Moving Beyond the Illusion of Writing: Four Steps for Getting Started with Learning Journals

The illusion of writing is happening in classrooms across the country, and you know the type I’m talking about: those genre-based units of study where students write a personal narrative or research a topic of their choice, writing an informational piece, or constructing an argument. It’s not that writing long-form pieces is necessarily bad; it’s just that this approach to writing is incomplete, often over-scaffolded, and grounded in a philosophy on writing that emphasizes bringing pieces of writing to published perfection–instead of focusing on the process.

Consider, though, what adults use writing for in their daily lives. Most of us write emails, in some cases having to succinctly convey an opinion or directive within a few sentences. Most of the writing we do in our authentic lives does not fit the conventional mold of narrative, informational, or opinion writing; most of our writing is on-demand, critical, responsive, and cognitively engaging, forcing us to take that which exists abstractly in our minds–and translate it to the written word so others can understand our thoughts.

Consider, then, the traditional approach to writing instruction in schools in juxtaposition with the authentic purpose of writing in our daily lives. Traditionally, teachers have engaged students in these genre-based units of study, where they begin by examining mentor texts, guide students through mini lessons, and then take students through a rather prescriptive set of lessons, all leading to a final product after four to six weeks of instruction that very closely mirrors the mentor texts. As someone who exclusively taught writing in this manner for the better part of a decade, I can tell you first-hand that it’s exhausting, and now as an instructional coach, I can also tell you that teachers are regularly over-scaffolding these writing projects for students, bearing the majority of cognitive, emotional, and sometimes, even the spiritual load of writing in the classroom.

So why are we teaching writing this way?

It begs the question: why are we teaching writing primarily in this manner if it doesn’t mirror the authentic experiences that students will have later in their education and beyond when they become professionals? Why are we so fixated on teaching students long-form narratives and the five-paragraph essay, when in reality, we simply want students to communicate what’s on their minds?

we simply want students to communicate what’s on their minds

Superficially, it stands to reason that this is the way that writing is often tested, if it is even tested at all. Students must construct responses that fit a formulaic mold in order to be seen as successful on these standardized tests. Second, this way of thinking about writing has been ingrained into us for decades now, with large curriculum publishers focusing on units of study to grow writers. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, our mindsets around writing instruction have long convinced us that writing is about creating a perfect product, ready for publishing with correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, and letter formation.

There are, however, significant flaws in the logic behind these three arguments. Not only do even the most accomplished of authors have a team of people around them, editing, revising, copyediting, and otherwise supporting the process of writing from inception to publishing; furthermore, how many people actually find themselves in positions to be an author?

While command of the English writing system enables one to be a writer, it’s really their ideas and their ability to communicate them with clarity and precision that makes for a strong community of writers, not their ability to emulate other authors. Let me be clear: I’m not trying to say that asking students to write a narrative essay or opinion piece provides no benefit to them. It is important that they have experience with bringing longer-form pieces to fruition. All I’m trying to say is that this method of teaching writing is overemphasized and incongruous with the authentic writing experiences in which adults engage on a daily basis.

The tide is shifting. More and more, students are being held to account with on-demand writing tasks in standardized assessments: students are asked to articulate their methods for solving a math problem or make inferences after analyzing scientific data, for instance. Instead of genre-based units of study taking up the majority of our writing instruction, I assert that the majority of writing experiences with which students engage should be like these aforementioned math and science tasks: critical, on-demand, cognitive writing experiences, which the research shows is not only beneficial for building writing fluency, but also for “reliably enhancing learning” in the content areas, increasing the likelihood that students will retain essential lessons.

This method of teaching writing, however, is more uncertain–and messier. We, teachers, don’t really like things to be messy. We crave structure just as much as our students do. While cognitive writing in learning journals can be somewhat open-ended and messy, it’s still possible to create structure within this learner-drive pedagogy.

Here are some tips for getting started, in the event that you’re not sure where to start.

1. Build effective journaling routines

Cognitive writing requires students to operate with a considerable degree of agency. After all, they need to connect their unique ideas to the written word, translating them so that others can understand their thinking. We know, though, that in order to build students’ agency and independence, we have to appropriately scaffold it. This requires modeling routines and gradually releasing them onto learners until they demonstrate proficiency in them.

In order to build routines for cognitive writing, I recommend using Responsive Classroom’s (2015) interactive modeling practice, where teachers explicitly model all routines (Yes, even the ones that we think kids should already know), then allowing individual students to practice these routines in front of their peers, receiving feedback in the process.

For example, I often invite learners to tape or glue tasks in their journals, creating an interactive notebook of sorts. Even something as simple as this–gluing in a task–requires explicit modeling. In addition, many students don’t know how to use a notebook, often writing away from the margins, neglecting to write letters on the lines, or even logging entries in a non-sequential manner. Each of these skills should be modeled, practiced, and gradually released with feedback and monitoring.

