“Nothing is more consistently helpful for young writers than encouraging more writing,” her Units of Study for kindergarteners advises. She’s a firm believer in having children write with little planning-“flash-drafting,” she calls it-and produce prodigious amounts of prose. Like many others, Calkins seriously underestimates how difficult the process of learning to write is for most students. The second and even more fundamental flawed assumption underlying Calkins’ curriculum is that the “workshop” approach, developed for experienced adult writers, will also work for children as young as five. But students benefit most if they’re reading and writing about the same topics, and Calkins’ reading and writing units aren’t coordinated in that way. But why teach a separate writing curriculum with its own history and science topics? If students are learning about, say, the Civil War in social studies-assuming their school even allots time for social studies-why shouldn’t they use writing to build their knowledge about the Civil War, rather than learning to “write like a historian” about a different set of events during English language arts class?Īlternatively, schools could adopt a literacy curriculum that incorporates topics in history and science, an approach that has been shown to boost reading comprehension. Once students have a certain threshold of information about a topic, writing can be a powerful way to build and deepen their knowledge. That approach might work for personal essays, but it can run into trouble in units where the goal is to get kids to write “like a scientist” or “like a historian.” Scientists and historians can write the way they do only because they know a lot about their topics. #Where did my reading list go how to“When I’m teaching people to write,” she said, “I’m teaching them a method-I’m teaching them how to do something.” When I interviewed Calkins for a book several years ago, she told me that children should acquire substantive knowledge in their social studies and science classes, but that’s not her focus. And young students are then expected to write essays applying these generic insights to other topics of their own choosing. Teachers who choose another topic would need to know enough about it to come up with their own insights about the influence of geography. But the topic used is Westward Expansion, and the teacher “script” illustrating the point centers on the Erie Canal. A second-grade unit on science writing uses the topic of force and motion, but teachers are advised that if that “isn’t a good fit for you, you can transfer this teaching to another area of science.”Īs a result, lesson titles and “teaching points” are content-neutral-for example, “Writers of History Pay Attention to Geography,” in a fifth-grade unit. And unlike some other “Common Core” writing programs, which expect students to write about topics they know little about, some of Calkins’ informational and persuasive units have kids dig into a specific topic for four to six weeks.īut even then, her focus is on writing skills rather than the content itself, and the assumption is that teachers could choose to substitute a different topic. In response, Calkins expanded her approach to include those genres. The Common Core standards in literacy, released in 2010, pushed back against that idea, requiring more “informational” and “persuasive” writing at the elementary level. The first is that writing skills can and should be taught separately from subjects like history or science-an assumption Calkins and many others have also made about supposed reading comprehension skills like “finding the main idea.” Originally, she seems to have believed that if children honed their writing skills on personal narrative, they could transfer those techniques to the more challenging kinds of writing expected at higher grade levels. #Where did my reading list go seriesShe also saw that writing needed to be seen as a process rather than a series of discrete assignments.īut her approach has rested on two flawed assumptions. She initially understood that children couldn’t write well about topics they knew little about, one reason she wanted them to write about their own experience. Calkins’ perceptions about writing have been spot-on in some respects.
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