The Missouri Reader Vol. 38, Issue 1 | Page 30

What drives our work of late is a straight-forward, yet recurring question raised by many of our graduate students (and we suspect also of many in-service teachers). This question is a big one, an important one: What should writing look like in a Common Core classroom? This seems an apt question, one that is no doubt driven by the Common Core initiative (National Governors Assocation & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) reflect the expectation that students will be able to write for multiple purposes and use writing fluently as a tool "to recall, organize, analyze, interpret, and build" content knowledge across curricular disciplines" (Graham & Harris, 2013, p. 4).

Present-Day Writing Practices

Teaching and cultivating writing which develops curricular knowledge across disciplines is a tall order. What is the present landscape regarding writing instruction? Interestingly, findings from a national survey by Gilbert and Graham (2010) indicated that more than half of teachers felt underprepared to teach writing. Writing instruction time was less than robust, with, on average, intermediate level teachers only spending a limited amount of time (as little as 15 minutes a day) teaching writing strategies, knowledge, and skills. It appears students are usually expected to write in short spurts, while they are infrequently (and perhaps rarely) expected to engage in sustained or extended writing. At present, instruction is more focused on narrative writing and not writing that is informational in nature (to inform and persuade). Given this backdrop, we see that some changes are needed in our collective futures regarding writing instruction---changes involving more time spent teaching writing, especially informational and argumentative writing, and more time spent by students engaged in writing, to practice and hone the skills and craft of writing. Both will be prerequisites for meeting the challenge of the new standards.

Call for a Shift in Practice

Most of us are familiar with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) recommendations which were incorporated into the new standards by the CCSS authors. These call for an even split between narrative and informational text reading (50% each) by fourth grade, with the amount of informational text reading to grow dramatically over time, to 70%, as students reach the secondary grades. In addition, the CCSS set forth an even more specific distribution within informational writing text types: by grade four, 30% of a student's writing should be persuasive, 35% should be explanatory, and 35% should be narrative (NGO & CCSSO, 2010). Once implemented, an intermediate student's writing would be nearly two-thirds informational in nature. Students would be writing nearly as many argumentative pieces as explanatory pieces.

This shift in types of writing calls for specific and direct changes to implement the CCSS:

- Decreased reliance on narrative text

(reading and writing) and the allocation of more time spent on informational and argumentative text reading and writing to align with recommendations

- More written responses featuring the

ideas, facts, and insights found in texts--

created in more varied formats and in

both brief and sustained lengths for a

variety of purposes

- More frequent written responses with

greater length and depth

- Writing for a particular audience and for

authentic purposes, whenever possible.

In an effort to understand these changes, Barbara Moss (2008) analyzed California elementary basal texts (since California is arguably the largest textbook purchaser in the country) and found that while 41.7% of the basal selections were informational in nature, argumentation/persuasive texts were largely lacking; only 5% of texts examined were

Reasoned Writing

by Karen Bates and Deborah Larson

Resourceful Research

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