Building Ratio Through Writing- Everybody Writes and Art of the Sentence

This blog post is a synthesis of information about two Teach Like a Champion 2.0 strategies- Everybody Writes and Art of the Sentence. Learn more about these two strategies on page 281 of Teach Like a Champion 2.0.

Building Ratio Through Writing
The amount and quality of writing students do in your classroom are two of the most important determinants of their academic success. Quite possibly, they are together the single most important thing, so one of the simplest and most powerful shifts you can make is to increase the amount of writing- especially high quality writing- your students do. By having students write more, we cause them to push their ideas from vague notions to complete thoughts, and to practice developing complete thoughts is to practice perhaps the core task of thinking.

Everybody Writes
Prepare your students to engage rigorously by giving them the chance to reflect in writing before you ask them to discuss. 

One way to make writing effective in your classroom is to use it before discussions to give students the benefit of more writing, to foster a more rigorous discussion, and to help them answer questions that stretch them to their limits. One benefit of Everybody Writes is that ideas get better when students are allowed a few moments of reflection, and this is the case even (or especially) for those students whose hands tend to shoot up first. Allowing students time to write before you ask them to discuss builds participation and think ratio, enabling all students- slow, reflective types included- to participate, and pushing students toward more rigorous thinking.

Here are some other benefits of Everybody Writes:

• Because you can review student ideas in advance by reading over shoulders, you're able to select effective responses to begin your discussion.
• Every idea that gets shared in discussion is in effect a second draft, a 2.0 thought of higher quality than what would otherwise be shared off the top of a student's mind.
• It allows you to cold call students simply and naturally because you know that everyone is prepared with thoughts.
• It enables you to give every student, not just those who can get their hands up fast, the chance to be part of the conversation.
• Processing thoughts in writing refines them, challenging students intellectually, engaging them, and improving the quality of their ideas and their writing.
• You set standards or steer students in a direction you think especially fruitful.
• Students remember significantly more of what they are learning if they write it down. 

More and more writing, especially writing with a distinct and immediate purpose- using writing to engage your peers just a minute or two afterwards, and being successful at doing that- is a great positive reinforcement for students who may not understand the "why" behind writing. 

See the strategy in action with this video: https://vimeo.com/107081200

Art of the Sentence
Ask students to synthesize a complex idea in a single, well-crafted sentence. The discipline of having to make one sentence do all the work pushes students to use new syntactical forms. 

Learning to write complex sentences is learning not only to write effectively but also to develop and refine ideas by expressing their relationships through the structures of language. It is the key to great paragraphs and great essays, and is arguably far more central to rigorous writing (and thinking) than the admonition to have three sentences with supporting details from the text. To use the Art of the Sentence, then you ask your students to synthesize a complex idea, summarize a reading, or distill a discussion in a single, well-crafted sentence. 

One way to engage students in developing well-crafted sentences is to utilize sentence starters and sentence parameters.  The Sentence Starter provides students with specific words or phrases to, well, start their sentences.

Sample Sentence Starters

You can arm your students with an arsenal of rigorous writing tools by introducing multiple syntactical structures over time. For example:

·       Describe the settings of the first two pages of Chapter 2. Start your sentence with “Babbitt juxtaposes…”

·       In one sentence, explain how Ramona's actions affected her sister. Start with, “After Ramona…”

·       Explain Fern's and Mr. Arable's differing viewpoints on how to treat the runt of the litter. Start your sentence with, “While Fern believes…”

·       Describe the opening to Kurt Vonnegut's “Harrison Bergeron.” Start your sentence with “In Vonnegut's satiric portrayal…”

Be Strategic

Here are some habits of thinking that you may want to encourage students to do more of in your literacy class:

Referring to evidence Synthesizing evidence

Summarizing ideas Revising initial thinking Supporting or refuting an argument

Sample Sentence Starters

Here are a few ideas to get you started with sentence starters for your students:

• In light of all the evidence...
• After considering the options...
• Upon further reflection...
• In contrast to...
• Whereas...
• Similarly...
• To illustrate...

Sentence Parameters are specific words, phrases, or structures you give to students to use anywhere in the sentence. Your choice of parameter depends on your goals for students' reading and/or discussion and what you'd like them to practice as writers.

Using sentence parameters, you might ask students to include a specific word or phrase. (“Use the phrase ‘internal conflict’ in your sentence.”) This is particularly effective for providing opportunities to reinforce vocabulary words, especially technical vocabulary words important in reading (irony, conflict, characterization, and so on). Although the benefits of sentence parameters overlap with those of sentence starters, they also allow more student autonomy in how the sentence takes shape.

Sample Sentence Parameters

Here are a few ideas to get you started setting sentence parameters for your students:

• Explain how and why Templeton supported Charlotte in her plan to save Wilbur. Use the word “motivated” in your response.
• Explain the conflict Steinbeck develops in the opening to The Grapes of Wrath. Use the phrase “antagonistic relationship” in your response.
• Describe the introduction to Kurt Vonnegut's “Harrison Bergeron.” Include this phrase: “Vonnegut juxtaposes ________ and ________ to show ________.”
• Summarize the data from this graph in one complete, well-written sentence. Use the word “exponentially” in your sentence.