Because cognitive writing requires students to grapple with open-ended tasks, teachers may want to build routines that help students make sense of tasks, apply sentence frames, or partner with a neighbor to engage in discourse and then revise their journal entries. Building these routines and ensuring students can execute them with independence is paramount to the sustainability and internalization of journaling in the classroom.

2. Use thinking routines or journaling structures to diversify responses

Make Thinking Visible (2011) offers a number of thinking routines that are intended to do just what cognitive writing intends: to help students translate their abstract thoughts into visible ones. There are many routines to choose from, and quite frankly, you can make your own, so long as you know the type of thinking you want learners to do before writing.

Consider using Biggs and Collis’s (1983) SOLO Taxonomy (summarized in the table below) to help you identify the type of task, journaling structure, and sentence frames to properly scaffold student responses.

Table 1: The SOLO Taxonomy

Unistructural	Multi-structural	Relational	Extended Abstract
Students focus on one relevant aspect of a task.	Students grapple with several relevant aspects of a task.	Students integrate information from a task to show a relationship.	Students generalize information to synthesize it into new ideas.
Define Identify Sequence Recall	Describe Explain Summarize List	Analyze Infer Compare/Contrast Apply Prove	Question Generate Connect Reflect Theorize

Adapted from Biggs and Colls, 1983

Notice how the demands of the task grow: in the unistructural phase, learners focus on only one relevant aspect of a task, prompting them to define or recall key knowledge. For instance, if students are learning about landforms, consider the following prompts within each level of the SOLO Taxonomy:

• Unistructural: What are landforms made of?
• Multistructural: Describe different examples of landforms.
• Relational: What’s the difference between a plateau and a mountain?
• Extended Abstract: How might a cliff slowly disappear over time? And how might a community deal with the challenge of disappearing land?

Notice how students explore the same topic in each of these prompts; the depth of knowledge simply increases as students ascend through the taxonomy. Teachers might use the Same and Different thinking routine from Project Zero for the relational task, while they might use Think-Puzzle-Explore to create a theory about how a cliff might disappear.

3. Provide students with sentence frames

Cognitive writing is a language-heavy pedagogy, as one might expect. All students will, at some point, need a language scaffold to grow their writing. This is especially true for multilingual students, students with disabilities, and learners who simply struggle with writing. Sentence frames provide a least restrictive scaffold for learners, so long as teachers create a plan for fading these scaffolds away with time.

Sentence frames also provide an opportunity to model active voice and proper sentence structure. Drawing upon the examples from Step 2, teachers might pose the question: What are landforms made of? What are some examples?

I often see teachers provide a sentence frame that “restates” the question: One thing I learned about landforms is… or One example of a landform is…

Pardon my candor: this is not only bad writing, it’s also inefficient and passive. Instead of these wordy sentence starters, consider succinct and active sentence frames that make writing more efficient, while still “restating” the question.

For the aforementioned prompt on landforms, I would, instead, suggest teachers provide the following sentence frames:

• Landforms are…
• For example, [name of landform] is …

These sentence frames place the subject of the sentence first, followed by a single verb, whereas the earlier sentence frames use a five- to six-word sentence starter, placing the subject after the verb, inadvertently modeling passive voice. When they get to middle school, they are going to have to unlearn this passive voice. While you can explicitly tell students why you want them to start their sentence in the latter format, for our youngest students, modeling and remodeling this will send an implicit message that this is the type of writing you expect from them.

4. Be consistent

Cognitive writing will not be successful if it is a peripheral activity, done once in a while or in a center where students can’t receive critical feedback. Cognitive writing must be embedded into the classroom’s culture of learning, enacted with integrity and consistency. If possible, students should be engaging in cognitive writing every day; if they do, writing about learning will become a way of being in the classroom, in the same way that engaging in discourse or choosing independent reading books is ingrained into them.

Being consistent very well may require us to let go of our own perfectionism while we build these routines and determine appropriate scaffolds for students. In short, we must be ready to dive into cognitive writing, prioritizing the consistency of writing opportunities over our own desire for our students’ writing to look perfect with accurately formed letters and correctly spelled words. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that spelling and handwriting are unimportant, it’s just that we must not let our misguided desire for perfection get in the way of giving students opportunities to write. Handwriting, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation must be taught systematically, but students must also be provided authentic opportunities to apply these skills to authentic tasks. Regular experiences with cognitive writing affords them these opportunities.

What are you waiting for?

Yes, it’s a little scary, but the science of writing is clear. When students write more frequently, and in short bursts, they build fluency. What’s more, when they receive regular feedback on their writing, either through peer feedback, discourse, or teacher-directed means, their writing skills and fluency will grow in tandem. Most of all, writing about content will enhance their learning, increasing the likelihood that they will retain key facts that will ultimately build a rich and diverse schema we know is important for proficient reading.

We must move beyond the illusion of writing in our classrooms–and we must get kids writing more. Cognitive writing through journaling is the way to do it–so don’t wait any longer to get it started.