Jane Hancock is co-director of the UCLA Writing Project, Director of the Lake Arrowhead young writer's retreat, author of Short Answers to Big Questions about Literacy, and has over 50 years experience teaching literacy and writing in K-12 and postsecondary. We asked her to share some of her teachings that have had the biggest impact, and her response is below.

You can feel the enthusiasm she brings to teaching and writing as you read her essay.

We couldn't resist also posting her Vita, which appears just after the article.

You are a writer!

After eating a delicious lunch of steamed rice and orange chicken, I opened my fortune cookie to find these words: You are a writer. My fortune cookie says so; therefore, it must be true. What wonderful words! I want to buy a fortune cookie factory and make sure that all the cookies coming off my assembly line say You are a writer. This is so much better than You are going to go on a fabulous trip or You are broadminded and socially active or Beware of an offer that sounds too good to be true. Because I believe that you-student, teacher, business professional, homemaker, laborer, anyone-can be a writer if you write. And that's the message I take to the workshops and classes I facilitate and teach. They may not think they are writers when they walk in the door, but when they walk out the door, I want to hear each one say, "I am a writer."

So, when I was asked to share a few things that have made the biggest impact on the writers I work with, that was the first one that popped into my head. What else do I value? What else am I going to hang on to and never let go of-in spite of mandates and pacing plans and concept lessons and frameworks and standards and essentially, no time? I'll make time for the following.

Writing with your students. The National Writing Project says that teachers who teach writing should write themselves. What a novel idea! But let's carry that idea farther. Teachers who teach writing should write their own assignments before they assign them and then, when the students write, the teachers should be writing with them and sharing. Teachers should be doing all the things that they ask students to do. It's long been recognized that during sustained silent reading, everyone reads, even the custodians, even the administrators. So when students are writing, everyone in the room should be writing.

Forget structure. Or, let's put it this way. Forget any structure of which someone else has said, "This is the way you write." Content dictates structure. Content dictates ideas. Last month, I was facilitating a workshop at a local high school. We had just read a persuasive essay from Newsweek, one of those "My Turn" columns. I asked the group to find the thesis. They started at the top of the article and kept looking for it. Every once in a while, someone would call out a line but before anyone commented, they'd take it back. Finally, someone found it-in the middle of the second column! Then one of the participants said, "Well, if the thesis statement had been at the end of the first paragraph where it belongs, I could have found it!" He said it facetiously, but his statement led to a discussion about who decided that's where the thesis statement belongs and why teachers follow this unknown guru down that path, forcing students to write a thesis statement in the end of the first paragraph before writing the essay.

Write to explore ideas. Sometimes we, who write, find that as we write, our thesis changes. Content dictates thesis. In the same workshop, a participant had told the group he was going to write his persuasive essay on banning cell phone use in all public places. When he shared his draft, we discovered that his thesis had to do with spending more time with his children. "What happened to banning cell phones?" we asked. That idea had evolved into a more important idea: if he put away his own cell phone, he could enjoy more time with his children.

Enjoy writing. And finally, or maybe this should be listed first, writing should be fun. Oh, I know writing is hard work. We struggle for ideas-finding the right words, attending to our audience, deciding on the genre. But, like any challenge, it can be fun. Playing football is hard work, but people spend hours, even years perfecting the skills needed to play the game. Win or lose, it's fun. Of course, it's more fun when you win. And writing is more fun when you have an audience who likes what you have produced. But writing will never be fun if the only time you write is for a grade on a test. Writing will never be fun if you have to revise and correct every piece you write. Writing will never be fun if it's always done in a classroom sitting at a desk. But playing with words is fun. Pretending you are someone else and writing as that person might write is fun. Changing a text from one genre to another is fun. Finding the perfect hook to start the writing is fun. Sharing it with an audience is fun. And seeing it printed in an anthology or on a blog along with pieces by other writers is fun, and rewarding.

My name is Jane Hancock, and I am a writer.

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Vita for Jane S. Hancock

Author of Short Answers to Big Questions about Literacy

Jane S. Hancock, co-director of the UCLA Writing Project, received her bachelor's degree from MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and her master's from the University of Southern California. Her first assignment, in 1949, was at Victor Valley Junior High School in Victorville, California, and this was where she fell in love with teaching.

