Writing – I honestly hated teaching writing more than any other subject. It intimidated me, I never knew what to work on, and it felt like a constant battle to get my students to write. When I finally fine tuned the writing process, and started experiencing that thrill of seeing my students progress, I never looked back. 5 years later and writing is still my favorite subject to teach. I hope incorporating even a few of these suggestions brings you great writing success with your students.
Teaching opinion or informative writing to students with learning disabilities must include pre-writing, drafts, editing, writing conferences, and publishing. Explicitly teaching each of these steps will greatly increase your students’ independent writing capabilities.
My students, not the ones who respond well to cookie-cutter programs, are the ones who helped me look at writing with a lens that heavily considered learning disabilities. This consideration led me to develop a writing system that could easily be differentiated to match the unique learning styles of each student. I have broken down each of these crucial steps and will explain the benefits of teaching them through specially designed instruction.
*Names have been changed to protect the students
Audience, Purpose, Type
Though the purpose of this article is to talk about the writing process I wanted to add in a quick section about the importance of teaching audience, purpose, and type.
I worked for a year with a very talented general education teacher to try to get our sixth grade students writing at higher levels. We fine tuned so many processes, and though our students made quite a bit of progress we were still struggling to get them to write essays specific to the prompt. It took a month or two until I finally realized the issue. Our students were only reading pieces of the prompt rather than using it to determine the audience, purpose, and type of essay they needed to write. That’s why when we asked them to, “Write a 3-5 paragraph essay that explains your views on zoo’s as rehabilitation centers.” We got essays that talked about what a zoo was. They read, “Write an essay about zoo’s.”
Our students’ very first step in every writing assignment is to read the prompt. Teaching them to dissect the prompt to identify what the purpose of their paper is will help them in turn identify the type of essay they are writing. It’s like analyzing a step in building a treehouse and deciding what tool you are going to use. This first step plays a critical role in how deeply our students will understand the reason we have different types of essays and when to use which writing “tool” (informative, opinion, or narrative).
Every year when I start my writing groups I start with this step.
Pre-writing
You will notice that his section is the longest and there is a simple explanation. This is where you should spend a large chunk of your time while you are teaching your students to love and be empowered to write. Explicitly teaching the prewriting process is a step I never knew I needed to take, and when I did, it was magic!
Let me tell you about *Sam. Sam hated writing. Every single time he came for writing his shoulders would slump, he would begin to scowl, and he would stare at his paper as if it had just eaten his last skittle (his favorite treat). This is often the conversations we would have:
Me: Sam time to write!
Sam: I don’t know what to write about.
Me: Right here on the board “Write about (topic for that day)”
Sam: I don’t know what to say about that. I hate writing.
This conversation would usually continue as I prompted and guided him to write at least one sentence about the topic. I began to research to try to understand what I could do to empower Sam and my other students. I soon learned the power of pre-writing.
It is my opinion that prewriting is arguably the most important step in the entire writing process, especially for students with learning disabilities. Why is that you ask? Because it takes the difficult task of writing the essay and splits it into two parts – brainstorming and organizing the thoughts (prewrite), and structuring sentences, paragraphs, or essays (drafting).
Prewriting and Brainstorming Lists
Let’s focus on opinion writing for a second. If there is one thing we know as teachers, it’s that students LOVE to share their opinions. Now picture this, you put an opinion prompt up on the board and simply give the students the opportunity to share their thoughts on it. No writing, no multitasking, just talking. What would happen with your students?
I’ll tell you what happened with mine: At first, they were quiet. I could tell they were worried the more they shared, the more they would write (I realized later that a better model and think aloud would have helped me avoid this initial response). But with some prompting and positive reinforcement, they suddenly exploded with ideas. They couldn’t get their hands up fast enough. Their eyes lit up, they were making connections, laughing, agreeing, and disagreeing. Suddenly, that prompt that was so overwhelming exploded into an opportunity to share a million thoughts they didn’t know they had.
Brainstorming lists gave the students the opportunity to take a topic and put every and any thought they had about it on a paper in list form. This removed the challenge of holding and sifting through information while simultaneously trying to plan their essay. This also allowed us to avoid wasted time day to day trying to remember ideas and thoughts from the previous day. All the information was on paper; they didn’t have to remember.
We practiced creating brainstorming lists (or doing brain dumps as I sometimes called them). We practiced until they got it, then we practiced it a few more times. We did it until they were confident that they had something to share on any topic I gave them, and that what they had to share had weight and value. The world, including myself, wanted to know and cared about what they had to say.
(picture)
Pre-Writing and the Graphic Organizer
Our next step was to take those brainstorming lists and organize them into graphic organizers. Let me tell you, I went through a ridiculous amount of graphic organizers. I even tried skipping this step altogether because I kept running into the same problem over and over: my students couldn’t, and sometimes wouldn’t, take the organizer I made into their general education classes. How could they? I had pre-made the organizers for them.
