The Writing Rope Book Club: A Spotlight on Explicit Writing Instruction

Meet the author, Janine Henley, part of our team at Heggerty, bringing extensive experience as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and literacy coach. With a Master’s degree in Elementary Education and a reading specialist endorsement, Janine channels her passion into enhancing writing instruction in elementary classrooms. Her dedication and expertise make her a valuable collaborator in the ongoing journey of improving education for both teachers and students. Explore her steps to starting The Writing Rope book club while also elevating your writing instruction.

• Introduction
• The Writing Rope Chapter Summaries
• 9 Takeaways from The Writing Rope
• Additional Resources
• References

Introduction

When I taught 2nd and 3rd grades, I used to dread my writing block. My 20 minutes of writing instruction (on a good day) were filled with grammar worksheets and writing prompts. I felt frustrated that my students were not becoming better writers, and I saw little transfer from the grammar skills I was teaching to my students’ writing. As a class, we did many writing activities and spent most of our instructional time on the writing process, answering “fun” prompts. However, I never knew I needed to explicitly and systematically teach my students syntax and transcription skills. Without those building blocks, it is no surprise that my students did not grow as writers.

“Improving students’ writing quality requires more than simply having them write more. Explicit writing instruction is necessary, and it benefits all students, even those for whom learning to write seems to come effortlessly. It includes explicit instruction with guided practice for all of the components of The Writing Rope.”

(Sedita, 2023, p. 11)

In 2011, NAEP scores revealed that only 27% of students in 8th grade performed at the proficient level in writing. Similarly to reading, writing does not come naturally. As an unconstrained skill, writing is a complex process, and everything the brain must do to read, it will need to do to write, plus more. For students to become successful writers, they need to be explicitly taught both foundational skills and composition skills. Unfortunately, many teacher preparation programs fail to provide preservice teachers with coursework in research-based writing practices. 

Explore the nuances of writing instruction in the blog post, “A Guide to Effective Writing Instruction” by Gary A. Troia, PhD, CCC-SLP. Uncover the intricacies of effective writing practices, bridging structured literacy with the art of explicit writing instruction.

The Simple View of Writing provides a conceptual framework for understanding the two major domains needed for skilled written expression. This model emphasizes that skilled writing requires mastery of foundational writing skills (transcription) and proficiency in text generation (composition). Therefore, it is important that educators provide explicit and systematic instruction in both domains. 

While becoming a skilled writer starts with transcription skills,  teachers should not wait to teach composition skills until students have mastered transcription skills, and instead, these two domains should be taught in tandem.

In one study, 37% of surveyed teachers expressed a lack of confidence and felt unprepared to teach writing due to the lack of a writing methods course in their teacher preparation program (Myers et al., 2016). This is concerning, as teachers who are better prepared and have more positive attitudes about writing are more likely to spend time teaching writing and using evidence-based practices than others (Brindle et al., 2015). Exploring new research and instructional methods may feel overwhelming, yet engaging in a collaborative learning community with colleagues proves both valuable and productive. Personally experiencing this with writing, I initiated a book club at Heggerty, and I strongly encourage you to consider starting one as well!

Ready to launch your own book club centered on The Writing Rope, emphasizing explicit writing instruction practices? Follow six easy steps in the blog post in our Professional Learning Community Series: How to Start a Professional Book Club.

Similar to the Simple View of Reading, the two domains of the Simple View of Writing can be broken down into multiple skills that require explicit instruction. The Writing Rope is a visual metaphor for the five fundamental components needed to become a proficient writer. This model can help ground our instructional decisions, as all five components should be included in our writing instruction. This leads to the question: Are we teaching all the skills and strategies needed to become a proficient writer? 

The Writing Rope book club: Explicit Writing Instruction Practices

Joan Sedita elaborates on all five components while providing instructional routines and strategies in her book, The Writing Rope. This text is geared toward grades 4-8. However, many instructional routines could also be adapted and utilized in the Primary grades. Those K-3 teachers may decide they only want to read specific chapters more applicable to their grade levels, so I have included chapter summaries below. 

The Writing Rope: Chapter Summaries

Part I: Laying the Foundation for Teachers and Students

Chapter 1, “Introduction to The Writing Rope,” briefly discusses the five components necessary for students to become skilled writers. Additionally, this chapter stresses the importance of writing in other content areas and reminds readers that all teachers play an essential role in a student’s writing development. 

Chapter 2, “What Do We Know About Effective Writing Instruction,” summarizes current research on effective writing instruction. While most of the research in this chapter is geared towards grades 4th-8th, Sedita does include findings from the IES report Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers (2018) and identifies seven teaching principles applicable to all grade levels. 

Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers

1. Provide daily time for students to write.
2. Teach students to use the writing process.
3. Teach students to become fluent in handwriting, spelling, sentence construction, typing, and word processing.
4. Create an engaged community of writers.

Chapter 3, “Transcription Skills,” focuses on the need for fluency in spelling, handwriting, and keyboarding skills. In order for students to be successful writers and be able to focus on their writing composition, they must be able to get words onto the page effortlessly. Sedita recommends that these transcription skills are taught alongside a phonics lesson and provides an example Scope and Sequence, which you may find helpful.

“Once students become automatic and fluent with spelling and handwriting/ keyboarding, they can focus their attention on higher-level composing skills. If students do not develop fluency with these skills by Grade 4, this will put a constraint on writing development as they move into later grades.”

(Sedita, 2023, p. 24) 

Chapter 4 defines “Writing Craft” and highlights how skilled writers incorporate specific techniques such as word choice, literary devices, and TAP (task, audience, and purpose) to create a desired effect on the reader. Learning these skills can be tricky for students, but teachers can utilize mentor texts to model strong writing craft that students can emulate. Teachers need to be purposeful in choosing these mentor texts and need to be explicit in what they want students to imitate in their own writing. Sedita also stresses the importance of writing for authentic audiences, not just for the teacher. 

Part II: Skills and Strategies: Learning to Write (Chapters 5-8)

Chapter 5, “Critical Thinking: Stages of the Writing Process,” focuses on a model to help students with the four stages of the writing process: Think, Plan, Write, and Revise. Sedita recommends that 40% of instructional time be spent on the Think and Plan stage, 20% on writing a draft, and 40% on rewriting and revising. While many teachers are familiar with brainstorming strategies such as bubble maps or topic webs, Sedita introduces new graphic organizers such as two-column notes and provides templates including filled-out examples. 

My favorite chapter, Chapter 6, “Syntax and Sentence Skills,” is filled with helpful instructional suggestions to develop students’ syntactic awareness, the awareness of the relationships among words to convey meaning. Sentences are one of the building blocks of writing but are often a missed component of writing instruction. Sedita provides examples of sentence combining, sentence scrambles, and sentence elaboration that will improve a student’s reading comprehension and writing skills. This is a must-read chapter for any teacher! 

Chapter 7, “Text Structure: Paragraph Skills,” offers suggestions for developing strong paragraphs. I often assumed that my students would be able to organize ideas into a well-written paragraph, but this is a difficult task that requires explicit instruction. Sedita recommends sharing mentor texts that feature well-written paragraphs, explicitly teaching transition words, and utilizing graphic organizers and templates designed around the six common patterns of paragraph structure. 

Chapter 8, “ Text Structure: Three Types of Writing,” provides suggestions for teaching the text structure for three different types of writing: informational, narrative, and opinion/point of view. Writing templates and teacher feedback checklists are included. While the graphic organizers in this chapter are best suited for upper elementary teachers, lower elementary teachers may still enjoy reading this chapter for their own professional development. 

Part III: Application: Writing to Learn (Chapters 9-11)

Chapter 9, “Critical Thinking: Summary Writing,” provides suggestions for teaching students the difficult skill of summarizing. Sedita shares seven ways to scaffold students who are having trouble creating summaries and provides templates and graphic organizers that teachers and students would find helpful!

Chapter 10, “Critical Thinking: Writing From Text Sources,” stresses the importance of writing in all subject areas. Writing during other subjects enhances students’ comprehension of the content. The chapter offers suggestions for instructional suggestions for responding to both narrative and expository texts. 

Chapter 11, “Putting It All Together,” features two activities that help teachers determine if they are providing instruction in all five components of The Writing Rope. This chapter contains graphic organizers and questions your book club could utilize to reflect on 

The Writing Rope Book Club: 9 Key Writing Takeaways 

Read below to learn our nine key takeaways from The Writing Rope book club, a spotlight on explicit writing instruction practices.

1. Developing oral language is extremely important in the development of syntactic awareness. Even before students are writing, we can work on developing oral language, which will help student’s listening comprehension and later, their writing composition skills. This is something I wish I had worked on more with my students when I was teaching!
2. When students have strong content knowledge about a topic, they will be able to write higher quality pieces and increase their writing quantity. Teachers should have students writing throughout content areas daily, and connect writing to reading whenever possible.

3. It is crucial that students master the foundations of writing early on. A student who isn’t able to fluently form letters, spell words or build a sentence is going to be challenged by the most basic writing tasks. How can we expect these same students to have the cognitive resources to hold onto more complex strand skills such as text structure and writing craft?
4. Writing can be fun and playful for students. Early on especially, students do not have to complete the full writing process every time they write. They can have fun with just the skills and strategies.