In 1981, she was invited to be a fellow of the UCLA Writing Project, and that summer changed her life. As she has often said, "USC made me a Trojan, but UCLA made me a writer!"

She belongs to two writing clubs, men and women who write and want to share their writing, and to a book club, a group of readers who love to read and want to talk about literature. Because she loves writing and the teaching of writing, she directs a program at UCLA called Writers Anonymous and a once-a-year weekend retreat at Malibu that gives teachers an opportunity to get away and write. In addition, she directs a retreat for young high school writers that meets in Lake Arrowhead one weekend a year.

In her work and in her contact with teachers, she receives many questions about literacy. Those questions are the basis for her book, Short Answers to Big Questions about Literacy.

In addition, she has written several articles for the National Writing Project publications, Quarterly and Voice, and for California English. She also was the principal writer for the California Department of Education's CAHSEE study guide: Preparing for the California High School Exit Examination. She has written and self-published two children's books and several chapbooks of her poems, essays, and personal narratives.

For over 50 years, her enthusiasm for teaching literacy has kept her in the profession. Her goal: to share her love of the written and spoken word with students and teachers and make them life-long readers and writers.

Steve Graham is a professor of literacy and Currey Ingram chair of special education in the College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.

His research interests include writing instruction and writing development, learning disabilities, and the development of self-regulation.

Graham is the editor of Exceptional Children and the former editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology. He is the co-author of the Handbook of Writing Research, Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Writing Better, and Making the Writing Process Work.

We spoke with Professor Graham about best practices in writing to hopefully gain some insight for you to incorporate in your teaching of writing. Please let us know if this information is helpful and what else you might like to learn from Professor Graham.

Steve, can you give us some examples of best practices in the teaching of writing?

Yes, there are actually six best practices I would like to share with you that have moderate to large effects on improving the quality of students’ writing. These practices have all been tested under controlled conditions multiple times and have been scientifically proven to improve students’ writing skills:

1. Teach writing processes

2. Have students work together

3. Create clear expectations

4. Use word processors

5. Teach complex sentences

6. Establish a writing workshop

The first and most effective practice is to explicitly and systematically teach kids strategies for planning, drafting, editing, revising, and regulating the writing process. Every study in which such instruction was tested validated this practice. This involves making writing processes concrete and visible by showing students how to do them, and then helping students apply these processes until they can do them independently and correctly. For example, the 6 + 1 Writing Traits Model makes students aware of the characteristics of writing that are important: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation. These are all important parts in producing a good product. Students can be taught specific strategies for any of these elements. For ideas, this can involve teaching them a strategy such as brainstorming, while a helpful strategy for organization is to create a web that shows how writing ideas are related to each other.

Strategies can also be designed to be both broader and more specific to a genre. A technique that helps to teach the process of planning and drafting persuasive writing is called STOP: Suspend your judgment and generate as many ideas on each side of the argument as you can; Take a side; Organize your notes and decide which ideas you are going to use to support your side and which ideas you are going to refute in your paper; and keep Planning as you write. With this last step, writers continue to add, change, and even delete ideas from the initial plan while writing their persuasive papers. This strategy can be taught to the whole class, small groups of students, or even an individual youngster. In any event, it is important to first describe the strategy, including how and why it works. Students also need to see how it is applied and practice using it, with the teacher’s help, until they make it their own.

The process of teaching strategies like this is powerful and the most scientifically proven method in teaching writing. It is not much used in the classroom, however. We have found that only 10-15% of writing instruction time is spent on this process in elementary classrooms, while 50% is spent on grammar and other basic writing skills like spelling and handwriting, and just 20% on writing.

Another best practice is to have students work together around the processes of writing: planning, drafting, revising, editing. Having students work together around those processes has a very powerful effect on their writing. It must be structured, not just telling the students to get together and write. An example would be to ask one student to read his or her paper to another. The first job of the peer is to say at least three things they like so you have a positive start. Next, the peer gives helpful feedback on two or three things. You might have the peer note places where more detail would be helpful or ask for clarification on an unclear sentence. The peer could say ‘can you tell me more about this?’ or ‘I didn’t understand?’ When students engage collaboratively, there is a very positive effect.

A third best practice is very simple--create clear expectations for what your students need to write. When you tell people what you want, you are more likely to get it. It can be about process (e.g., make at least three revisions where you add new ideas) or about product (e.g., use transition phrases). I find it rather surprising that this practice is not used much.

