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http://bul.sagepub.com/content/81/591/57The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/019263659708159110

1997 81: 57NASSP BulletinRonnie D. Carter

Obstacles to the Effective Teaching Of Writing: A 20-Year Follow-Up  

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What is This? 

- Oct 1, 1997Version of Record >>

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F E A T U R E S

Obstacles to the Effective TeachingOf Writing: A 20-Year Follow-UpBy Ronnie D. Carter

Ronnie D. Carter is professor of English at Indiana University East, Richmond, Ind.; readers maycontinue the dialogue on the Internet at rdcarter@indiana.edu..........................................................................................

Note: The original survey of 1976 was published in the NASSP Bulletin in October ~1997; the 10-year follow-up of 1986 was published in the October 1987 issue.

Has the effective teaching of writing changed for the better, remained

much the same, or become worse in the last 20 years? Have the majorobstacles to the effective teaching of writing been removed? This 20-

year follow-up examines the question.

hy can’t high school teachers effectively teach students how to~~J~~ write?&dquo; When I asked that question 20 years ago, high schoolw V V English teachers from a six-county area of east central Indiana

gave a variety of reasons, from inadequate teacher training and lack of sup-port from teachers in other disciplines; through indifference of administratorsin charge; to large class size; to poor student preparation in grammar, sen-tence sense, and punctuation.

Ten years ago I conducted a follow-up study of the same 16 highschools to learn whether the major obstacles to the effective teaching of

writing had been removed. Alas, despite 10 years of research, publication,discussion, additional inservice training, and practice, the problem areasremained much the same. To be sure, there were some gains, but the over-all rate of &dquo;progress&dquo; in student writing quality could be labeled extremelymodest.

The modest gains included microscopically better training for afew new teachers, slightly reduced class size (from 27 to 25 students inthe average writing class), and more support from administrators.

Teachers in other disciplines were just as indifferent to student writingproblems and equally resistant to accepting accountability for assigningand grading written exercises.

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The More Things Change...Have things changed for the better, remained the same, or become worse

by 1996? Have the major obstacles to the effective teaching of writing beenremoved?

The respondents (n = 36) have seen no improvement in the last 10

years in the casual indifference expressed by teachers of other departmentstoward the &dquo;writing problem.&dquo; As always, it remains the problem of the

English department. When a little writing is assigned in other courses, con-tent is rewarded, wretched grammar and punctuation are blithely ignored.

The improvement in administrative support from 1976 to 1986 has

plateaued in the 1990s. The respondents felt stymied by the inability of sym-pathetic principals to help them gain smaller classes and better inservicetraining.

Poor student preparation-in 1976, 1986, and now 1996-is well-

recognized and documented. The extremely modest gains from 1976 to1986 in grammar, sentence sense, and punctuation have mostly evaporatedby 1996 and even fallen back to the level of 1976. There are numerousexplanations for this loss: increased MTV viewing by students, more part-time jobs at the burger and pizza chains, less homework, and students’reluctance to acquire skills that require time and sustained effort, all of

which mitigate against the long-term commitment that writing requires.As a teacher of writing at the college level, I see evidence of the

dilemma semester after semester. My campus routinely loses half the fresh-man class, and the highest rate of attrition is consistently among those enter-

ing students with poor preparation in writing and math. And these are notat-risk dropouts but graduates in the top half of their high school class!

Class Size

The major obstacle, identified by more than half the respondents, isthe same decade after decade after decade--class size. The average writingclass of 27 in 1976 fell to 25 in 1986 and now 24 in 1996. One student less

per writing class in a decade!

The difference between literature and writing classes, when taughtseparately, is less than 1 student per class. To me, this makes little sense

because a dedicated teacher can handle more students in literature than

writing or grammar courses. Given limited resources, a better mix would be26 in literature vs. 20 in writing.

The class size problem will be with us for several decades to come,especially in a conservative state that places most of the financial burden onlocal property owners to support public schools. Wealthy districts have

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17-20 students per writing class, a high school graduation rate of 95+ per-cent, and a postsecondary education attendance rate of 60 percent; the two

poorest districts in the survey area have 30 students per writing class, a highschool graduation rate of 60-70 percent, and postsecondary attendance rateof 30 percent or less.

On the NCTE essay contest, 3 high schools of 394 in the state havewon almost one-third the prizes in the last two decades; the three are alsolisted among the top 10 for tax base and dollars expended per student. I

visited one of these schools in early 1995 to see learning groups of 15 work-

ing busily at computers, hacking away on essays for history, geography, and

psychology-in an English class. The average student heading for collegehad composed a whopping 35 essays, only half for an English teacher. Bycontrast, in a financially-strapped school in my survey area, the typical grad-uate had composed a meager 2 essays per year.

