For Students, No Dodging the Drafts

New Writing Programs Try to Revive Revising

Rachel Adler, 8, seated on a rug in her large third-grade classroom, formed a circle with three fellow students who listened intently as she read her story titled "Why The Tiger Has Stripes." Encircling them were 20 other students who heard how Tiger flung mud on his back to clean off dirty leaves and decided he liked the two-toned look.

When she was done, Rachel listened to the children in the small group tell her what was good about her story and how to improve it. The others then judged how well Rachel's evaluators had performed.

Rachel, who attends the private Sheridan School in the District, expects to revise her story several times before it is in "publishable form." Serving as helpers are wall posters about the stages of writing, including one labeled "Revision Ideas" that starts with this sound advice: "Check to see if the piece makes sense."

This multi-step writing process is being taught at an increasing number of U.S. schools, although few do it as intensively as Sheridan.

"We've grown to love writing," said Rachel, who especially likes her "writer's notebook," in which every child is encouraged to write literary fragments they might later want to turn into a cohesive piece. "The teachers make it fun and help you explore. It's like you're a bird and your writer's notebook is the sky."

Sheridan's teachers happily admit that they have no interest in teaching students how to take standardized tests but rather want to show them how to be good analytical writers. From kindergarten through eighth grade, most Sheridan students spend several hours a week on writing, from brainstorming ideas to first drafts, peer review and teacher consultation. They produce second, third and sometimes fourth and fifth drafts until the piece is coherent and error-free.

Teaching good writing is a topic that is getting renewed interest from educators everywhere. Writing programs abound, teachers are jamming writing seminars and colleges are experimenting with writing requirements for graduation. Some colleges make writing advisers available to student 24 hours a day, by telephone or online. The verbal portion of the SAT now includes a writing section, and New York City schools just changed some of their testing to emphasize writing.

"It's no longer good enough to have kids read and bubble in answers," said Lucy M. Calkins, who teaches English education at Columbia Teachers College in New York. "Students have to be able to write articulate and coherent essays."

Yet many still can't. College presidents and employers continue to complain that young people can't write well, and federal studies confirm it. Results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 1 percent of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders performed at the "advanced level" in writing, and most of the students did not reach the level of "proficient."

Some educators, such as Kay Phillips, head of the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are convinced that the quality of writing has deteriorated in the past quarter-century. She blames it in part on what she believes is a decline in the reading of literature and a lack of strong grammar instruction.

Pesche Kuriloff, director of the Mellon Writing Project at the University of Pennsylvania, doesn't quite agree. The quality of students' first drafts hasn't changed, she says. The problem is that they are no longer being pushed by their teachers to do better. "Standards have declined," Kuriloff said. "There is a very high tolerance for what I consider very sloppy thinking and sloppy writing."

Kuriloff said she finds little sense of form in student writers--and one reason is the computer. "There is often no relationship between the beginning and end of an essay because it disappears off the screen," she said. "They don't read it through and make the connections. They produce a paragraph and then another and another. The result is linear writing. It's not a circle."

Experts say that many education schools fail to give student teachers proper training in how to teach writing--and that many teachers don't bother to do it once they're in the classroom. "More than half of the teachers in America do not have time for teaching writing as a subject," Calkins said.

When they do teach it, too much of the instruction is abstract, said Sheila Ford, principal of Horace Mann Elementary School in the District, who has sent some of her teachers to Calkins's summer institutes in New York. The key piece of equipment that should be in every classroom, Ford said, is a $79 overhead projector on which students can see examples of good work.

"You can teach the process of writing like you teach tennis," Calkins said. "The role of the teacher is to demonstrate and to coach and to watch people as they do it. It requires a different image of teaching . . . turning classes into workshops."

Which is what Sheridan's teachers pride themselves on. They recognize that private schools have more luxury than some public schools to spend time on writing, in part because they are not focused on standardized testing. Yet they say public schools can do better if they want.

Rachel's third-grade teacher, Silvana G. Nazzaro Clark, spent a year at Montgomery County's highly regarded Burning Tree Elementary School. She said writing was taught well there, but the steps were not shown to younger students as clearly as they are at Sheridan.

Take the poem that Sheridan third-grader Clare Sestanovich wrote about baseball. She didn't just sit down and slap together a rhyme. First she wrote three full pages in her writer's notebook about her subject, beginning: "As you step from the dugout, the dirt spraying from the ground, the mound looks silver from the moon as the last sharp words come from the dugout."

Then she began writing in poetic form: "I like baseball . . . /I like the cheers/and the brown bat; hitting the ball/CRACK." Eventually the poem was "published" on yellow paper with her own illustrations.

Sheridan students don't just have to worry about their writing in English class. They also are required to do several drafts for reports in subjects such as social studies and science.

The concept of "writing across disciplines" is gaining popularity even at the college level. Georgetown University, for example, has a program to teach professors of all subjects how to improve students' writing.

"Students can do very well in writing courses. But if that is all they are doing, when they get to a complicated history or economics course, some of those skills collapse," said Jim Slevin, a Georgetown English professor who directs the program.

That's old hat to Sheridan students such as Cary Euwer, 14, who is in eighth grade and been through everything the school has thrown at him. "Science lab reports, sure, we have to revise them. Social studies, too, we have to do drafts first."

Exactly how many drafts? "It all depends on how many times the teacher wants you to do it," he said.