Teachers around the country are faced with a pervasive issue: students can’t write in their classrooms. When tasked with what most would believe to be a simple task such as responding to an open-ended prompt, students face myriad challenges from forming an idea to writing coherently or even spelling simple, high-frequency words correctly.
No, the solution isn’t more genre-based units of writing where teachers carry the majority of the cognitive load over the course of a six- to eight-week deep dive into a specific style of writing; instead, we must shift to a culture of on-demand writing in our classrooms, where students are writing across all subjects—and every day. The reality is this: students will not learn to write on-demand if they rarely have the chance to practice it. While structured and systematic instruction in foundational skills will certainly support writing fluency and the ability to form coherent ideas, they also need repeated opportunities to apply these skills in authentic contexts. This is where on-demand, cognitive writing comes in, also known colloquially in the classroom as “journaling.”
Most teachers need not be convinced that infusing writing into the curriculum will benefit students. In fact, the research is quite clear: engaging students in cognitive writing can improve reading skills (Shanahan et al., 2024; Graham, 2020), build writing fluency (Koenig, Eckert & Hier, 2016; Shanahan, 2022), and increase the likelihood that students will retain content area knowledge (Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020). That said, many teachers are challenged by where to start, especially if their teacher preparation program did not include coursework on scaffolding writing across all subjects.
While I suggest journaling as a means for engaging in on-demand, cognitive writing every day, some teachers will be bound by mandated curriculum or school policies about fidelity to specific practices. Regardless of where your on-demand writing is contained, consider these strategies for supporting on-demand writing—and gradually releasing it—to students.
Make Your Success Criteria Clear
Clarity (Almarode & Vandas, 2018) is key when infusing writing into the curriculum. Make sure students are clear on the success criteria for writing, and choose that success criteria mindfully, striking a balance between efficiency and correctness in their writing. For instance, it makes sense for third graders to be held accountable to high-frequency words, capital letters, and periods, but perhaps not comma usage or correct spelling of multi-syllabic words quite yet.
Consider creating success criteria with students so that they have a say in what quality journaling looks like. Provide learner-friendly versions of the success criteria, allowing students to self-evaluate and check off success criteria as they achieve them. If students aren’t meeting success criteria, encourage them to write “second drafts” of their journals to show they can meet success criteria. As it turns out, revising is also a research-based strategy for growing writers (Koster et al., 2015; Gillepsie & Graham, 2014), meaning that is absolutely worth students’ time.
Meet Students Where They Are
All students learn at different paces, which means you will have a variety of writing skill sets in your classroom. While all students should have access to the class-wide success criteria, it may not make sense to hold some students to all success criteria, especially if they present with significant writing challenges.
While some students may be adequately challenged by writing multiple sentences or even a paragraph while writing on-demand, others may be adequately challenged by writing a sentence or less. Accurately assessing student writing at the start of each school year and intermittently monitoring students’ progress with writing over the course of the school year, using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative measures, such as standards-based writing rubrics and curriculum-based measurements (CBMs), respectively.
Once teachers know where students’ assets lie, they can gradually grow writers from there, offering scaffolds to appropriately challenge students without overwhelming them with struggle.
Choose Scaffolds Wisely—and Gradually Release Them
Scaffolding is an art. There’s no doubt about it. It’s important to not only identify the appropriate scaffolds that temporarily support students in their growth, it’s important also to know when to release them.
For students who struggle to write sentences or even form letters, drawing pictures and labeling provides an entry point. For students who are working on writing complete sentences, consider providing an array of sentence starters that align with the rigor of the task. For instance, if students are asked to define a force, provide them with “Forces are…” along with accompanying vocabulary they may need to retrieve from a word wall. For students who are writing sentences and need to learn to elaborate, provide them with additional sentence starters, as well as peer-assisted strategies like discourse and sharing samples of writing under the document camera to consistently expose them to different ways to elaborate.
It’s also important to consider the rigor of the task itself. The SOLO taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982) provides a framework within which we can sequence tasks to ensure we are gradually increasing the rigor of tasks.