5. After reading The Writing Rope and articles, I have been thinking about how demanding writing is and how there are many individual skills that are required to produce a writing piece. Sharing this piece with others can be a very vulnerable experience for students. This should be kept in mind, as a student’s first writing experience can shape their future perception of writing.
6. I had always considered handwriting to be more closely tied to writing than reading, but in reality, phonics and transcription are very connected. These two foundational skills are best taught together. So, for example, when we teach students to form the letter m, we should also be teaching students the letter name and /m/ sound. 

7. Summarizing is an important skill for students that also supports comprehension. Summarizing needs to be continually scaffolded after it is explicitly taught using the gradual release of responsibility method, providing samples of the text, note-taking templates, and more resources.
8. Student engagement increases, and the quality of writing tends to increase when students are aware of their authentic audience. They can envision that they are writing to that audience, even if someone in that audience doesn’t read it. 

“Penmanship and spelling were historically the only parts of writing that were taught, and when writing reappeared in the latter half of the 20th century, it tended to focus on “process writing”, emphasizing personal experience and story generation over other genres. Only when Common Core State Standards appeared in 2010 did the emphasis shift to writing about nonfiction texts and across subjects-the idea that students should be writing about what they’ve learned.”

(Sawchuk, 2023)

9. For me, this emphasized the importance of teaching writing in a structured way that addresses all aspects, just as we teach reading. This includes looking at penmanship, spelling and grammar, as well as the writing process and how writing is a critical component of all subject areas.

The Writing Rope Book Club: Resource Round-Up

When planning our Heggerty book club, I also wanted to include other resources to expand our knowledge and hear different perspectives from writing experts.

The Writing Rope Webinar from Reading League Wisconsin– Watch before reading to build background knowledge

How Does Writing Fit into The Science of Reading? – Read with Chapters 1 and 2

Questions to consider after reading the article:

1. “And finally, teaching writing is hard. Few studies document what preparation teachers receive to teach writing, but in surveys, many teachers say they received little training in their college education courses. That’s probably why only a little over half of teachers, in one 2016 survey, said that they enjoyed teaching writing.” How do you feel about teaching writing? 
2. Why is writing frequently not taught in classrooms?
3. This article discusses how writing instruction can progress- from transcribing sounds, to encoding words, to writing sentences and paragraphs. The article also notes the importance of explicitly teaching skills and strategies of writing. How is that similar or different from your own instruction? 
4. Blevins states, “ Young kids are writing these mile-long sentences that become second nature. We set a higher bar, and they are fully capable of doing it. We can demystify a bit of that complex text if we develop early on how to talk about sentences—how they’re created, how they’re joined…There are all these things you can do that are helpful to develop an understanding of how sentences work and to get lots of practice.” In The Writing Rope, Sedita walks us through several ideas for helping students create stronger sentences. Which activity was your favorite and why? 
5. What other key takeaways did you have from reading the article?

Young Writers Need Structure to Learn the Craft. How Much Is Enough? Read After Chapter 7

Questions to consider after reading the article:

1. How do “process writing” techniques compare to a structured literacy approach? Do you think there is a place for these techniques within a structured literacy lesson? 
2. Why is it important for students to practice writing skills in context? 
3. What role does explicit teaching have in writing development?
4. This article discusses several ways to teach paragraph writing. Which approach best matches your current instruction? 
5. What is one takeaway from this article you could apply to your own teaching? 

Writing Your Way to Better Reading– Listen after Chapter 8

Questions to consider after listening to the podcast:

1. Why are authentic writing tasks important? Does your writing instruction provide authentic writing opportunities?
2.  What are the differences between writing activities and writing instruction? 
3.  How does motivation impact writing? How does this connect to the “Not So Simple View of Writing” featured in Chapter 2?
4.  Toward the end of the podcast, Steve Graham provides five key takeaways that can impact writing instruction. How are these similar or different from Sedita’s Seven Teaching Principles from Chapter 2? 
5.  How is writing instruction linked to reading comprehension?
6.  Were you surprised by any information Steve Graham discussed? 

The Writing Rope Book Club: References 

• Brindle, M., Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Hebert M. (2015). Third and fourth grade teacher’s Classroom practices in writing: A national survey. Reading and Writing, 29, 929-954.
• Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. (2018, October). Practice Guide: Foundational Skills to Support Reading  for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade. Retrieved from https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/17
• Myers, J., Scales, R. q., Grisham, D. L., Wolsey, T. D., Dismuke, S., Smetana, L., et al. (2016). What about writing?: A national exploratory study of writing instruction in teacher preparation programs. Literacy Research and Instruction, 55, 309-330.
• Sedita, J. (2023). The writing rope: A framework for explicit writing instruction in all subjects. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.