Words That Flow

As a greenhorn teacher in Glendale, Sidnie Myrick thought she had landed on a sure-fire way to get her fifth- and sixth-grade students jazzed about writing: Let them write whatever they wanted.

But the reaction was groaning and moaning.

“They were scared to death,” Myrick recalled. “It was too much freedom.”

Perplexed, Myrick turned for help to the UCLA Writing Project, where she learned from accomplished peers how to bring out the best in anxious young scribes. In the 11 years since, she has earned a reputation for inspiring well-reasoned analysis from children who have only recently mastered the ABCs.

For more than two decades, thousands of Southern California teachers like Myrick have attended the project’s summer institutes, workshops and conferences to hone their own writing skills and glean tips on how to teach writing.

One of the most highly regarded ventures of its kind, the project is an offshoot of the federally funded National Writing Project at UC Berkeley. The UCLA program is one of 16 at UC and California State University campuses, all of which use the teachers-teaching-teachers model and extensive follow-up and networking to bolster participants’ ability to reach students.

The writing programs, open to teachers of kindergarten through college, provide an educational “bag of tricks” at a time when writing in many schools is no longer wedged solidly between reading and ‘rithmetic.

“Writing is not very visible in this state,” said Faye Peitzman, director of the 22-year-old UCLA Writing Project. “Obviously, writing needs to be better and the teaching of writing needs to be better.”

In recent years, Peitzman and other educators say, writing in California has flagged in importance as teachers have struggled to keep up with ever-shifting reforms and increasingly rigorous standards.

Education schools barely touch on the teaching of writing, leaving raw and veteran teachers alike to figure it out as they go along. Compounding the situation is the surge into classrooms of non-credentialed novices who have their hands full bringing students up to snuff on basic subjects that are the focus of high-pressure standardized tests.

However, both nationally and in California, interest in writing is reawakening. In September, the U.S. Department of Education reported the most comprehensive assessment to date of how well American students can write. The news was grim: Only about one in four has the level of proficiency needed to succeed in school or future jobs. The weakness is especially acute considering the nation’s growing reliance on rapidly shifting Information Age technologies that require strong writing and verbal skills.

In what has become a depressingly familiar pattern with high-profile tests, California students as a whole performed below the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress writing exam. California trailed such states as Texas and New York, with similarly diverse populations and dense urban areas.

Still, Richard Sterling, director of the National Writing Project, greeted as good news the widespread interest in the test.

“We’re very pleased that writing is finally getting this attention,” he said at the time. He added that the federal government has recently boosted funding--to $7 million this fiscal year--for the National Writing Project.

The stronger interest is partly in response to persuasive research demonstrating, among other things, that very young children can handle complex writing assignments and dabble in a variety of genres.

Delaine Eastin, California’s superintendent of public instruction, said the state’s feeble showing on the writing test underscored the need for a stronger statewide emphasis on writing.

As a sign of renewed commitment, the state recently ordered test publisher Harcourt Educational Measurement to develop writing “prompts”--passages or questions to which students must respond in writing--for fourth- and seventh-graders for next year’s Stanford 9 standardized test. The writing portion would be the only section of the exam that does not consist solely of multiple-choice questions. The results should help establish a benchmark against which future progress can be measured.

No one is expecting terrific results at the outset.

“We have some real work to do in this state to put writing back into the three Rs,” said Mary Ann Smith, co-director of the National Writing Project and director of the California Writing Project, the umbrella organization for the state’s 16 project sites.

25 Years to Fix Trend

The national project got up and running in 1974, after educators at UC Berkeley noted a disturbing trend: About half the university’s entering freshmen, among the nation’s top high school graduates, lacked the requisite writing skills to succeed in college and were being ordered to take a remedial course. The weakness spotlighted an even bigger problem: Most teachers had no idea how to teach writing.

That embarrassment spurred James Gray, a former high school teacher, to start a program that would seek out teachers with exemplary methods to instruct other teachers, with the goal of improving writing and learning in U.S. schools.

Since its founding, the national project has spawned 165 sites at universities in 48 states. Through this extensive national network, the best teachers of writing promote their methods to more than 100,000 colleagues each year. To date, more than 1.5 million teachers have attended programs.

In Southern California, the UCLA Writing Project has been a pillar for teachers whose devotion to writing has never wavered.