The one thing I knew for sure was that the organizer was an absolutely vital part. I found an overly simple solution to teach them to create their own organizers using symbols that represented each part. Teaching them to create their own organizers had two extremely unpredicted outcomes:
- My students didn’t just memorize a sequence, they learned to tell me each part of the paragraph or essay they were writing and why it was important.
- My students, when it was a topic they were interested in, began to add details beyond what was “outlined” for them.
I thought that by giving them a graphic organizer I was helping them, but I was actually limiting them. Creating their own allowed them to go beyond just the 2 or 3 details that I had space for in the premade outline.
By focusing harder and longer on the prewriting process (at least until my students no longer dreaded walking into writing class), I was able to help students like Sam go from writing one to two sentences, with a ridiculous amount of prompting, to independently writing five to eight sentence paragraphs in a single sitting.
Picture
First Draft: Putting their notes into words
Let’s talk about *Greg. Greg was a student that was also greatly affected by teaching the prewriting process explicitly. He struggled with anxiety and by working through prewriting, he no longer stood at my door and cried. He came in confident and excited to share his thoughts. However, moving from the graphic organizer to writing the five-sentence paragraph always yielded the same results:
Greg would immediately go into a panic attack. He would begin to pull his hair, stare at his papers, and soon large tears would form as he melted. I was having to prompt him and guide him on every single part of his paragraph. Here is how our conversations usually went:
Me: Greg what’s wrong?
Greg: I don’t know what to write?!
Me: It’s all right here remember (*gesturing to his outline)? You just turn your notes into sentences. I’ve seen you do that with other notes, you’ve got this!
Greg: I know but I don’t know what to put!
Me: Ok let’s start with the topic sentence what is your topic?
Greg: Animals
Me: Ok so what are you going to say about animals?
Greg: I don’t know! I hate writing! (*cue the tears and anxiety attack)
I was confused with this outcome because it was all right there – his whole paragraph summarized in notes. He literally just had to turn them into sentences. I could not figure out where the panic was stemming from.
Fast forward a few months and I am sitting at a conference where they are teaching me about the power of teaching phonics. They gave me all this amazing information and man, I was confident in my understanding of what I needed to teach. Suddenly, I panicked. “How the heck do I teach this? Where do I even start? I don’t even know how to present this to my students.” Then the instructor said, “Let me give you an example of how I start each part of the lesson.” Boom! It all clicked.
When my student was saying, “I don’t know what to put,” what he was really saying was, “I don’t know how to start.” Again, I began to research and I discovered the power of sentence starters.
I will admit, at first I was highly against sentence starters (or sentence stems as some people call them). I didn’t want them to be locked into one start. I wanted them to be creative, to have their own voice, add their own flare. But, let’s compare this to building a house. There are lots of different kinds of houses. Mansions, castles, simple homes and shacks; but what do they all have in common? Their foundational concepts are the same: walls, doors, and a roof.
Picture of a house frame
Teaching students to start each part of their paragraphs with given sentence starters is on par to teaching a builder that a house should have: walls, doors, and a roof. They need to know where to start. Once they understand how to start they slowly but surely begin to add their own voice and flare. If we give them that foundation, that start, their creativity can blossom.
Editing:
*Maria was my student who could write and write. She would write all day if I let her. The problem was I had a hard time getting her to understand the order and structure of an essay. She wanted to give information on opinion essays, opinions in informative essays, and loved to include story pieces in all her passages. I used all the tricks I had learned over the years. This is when I decided to dive deeper into editing. I thought that if I could get her to work with her peers maybe, just maybe, I could get her to structure her essays.
I don’t know when it happened, and I remember it didn’t happen right away, but I can still see the light go on one day while she was helping a student who was struggling with his paragraph. She was telling him that he had a sentence that didn’t belong. He asked her what sentence, she showed him, he disagreed. I vividly recall watching as she slowly but successfully explained why what he had written wasn’t a reason that supported his opinion. CLICK. She stared at his essay, blinked a couple of times, and went back to her essay. She brought it to me and told me what she had figured out. She finally got it, and she was proud.
I shudder to think that there was a long period of time when I breezed through the editing section of writing. Sometimes I just did the editing for them and moved on. It wasn’t until I decided to explicitly teach editing that I truly understood the ability it had to expand and solidify my students’ understanding of the writing process. Again, after years of playing around with it I found giving my students three opportunities to edit their (or their peers) essays benefitted them the most.
Edit: Self and Peer
Finding the balance between the self-edit and the peer edit took a lot of discussion with a very knowledgeable Gen Ed teacher. We worked through lots of different rubrics and settled on this combo:
- In the self-edit the student is checking all the parts, but particularly focusing on their convections (sentence structure, grammar, handwriting, etc.)
