A Research Conundrum

Marci Glaus, English language arts consultant, at WI DPI, contributed today's post.

There are several places we go as educators to find research in support of teaching practices. One tool educators use to support their practice is professional books. While many of these professional books are not entire volumes on research the author/s conducted, there is value in learning from them as leaders in the field, along with the research that they cite in support of the purpose of the book. The focus for this blog post stems from an interesting experience I had with a professional book while searching for appropriate research for a project I have been working on about teaching writing.

I have been gathering information specifically related to characteristics of effective writing instruction and I became excited when I was reading a chapter in Routman’s (2014) Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success, because of the following statement and citation: “Not only that, but thinking out loud and writing in front of our students is the number one strategy for improving students’ writing57” (p. 112). This statement was like a gift especially wrapped for me, because I assumed it meant that someone else did the work for me when it came to gathering the research related to writing in front of students, and all I had to do was cross-reference the endnote from the book to get it. I flipped to the endnotes section and quickly found out that she was citing another favorite in the field, Kelly Gallagher. I wasn’t expecting this, but located his book Write Like This (2011) from my shelf and turned to the page cited in Routman’s endnotes. What I found was a conundrum.  

Like I said, based on Routman’s broad statement about a particular strategy being the number one strategy to improve student writing, I assumed that I would be led a meta-analysis on several research studies, or a large-scale research study. Instead, I was led to the following statement from Gallagher’s book: “This bears repeating: of all the strategies I have learned in my twenty-five years of teaching, no strategy improves my students’ writing more than having my students watch and listen to me as I write and think aloud” (p. 15) (emphasis original). While I admire and respect Kelly Gallagher as an authority in the field and a great writing teacher based on his experiences with the National Writing Project and as a leader, I was not convinced that all of this fit with Routman’s blanket statement. One person’s professional observations and evidence from classroom experience did not align with what I thought I would find as support for such a broad proclamation. Even though I agree with him, and even though I have experienced the same results myself as an English teacher after writing in front of my students as a teaching tool, I wondered, is this enough? Can I re-state that the number one strategy for improving students’ writing is to write in front of your students in this context?

After having this uncomfortable conversation with myself, I decided that it would not be responsible to promote the same statement in the work that I am doing. However, I am not abandoning the idea that writing and talking about it in front of students is a great strategy. So, I moved back into the digging that we just have to do in order to locate the research support that is needed in the field. Stay tuned!

References

Gallagher, K. (2011). Write like this: Teaching real-world writing through modeling mentor texts. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Routman, R. (2014). Read, write, lead: Breakthrough strategies for schoolwide literacy success. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.