I consider this next best practice both bad news and good news rolled into one. Evidence to date shows that having students write on a word processor has a positive effect. This seems fairly logical as it is easy to make changes, and if your typing is good, you can get text down quickly. But, you need to know how to use the computer, and it really helps to have good typing skills. The bad news is that we don’t see a lot of computer use in the classroom. In a typical classroom, we see only one to three computers. Plus, computers are the least used instructional tool teachers use in the classroom. The good news is that computers can make a substantial difference in writing. This effect is true from second grade forward.

Teaching students how to write more complex sentences is another best practice. This is the first I’ve mentioned about teaching specific writing skills. The procedure that I would most recommend is sentence combining. This involves modeling how to combine simple sentences: ‘The dog is big. The dog is black. The dog is my friend.’ to something like ‘My friend, the dog, is big and black.’ With this method, first show students how to combine the sentences; next, do it with them; then, have them do it with a peer or alone; and finally, have the students do it with something they have already written. Too often, students are taught a skill, but they never actually apply it. If a skill is not used, teaching it has a very limited effect.

My final best practice is writers’ workshop, where students are expected to write and write often. In writers’ workshop, a supportive environment is created where students share their writing and help each other at different stages of the writing process. They are also encouraged to engage in cycles of planning, drafting, reviewing, and revising as they write papers. This shapes the writing act so that the processes we are talking about happen on a regular basis.

If you went back 20 years, writing classes involved teaching handwriting, spelling, and grammar, and this was not always enjoyable. While skills are important, you also need to write and learn how to carry out the planning, revising, and other processes critical to becoming a skilled writer.

I have not said anything so far about teaching handwriting and spelling. It is important to teach both (as part of a balanced writing program that emphasizes writing, process, and skills). It is especially important, however, to provide extra instruction in these skills for students who struggle mastering them.

So then, what are some of the things that you’ve seen teachers do often, which you would counsel teachers not to do if they want to make good writers out of their students?

Traditional grammar instruction, including teaching parts of speech, sentence diagramming, and making students pick out the right tense of the verb; these practices do not improve grammar skills, syntax, or the ability to write. This may work with a few specific students, but it is ineffective with children in general. One reason why this instruction is not generally effective is that instruction rarely involves the students using what they are learning within the context of their writing. A good substitute for such instruction is the sentence-combining exercise I described above.

Giving too much negative feedback: In its worst form, the students' papers are red-inked to death, and  they will ignore it; they cannot deal with that much feedback at once. Find ways to provide positive feedback, telling students what you like about their writing; positive feedback has been found to be effective. This does not mean I am recommending that you not give corrective feedback. Rather, provide corrective feedback on one to two things, and follow through on the same feedback items in the next paper if needed. Keep working on those attributes targeted in your feedback until you can move on to something else. You will get a lot more growth and student attention with targeted feedback.

We’re at the beginning of the school year now. Are there specific things you would recommend that teachers implement in the first quarter?

For beginning teachers, I would say they first need to set up a supportive writing environment, where students are expected to write daily, as they plan, draft, edit, revise, and share their writing with peers and others. Focus on one writing genre at a time, like stories or a personal narrative. Use reading as a starting point for each type of writing. For example, read some personal narratives, with the goal to have students incorporate some of the ideas from this reading into their own personal narratives. Then, change the focus to different genres throughout the year. An ambitious teacher could add a graphic organizer for structure and integrate one or two of the teaching strategies about planning and revising that we discussed earlier. With younger students, a teacher should include spelling, grammar, and handwriting instruction, but it should not be at the expense of writing.

Experienced teachers are probably doing a lot of these things already, but they could consider incorporating one new idea every month or so, in order to continually upgrade their teaching skills.

Finally, the best way to improve all students’ writing is to make it a school effort, so what you are doing is coordinated between teachers and between grades. For example: If an English teacher is teaching persuasive writing, it would be great if that could be coordinated with the social studies and science teachers also assigning persuasive-writing exercises, and then the different styles for the different disciplines or contexts could be compared and contrasted. The key is collaboration.

Thank you, Professor Graham, for your time. We have certainly learned a lot today and we are looking forward to future interviews with you during the course of the year.