- In the peer-edit they are looking to make sure their classmate had all the parts the essay or paragraph required and that each part was on topic
Doing this kind of peer work had to be handled delicately because it put each student in a very, VERY vulnerable spot. To handle this I first modeled how to do a self-and peer edit. I showed them how to give positive feedback and constructive feedback to their peers. Then I modeled it again, and again, and again, and…well…you get it. We talked about what to do if you did not agree with the peers score (maybe the peer said you were missing a part and you didn’t agree). We talked about the importance of sharing our work so we could learn from others and others could learn from us.
Next, I pulled the students back to me to do their peer edits while I helped guide and strengthen their conversations through the peer editing process. I guided them until they had confidence to give and receive feedback without my support. My students latched on and took off. They loved editing their essays and editing their peers. I listened so many times as suddenly my students with disabilities were engaging in deep meaningful conversations about the different parts of the peers essay, what they liked, why those parts were important, and sometimes even how they could improve.
My students suddenly were gaining a deeper understanding of why it was important to add periods, nice handwriting, sentence starters. They showed patience and compassion for their peers who struggled with writing or reading (I usually helped out with those edits). They suddenly became motivated to write because it wasn’t just me reading what they wrote, they had a larger audience (more on this concept below).
- Second Draft
I’m not going to spend a ton of time on this section. Truthfully, I only included this step for my super high writers (typically my students who were in my class purely for behavior). In this step, they corrected any edits they made along with the feedback from their peers. I encouraged them to try to push their writing to the next level. Add stronger details. Give stronger reasons. Sometimes I allowed them to type their second draft and other times they wrote it. Either way once they finished they would bring it to me for a final edit and writing conference.
- Editing and Writing Conferences
Oh how I wish I would have started writing conferences earlier in my career! This was valuable time working with them one-on-one while we discussed what was going well and what goal(s) they had for their writing.
Don’t get me wrong, when I first started trying these it was a little awkward. I wasn’t sure what to say or how to approach the instructional part without dashing the little writing motivation we had built up.
I found that balance the hard way. *Blake had just finished an essay and it was one of the longest and best he had written. We were both so excited and proud of his work when he came to conference with me. After praising him I started into the edits. “Alright, let’s go through and add punctuation first.” Cue red pen. “Alright, now let’s go back and check capitals.” Again, red pen. “I think that you should maybe add some detail here. I would love to know more about this part, also let’s fix these spelling mistakes since we are hanging it in the hall.”
I noticed too late that soon his whole paper was covered in red and my student had nearly melted into a defeated puddle on the floor. He was on the verge of tears. It was gut wrenching. It took me months (no not days, not weeks, but months) to undo the damage I did in that ten minute conference.
Blake taught me that writing conferences should be about diving into the students article together, not about me dissecting it while they defended, or more realistically, watched in despair. I learned to start with giving them the opportunity to tell me about what they wrote, why they wrote, and show me all the parts of their essay. Not only did this allow the students to brag about their work, it also gave me extremely important information about what they had solidified in the writing process, and what they still needed instruction on.
However, The most important thing that I learned from Blake when having writing conferences was this: Pick no more than 1-3 things to fix on the students’ essays.
Editing every part only destroys the confidence of our students and makes them feel their work was for nothing. If you come in hot with that dark red marker you will build a belief that every paper has to be perfect. It doesn’t. Right now, our goal is not perfection. We want them to build confidence and a desire to share their thoughts with others – to try, to put in effort. Setting small goals allows them to work on, and succeed, in making progress and slowly work towards perfection.
Learn from my mistakes. When you are doing writing conferences let the student lead, and pick only 1-3 things to edit for that paper.
- Publishing:
This lesson came from a young me. I was giving my students a writing assignment when I heard one of my students say, “Why are we even doing this. There is no point.” Suddenly an 8 year old me flashed before my eyes and I remembered saying that exact thing as our substitute handed us another assignment that would go ungraded and in the recycling bin.
From that day on my students started the writing process understanding where their papers would end up (also known as identifying the audience). They ranged in places, some were read to the principal, some were hung in the halls, some were posted in the classroom, others were saved for parent teacher conferences. It didn’t matter where they ended up as long as they were published somewhere.
When the students knew that others would see their work they wanted to try harder. They wanted to put a better effort forward because they wanted to be proud of the papers they presented to their peers, friends, and family. The writing process is not complete without publishing.
The struggle with learning to teach writing to my students was real and long! Each battle with my students gave me insights I could have never seen on my own. Each experience gave me ideas that allowed me to do a deeper research and fine tune the writing process through the lens of a student with a disability.
It is my deepest hope that these insights will give confidence and direction as you structure your writing lessons for your students with disabilities.