Large writing classes mitigate against assigning much writingbecause of the enormous amount of grading it produces. For many teach-ers with 125-150 students, one modest essay requires 25-35 hours of grad-ing. This produces an ancillary problem of large classes: grading the papers.This is the second most-cited problem. More than 90 percent of the respon-dents felt schools should require students to write more during their highschool careers. Teachers want to assign more writing but cannot, not if theyplan on a life beyond a desk, hunkered down before a mountain of ungrad-ed essays.

Teacher TrainingHas teacher training in the teaching of writing improved in the last

20 years? The answer is a resounding no! True, at the B.A. level the respon-dents graduating after 1986 have taken one fewer literature and one more

writing course, but almost the same percent of respondents (70 percent)express high frustration with the writing methodology courses.

After 20 years of hoopla surrounding &dquo;new initiatives&dquo; and &dquo;national

agendas&dquo; with billions of dollars spent on computer labs, inservice training,back-to-basics, competency testing, and such, the way writing teachers are

being trained has changed very little for the better.As a site visitor and supervisor for the Advance College Project of

Indiana University, I routinely observed master teachers perform minor mir-acles with small-group work and discussion, role playing, in-class written

&dquo;short shots&dquo; of reader response, oral reports, peer evaluation, and pairswork on computers-in short, interactive learning at its best. Lecturing neverconsumed more than 10 percent of the class time. Of the five best teachers

I have ever observed, not one learned the &dquo;right stufF’ in a methods class.

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Indeed, I have met only three teachers in the last decade who received evena hint on how to grade papers accurately and quickly.

Better training on all aspects of teaching writing has been avail-able since the late 1970s, yet my respondents see very little of it. Theyrate their training as &dquo;not very good,&dquo; &dquo;not helpful at all,&dquo; &dquo;very inade-

quate,&dquo; and &dquo;extremely non-effective.&dquo; The pre-1986 graduates differ nota whit from the post-1986 graduates in their response. The tenor of

remarks remains the same: nearly uniform disappointment and across-the-board frustration.

What To Do?Given the lack of student preparation, the indifference of other teachers tothe &dquo;writing problem,&dquo; plateauing of administrative support, large class sizeand a great deal of writing to evaluate, and inadequate training it is a won-

der that new teachers enter the field and veterans stay. A note of despairhas slipped in by 1996, a note I failed to detect in 1976 or 1986.

As principals and superintendents, you have the leading role in solv-ing this problem. I have seen one high school (in a county with three) gofrom last place to first in SAT scores, college attendance and graduation rate,and number of winners of scholarships and academic contests and theAcademic Bowl for schools with fewer than 1,000 students. This high schoolinvited in a college writing course exactly one decade before the second-place finisher; the last-place finisher still can’t find 15 students among 75

graduates to enroll in the college-level course. In the top high school, ath-letic trophies were displayed in a side hall; the main hall display cases werefilled with academic trophies, awards, and prizes. The high school principaland superintendent beat the bushes and tripled the scholarship fund forgraduates going on to postsecondary training or college. In short, they madeacademics the theme of their long tenure.

Principals must lead the charge, not wait on the state to mandateanother barren initiative to satisfy frustrated parents and ambitious politi-cians. After teaching composition for 33 years at the college level, gradingmore than 50,000 pieces of student writing, and keeping a keen eye ontrends in the writing classroom, I can state that only a dozen things, at most,work well to turn out a decent writer on high school graduation day: theprocess approach, holistic grading, interactive learning that deals with dif-ferent learning styles, peer review and evaluation, role playing, group workand group discussion, grammar and punctuation instruction that deals withauthentic materials (not abstract linguistics), tutoring one-on-one, and prac-tice, practice, and more practice.

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If the chair of your English department has neither the training norinclination, hire a professional who knows writing to screen all applicants,to test and interview them for you to make certain they have been proper-ly trained. Work hard to get writing classes down to a manageable size of20 students, even if it means larger literature classes. Send your currentteachers to inservice workshops that feature holistic grading.

Once the word gets out that your school corporation has rejected thelast 10 applicants from the local teachers’ college, the English education

program will sit up and take notice. A boycott does wonders for improvingthe quality of training.

After 38 years in academia (33 on the teacher’s side of the desk) I am

absolutely convinced principals and superintendents are the best and mostpowerful change agents in solving the writing problem at the high schoollevel. They can nudge and cajole the lackadaisical performers toward appro-priate inservice workshops. They can hire properly trained teachers. Theycan gradually reduce the size of the writing classes to accommodate more

practice. They can educate the school board to the mission of preparing ourchildren for survival and success in the Information Age of the 21st century.They can eventually create an atmosphere of academic excellence that willattract the best teachers in the region to their high school.

Mission impossible? Not so! Of the 30-odd schools I have observed

and followed during the past 25 years in east central Indiana, the greatestgains were made in the pair of high schools with dynamic leaders.

Principals do make a difference. -B

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