Teaching English, How To.... Essential Ideas 07

How help students prepare for writing assessments? Ten-minute daily essays for three weeks, twice a year, one class at a time. Begin in seventh, eighth and ninth grades by having students write on their own topics. Ten minutes is not a long time to write. Teacher corrects, i.e., actually spells words correctly, makes the changes with grammatical mistakes, usage, punctuation and style and re-writes awkward expression and ideas that are not clearly expressed.
Students do not have to write a complete composition in ten minutes. At the end of ten minutes, the teacher collects the papers, even if the students are in mid-sentence.
Students begin by turning their topics into a thesis sentence. In later grades, the teacher assigns the topic and students must turn that topic into a thesis sentence, just as occurs in state and SAT writing assessments.
Students come into class and immediately begin to complete their ten-minutes of writing. When the teacher returns the ten-minute essay the next day, students rewrite it, including the teacher’s corrections. Rewriting focuses the students’ attention on the changes and raises questions about the teacher’s reasons for making the changes. Rewriting also helps students to visualize their writing as good writing. The ten-minute essays become part of their writing grade.
Another advantage of the ten-minute essays at the beginning of class is that the students settle right down and begin to write. No restlessness and indolent chatter waiting for the teacher to begin the class.

Questions about ten-minute essays. In making the corrections for the students, isn’t the teacher doing it for them? Won’t students learn more by making the corrections themselves? What do the students learn from the teacher’s actually making the corrections? The teacher is demonstrating how to revise and edit. The teacher is making students aware of mistakes and how to fix them, which the student would not otherwise recognize. Students often do not understand teachers’ labeling of mistakes and therefore make no effort to correct them. Students’ interest will be piqued when they can compare what they wrote with the teacher’s corrections. The teacher’s corrections will cause students to ask for explanations.
Students must still correct problems in major compositions themselves.
Isn’t asking the teacher to correct a classroom set of ten-minute essays to be returned the next day asking too much of an English teacher? Probably. However only one class completes the ten-minute essays every three weeks and students cannot write all that much in ten minutes. As the students write daily and the teacher corrects, students will make fewer and fewer mistakes. Students will develop the habit of writing and will increase writing fluency. Students will be better prepared to write on demand in state and SAT writing assessments. Finally, the teacher will have a good knowledge of how well each student writes, which will aid in recognizing plagiarism in major papers.
Does the teacher change the students’ ideas? Never. The teacher corrects grammar, usage, punctuation, spelling, style and attempts to show students how to smooth awkward expression and clarify expression that is unclear or confusing, but NEVER changes or punishes the students’ ideas. On the other hand, inappropriate or offensive ideas should be discussed personally with the student.
State and SAT writing assessments require much longer writing times than ten minutes, with the state’s assessments requiring an hour and the SAT’s, 25 minutes. Isn’t ten-minutes too short? I never found it to be so. Writing ten minutes daily, for three weeks, twice a year, gave students all the practice they needed for writing on demand, turning topics into the thesis sentence and developing the thesis sentence in paragraphs with topic sentences. The extra time allotted in the state or SAT assessment will be almost a relief.
Teachers could expand the time for daily writing in later grades to fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes or an hour, but will have to respond to the increased amounts of writing by giving a “holistic” (overall) grade or some other brief evaluation that would not require their spending too much time each evening. Students will not then benefit from the teacher’s corrections.

All of these ideas appear in Chapter 4, “Professional Research Adapted,” p. 70; Chapter 9, “Grammar and Composition,” p. 166; and Chapter 10, “Helping Students Prepare for writing assessment,” p. 180.