Aligning Curriculums and Writing Instruction

Because schools and districts in the United States (and in other countries) are changing their approach to teaching reading, they’re adopting new curriculums. Since these new curriculums usually include a writing component, the shift to new reading curriculums is also changing instructional approaches to teaching writing in many of these schools and districts.

However, when we’ve reviewed many of these writing components and looked at them through the lenses of the principles of effective writing instruction (see our blog, “Writing Instruction Considerations,” and Chapter 1 of How to Become a Better Writing Teacher), we’ve seen they fall short.

In response, we’ve been in conversation with teachers, literacy coaches, administrators and district leaders about how to make changes that will help them align their new writing curriculums to the principles of good writing instruction. Some of the changes are tweaks; others are more substantial. When schools have implemented these suggestions, we’ve seen an increase in student engagement in writing -- and more student growth.

Here are some of the ways we suggest you can reconcile what we know about high quality writing instruction and the curricular resources you’re using that may not completely align with this knowledge.

Time

Growth in writing depends upon students having plenty of time to practice writing. In this way, learning to write is no different that learning how to play a musical instrument, or a sport.

One of the first assessments to make of your writing curriculum is to see how much continuous time it provides students to write each week. Optimally, students should have 3-5 fifty-minute writing periods per week. Each period should include a 10-12 minute whole-class lesson at the start of the period, 30 minutes of time for students to work on their writing, and 5-10 minutes for the class to reconvene and share the work they did that period.

In some of the new writing curriculums, we’ve noticed that there is daily continuous time to write, but the time isn’t sufficient to include both whole-class instruction and sufficient practice. In this case, we suggest you combine short daily periods into fewer longer ones. For example, five 30-minute periods per week could be recombined into three 50-minute periods (both add up to 150 minutes per week).

In other curriculums, we notice that students write for 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, 15 minutes here, and so forth. If this is what your curriculum has you do, we suggest combining these into longer periods so that students have time to really sink their teeth into their writing and develop the stamina to write for sustained periods of time. Doing this will also give you more opportunity to teach.

Choice of Topic

In some of the new curriculums, children are given topics to write about in every writing unit. One of the simplest modifications you can make is to give students the opportunity to choose their own topics. This is an important tweak for these reasons:

• Choice of topic significantly impacts student engagement in writing.
• When students choose meaningful topics they already know something about, they’re much more likely to be able to write with detail.
• If we always give children topics, they won’t learn how to generate their own meaningful topics, which is an important skill for writers at any age. 

Of course, it isn’t enough to give students choice of topic--we also need to teach students strategies for finding good topics. By adding a few topic choice lessons to units (for example, on strategies for brainstorming topics), you can give students the support they’ll need with this important skill.

Note that topic choice doesn’t require changing the craft techniques and process strategies that are taught in a unit. But with the increased student engagement that topic choice brings, students are more likely to be eager to learn these skills.

Bookmaking

In many of the new curriculums, primary students are being asked to write pieces that fill just one piece of paper. A modification you can make is to have them write in multiple-page books, something you can easily do if you have a stapler and a stack of paper! 

Having students write in books has a huge impact on students’ ability to compose at a high level:

• Since we read students picture books, they already have a vision for how multiple-page stories go, and they are more likely to be engaged in writing something that they regularly see in the world that “real” writers make. 
• Working across pages challenges students to think on a much higher level. The simple shift from a single piece of paper or page in a journal to making a book significantly changes the thinking children do. For example, they can plan a multiple-part book by touching each page and saying what they’ll write on it before they start to write.  Since they have more room to write across pages, they’ll elaborate on a topic in much more depth. And they’ll learn how to focus a multiple-part piece of writing.

More Engaging Mentor Texts

Students will write better if they have a vision for what they’re going to make. Having a stack of mentor texts to teach with in each unit will provide that vision for them.

If the units in your curriculum don’t come with mentor texts, then one modification is to gather a stack of them to show students how to craft their writing in whole and small group lessons, and 1:1 writing conferences. 

If the units in your curriculum do come with mentor texts, then ask yourself the following:

• Do they align with what students are actually making, rather than showing students one thing but asking them to write something else? 
• Will they inspire your students to write because they reflect students’ various identities and interests, and because they’re well-written?
• Will they help your students learn to write better because they contain craft techniques your students need to learn? 
• Are they at an appropriate level for children, that is, is the amount of text something that is attainable for most children in your class, with instructional support?

