Below is a post from guest blogger and teacher leader, Kevin Studdard.  He recently taught Teacher Academy on our new school wide graphic organizer teachers will use in their classrooms when essays or writing prompts are assigned.  #Exceptional job @kevin_studdard!

I love to write.  There’s something about the expression that comes with taking words right from the brain and putting them carefully into a medium, constructing those intricate thoughts oh so carefully so that they carry with them a weight that moves others to thought.

That said, I feel there’s a problem with writing, especially at the secondary level.  It’s not one that is easily addressed due to circumstances beyond the control of most common educators.  In my opinion, the biggest enemy of good writing, the kind that moves others to think, the kind that touches on socially and emotionally important aspects of life, the kind that makes a person wake up and say, “I want to put that on paper” is time.

Most standardized tests give students anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes to prove they can write a decent response to a given prompt.  To tell the truth, I probably spent more than 40 minutes simply thinking about what I wanted to put into this blog post.  To write a good response, students are expected to plan and pre-write their paper, actually write their paper, and revise and edit their paper to meet certain guidelines that will prove they are decent, academically-minded writers.

In my experience, pre-writing can be about the trickiest part of the whole process for students.  I think most of them hear, “You have 40 minutes to complete this test.  You may begin,” and immediately freak out, writing anything and everything that comes to mind that may or may not actually be relevant to the topic.  Here, there’s no order.  There’s no plan.  There’s panic and confusion.  There’s chaotic writing put into place in order to fill up as much of the page as possible in hopes that someone will say, “Wow!  This student wrote a whole lot so it must be good!” without any consideration to the content.

Pre-writing under the pressures of time takes…well, time.  Recently, teachers from our English department met to create a school-wide method to address the lack of pre-writing we saw in many of our students.  I was so impressed with what my colleagues and I put together I introduced it to my students as soon as I could work it into my lesson plans.  Carefully, I walked through the steps: “Supporting details go here.  Your thesis goes here.  Be brief, but specific.”  I turned them loose on the graphic organizer feeling confident and elated because my students all seemed to grasp what we were wanting from them in the beginning stages of their writing!

It took 45 minutes.

I wish I were kidding, but it seriously took 45 minutes for them to complete.  I want to be sure I’m clear here: this was just to complete the graphic that I showed them how to use, not including writing the actual essay.

Methods of using the tool were varied. Some students attempted to fit as much information as they possibly could into the section for supporting details using complete, and often long, sentences.  Others used short snippets with brief details and descriptions.  If nothing else, this shows that writing and the methods by which students express their ideas is as different as their individual personalities.  However, these methods can still be honed and shaped just as much as the personalities of individuals change as those people grow and learn.

From here my goal is clear: teach students to pre-write while being as time-efficient as possible.  It will be a process, but one that can be achieved simply by pulling back the time given to pre-write and expecting my students to do so with the hope that not every minute detail makes it to paper, internalized like the art of breathing.  Yet, like the expressiveness of writing itself, their pre-writing should be personal and written as a plan by them, for them.  It’s going to be messy, but most things done right are rarely done right the first time.