Table 1: SOLO Taxonomy
| Prestructural | Unistructural | Multistructural | Relational | Extended Abstract |
| Students cannot yet access the task. | 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. |
| Ask yourself: do I need to modify the task or accommodate the student with extra scaffolds? | Define
Identify Sequence Recall |
Describe
Explain List |
Analyze
Infer Compare/Contrast Apply Prove |
Question
Generate Connect Reflect Theorize |
Adapted from Biggs and Colls, 1982.
As you can see in Table 1, as tasks ascend from unistructural to extended abstract, the rigor of the tasks increase due to the cognitive demands. In the unistructural phase, learners grapple with one aspect of the task, while in the relational and extended abstract phases, learners strive to show relationships between ideas and make generalizations, respectively.
The best scaffold? Continuously model on-demand writing, leveraging shared writing in small bursts, and only when appropriate. Consider the fact that students’ attention spans will likely not last more than 10-12 minutes, and therefore, the focus of shared writing shouldn’t be on perfection. Instead, it should be on the coherence of ideas, elaborating using examples or connections to lived experiences, and foundational skills that are both developmentally appropriate and conducive to building writing fluency.
Teach Foundational Skills in Short Bursts
Gone are the days of endless worksheets for building foundational skills. That said, without explicit instruction in foundational skills, we run the risk that students will not become fluent writers. In order for students to be fluent in writing, they must have command of the writing system. If they don’t, writing will feel laborious and frustrating: they will expend the majority of their cognitive and emotional energy simply trying to spell words, form letters, and punctuation, when the long-term goal is to get them communicating their ideas with clarity, precision, and fluency.
Journals can also contain these lessons on foundational skills. Consider starting all content area instruction with a “word warm up,” similar to how math teachers might begin a lesson with a “number talk.” Word warm ups provide students with a variety of options for analyzing words essential to building knowledge in the content areas, such as STEM, social studies, or the arts. Structured Word Inquiry (Bowers & Bowers, 2000) provides a framework within which students analyze words.
First, students describe the meaning of the word using synonyms, real-world examples, or sentences that contain the word. Then, students analyze the structure of the word, identifying prefixes, bases, and suffixes in multisyllabic words, and initial, medial, and final phoneme-grapheme correspondences in monosyllabic words. Next, students generate word relatives, using the base of the word as an anchor for attaching prefixes and suffixes. Finally, students consider the pronunciation of the word, connecting morphology to phonology: students begin to see that the same word parts can be pronounced differently. For instance, the base <sign> is pronounced with the most common /s/ sound and a hard /g/ in signature, while <gn> is pronounced with the /n/ sound and the <s> is pronounced as /z/ in the word design.
Consider other options for building foundational skills to build letter formation and punctuation skills. For instance, the word warm up can be used for dictation, where students write down sentences as the teachers say them aloud. To infuse dictation into the content areas, consider following one of the aforementioned word analysis warm ups with dictation the next day, requiring students to recall the word relatives generated from the day prior, incorporating them into sentences that they dictate in their journals.
Strive for Good Enough, Not Perfection
While it is important to ensure students slowly increase their command of the English writing system, it’s important to remember that even the most accomplished of writers require a team of editors to make a piece of writing ready for publication. It’s misguided, then, to assume that a child would submit perfect pieces of writing, with pristine handwriting and accurate spelling.
It’s not that we want to praise mediocrity; this is, in fact, where the art of teaching comes in—we have to strike a delicate balance between encouragement and correctness, acknowledging our students’ assets, allowing them to be imperfect writers, meanwhile helping them set reasonable goals to gradually improve their writing.
On-demand, cognitive writing can help us get there, in part because the research supports it, but also because it offers students the opportunity to start fresh every day, making incremental changes to their writing skills and writing habits over the course of an entire school year.
If we are going to afford our students the courtesies of imperfection, we need to afford ourselves these, as well. If you’re apprehensive about incorporating cognitive writing into your practice, know that you’re not alone. That said, you’ll never improve students’ writing skills if you don’t take some risks and give it a try!