If the answer to one or more of these questions is “no,” then another modification you can make is to search for more appropriate mentor texts and use them instead of the ones provided by your curriculum. 

Differentiating Instruction

Whatever writing curriculum you’re using, you’ll face this challenge: since the students in your class have differing strengths and needs, you’ll need to differentiate instruction for them.

The emphasis in many of the new writing curriculums is mostly on whole-class instruction, not on how to differentiate that instruction for the diverse kinds of writers teachers have in their classrooms.

How can you best differentiate writing instruction? The answer is to have 1:1 writing conferences with your students. This instructional modification requires only that students have sustained time to write (which we addressed above). 

Writing conferences has benefits:

• You’ll develop mentor-mentee relationships with your students, which increases their engagement and willingness to learn from you.
• When you confer, you’ll have the opportunity to assess where your students are as writers at that point in time and respond with teaching that’s tailored to their individual strengths and needs.

Despite the inclusion of AI feedback in some curriculums, there’s simply no substitute for the relationship that develops between a real-life teacher and their students across a year of conferring, and for how teachers can leverage that relationship to teach students to become better writers.

Swapping Low Engagement Units for High Engagement Units

When we talk with teachers and school leaders, we suggest that they swap less-engaging units for more engaging ones. Below are some examples of units that are not highly-engaging for children:

• Sometimes the same unit is repeated every year, such as personal narrative, and students tire of it.
• Sometimes there is an over-emphasis on a genre across a year, such as response to reading, and students don’t have the opportunity to explore genres that are the most engaging for children, such as realistic and fantasy fiction (in which students can learn about literary elements by including them in their own stories, instead of only analyzing how other authors use them in their texts).
• Sometimes students are asked to write pieces that actually aren’t genres, such as single paragraphs, and would be more engaged if they could write in authentic genres, such as nonfiction picture books (in primary) and nonfiction feature articles (in upper grades).
• And sometimes every unit is a genre study, and students don’t ever get to choose genres to write in, an important choice that is linked to student engagement in writing.

Fortunately, there are many professional books that will walk you through how to teach these units:

• Teaching engaging genres—Teaching Fantasy Writing: Lessons that Inspire Student Engagement and Creativity (2024) by Carl Anderson
• Teaching memoir—Writing a Life (2005), by Katherine Bomer 
• Teaching essay—The Journey is Everything (2016), by Katherine Bomer
• Teaching poetry—Awakening the Heart (2024), by Georgia Heard
• Providing choice of genre—Craft and Process Studies (2018), by Matt Glover 

Valuing Illustration

In some of the new curriculums, primary students are being asked to write texts without illustrations; and when students are given the opportunity to compose pieces with both, there is little instructional attention paid to the illustrations.

Adding lessons to primary units that teach into illustration is important for a couple reasons:

• Composing illustrations is the perfect entry point for emergent writers. In fact, illustrations are a great equalizer and allow all children to compose and make meaning right from the start, especially for emergent bilingual students.
• Illustrations are the starting point for thinking, talking and writing in detail, so we want to capitalize on their impact instead of minimizing it. When students have thoughtfully composed illustrations, they’re able to compose thoughtfully composed oral language based on the illustrations, which then leads to more detailed, thoughtfully composed writing.

Not only can you add lessons on illustrations into any primary unit, you can also add a unit with this focus, as described in Katie Wood Ray’s book, In Pictures and In Words (2010).

Audience

Writing is ultimately an act of communication with other human beings. This is universally what drives writers to write. 

We’ve noticed that in some of the new writing curriculums, there aren’t many opportunities for students to share their writing with others, such as classmates, parents and other members of the school community. Without the opportunity to share their writing, students write to comply with a unit, instead of to share their experiences and thinking with others. This has a direct, negative effect on student motivation to write in the first place, and also on their desire to learn how to write clearly and powerfully for an audience that matters to them.

It’s a simple modification to add a “writing celebration” day at the end of a unit. There are several ways students can share their writing in a “celebration”:

• Students can read their writing to classmates in small groups.
• Students can put their writing on their desks and then circulate around the room, reading their classmates’ writing and writing comments on a piece of paper.
• For some celebrations, parents and members of the school community can be invited to participate.

For more information about any of these topics, see How to Become a Better Writing Teacher, by Carl Anderson and Matt Glover which includes 50+ actions teachers can take to improve their skills as writing teachers, plus 90+ videos of Carl and Matt doing demonstration lessons and discussing teaching writing.