Even though it was 15 years ago, Alfee Enciso, an English teacher at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, vividly recalls his five weeks at the summer institute as “a religious experience.”

As part of the drill, participants at the institute polish their own prose and poetry daily and read it aloud from an “author’s chair,” receiving feedback from colleagues and making revisions. They also demonstrate for one another teaching methods that have worked for them.

“You see how to teach the writing process,” Enciso said. “[Then] you see people who have not gone through the program. They bore kids to death. They don’t let them find their voice.”

Like many other graduates, Enciso has become an unofficial mentor for young or struggling teachers. He also gives presentations statewide on how to get kids excited about writing. His ninth-graders, for example, tend to respond well to offbeat exercises. In one, they read 15 short stories from around the world and compose five postcards about them. Sometimes they pretend to be a character in a novel.

Enciso acknowledged that writing can be an arduous assignment for teachers, particularly in urban middle schools and high schools where teachers have 100 or more students from wildly diverse cultural backgrounds.

“You’re taking 100 pages [of writing assignments] home,” he said. “You’ve got to give feedback. It’s a great deal of work.”

That assumes that the teacher is able to get students to put pen to paper, not always a given.

“One of the things we really notice about kids today is they no longer have conversations with anyone anymore,” said Myrick, the Glendale teacher, who this year is working as a literacy coach in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Soccer, TV, computers and video games lure children away from reading and journal-writing, and the traditional sit-down family dinner, once a hotbed of lively conversation, is rare in many families.

“I tell my students that good writing is good conversation written down,” she said.

One recent Friday morning, Myrick was coaching two young women who team-teach 40 second- and third-graders at Stoner Avenue School in Culver City. A wall in one classroom held a permanent display of writing samples. With students divvied up into small groups, Myrick and teacher Silvi Winthrop guided them through an exercise based on the theme “When I Was Little,” from a book by actress Jamie Lee Curtis.

Many of the students had brainstormed and jotted ideas on a piece of paper in a stylized “web,” with a variety of thoughts shooting off from a central theme. A few of them felt comfortable writing in paragraphs; many others sought help with the spelling of each word. But they all made progress, even if it was excruciatingly slow.

Co-teacher Sarah Ascheman recalled feeling let down as a student when her teachers would say, “Here’s what you’ll be writing about today.” As a teacher, she resists that approach.

“The process comes much more naturally when you have ownership of it rather than being told what to do,” she said, adding: “It’s a huge help to have a coach.”

Researchers agree that the writing projects succeed by building a reliable scaffold that can support teachers over the long haul.

“Many teachers stay connected [to the program] for years,” said Ann Lieberman, a visiting professor of education at Stanford University who has studied the UCLA Writing Project. “It becomes a lifeline, and they continue to stretch themselves.”

The project, she said, transforms teachers much more than the one-shot workshops that are the norm in teacher development.

“Teachers teach each other,” she said. “They are simultaneously teachers and learners. Teachers begin to feel incredibly powerful as their own work is recognized.”

Writing Tips

Here are tips for teachers of writing from Jane Hancock, associate director of the UCLA Writing Project, and Sidnie Myrick, teacher and literacy coach.

* Encourage students to turn on the creative faucet and let the ideas flow. Worry about spelling, grammar and punctuation after the words are down on paper. “Fluency” comes first, then form and structure.

* Make writing a daily habit, starting on the first day of class. One way is to have students make entries in a journal each day without fail.

* Help students keep a portfolio of their work, so that they have samples to look back on to measure their progress.

* Urge them to write multiple paragraphs and multiple pages; have them stretch themselves intellectually.

* Instill in them the steps of good writing: pre-writing, draft writing, revising, proofreading, publishing.

* Preach these guidelines: Start strong, end with significance, don’t forget to reflect.

* Urge students to converse with others and to read, read, read.

* Encourage parents to be good listeners and to praise effusively. Suggest that parents resist the urge to pounce on every misspelled word or misplaced comma.

Writing Samples

Here are student writing samples gleaned from the classrooms of teachers who have been fellows at the UCLA Writing Project. These four excerpts, selected by teacher and literacy coach Sidnie Myrick, are examples of analytical writing by pupils in first, second or third grade at Thomas Edison Elementary School in Glendale. The punctuation, spelling and grammar are as written.