year, I say let them copy. Set a goal when you expect them to start doing their own thing.
Look at why they may be copying. Maybe those students have trouble with pencil grip, sounding out words, or coming up with ideas. Providing lessons to help them solve these struggles is key to getting them away from copying your writing. Once they have the tools to be successful with writing on their own, they will break away from copying your writing.
Mistake #5 - Completing an Entire Writing Piece
Sometimes when we are modeling writing, we feel like we have to craft an entire writing piece in front of students. Not only that but we might feel we have to plan, write, revise, edit, and publish within a few days time.
How to Avoid It
Having a clear plan for what we are teaching is a great way to avoid doing too much when we are modeling for students. Although there are a lot of skills we want to teach our students, we need to slow down and model just one thing at a time.
We don’t need to model an entire writing piece if we are wanting students to focus on using a descriptive beginning. If we model the beginning, middle, and end we lose the focus of showing students how to craft a great beginning. They will probably have forgotten what you are trying to teach by the time you get to the end of the lesson!
Help avoid writing mistakes by having a plan. Download my FREE writing skills chart.