The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 270
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
GONZALEZ: Literacy has always been a hot topic in education, and the intensity surrounding it has really ramped up in the last few years. But in most of those conversations, we rarely bring up writing. There’s no shortage of debate about phonics, fluency, and reading comprehension, but writing instruction is almost never mentioned, even though reading and writing are so deeply intertwined.
This glaring omission was something today’s guests wanted to address. Melanie Meehan is a former curriculum coordinator who recently opened her own in-person writing center. She was also a guest on episode 192 of this podcast when we talked about a strategy called backward chaining. Maggie Roberts is a literacy consultant and former middle school teacher who spent nearly two decades supporting teachers in classrooms. Earlier this month, they published a new book together called Foundational Skills for Writing: A Brain-Based Guide to Strengthen Executive Functions, Language, and Other Cornerstones for Writers. In the book, they explore what the brain actually has to do when we ask kids to write, and what gets in the way.
The book breaks the larger task of writing into smaller skill categories, including transcription skills like handwriting, keyboarding, spelling, and large and small motor development, oral language — the speaking and listening skills that are a precursor to writing, and executive functioning, which includes working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. To be a proficient writer, a person needs to develop and practice all of these skills, and in the book, Meehan and Roberts show teachers how to develop them in students.
In today’s episode, they’ll share eight of the strategies from the book. Each are from a collection they call “minute moves,” quick lessons and exercises that can be done in just a few minutes to build different kinds of writing muscles. They’re fun and engaging and if you’re someone who teaches writing, I think you’re going to love them.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank Renaissance for sponsoring this episode. With decades of learning data and close collaboration with educators, Renaissance advances AI responsibly to deliver tools you can trust and results you can see. Renaissance’s 40-year commitment to accelerate learning for all students drives this ongoing investment in the best use of AI throughout its solutions, which include Star Assessments, Nearpod, Freckle, Accelerated Reader, and more. By connecting real-time assessment data to personalized instruction and engaging practice, Renaissance’s use of AI empowers educators to make informed decisions that meet each student’s unique needs, while helping administrators answer essential questions throughout the year. As technology continues to advance, Renaissance is committed to the best use of AI to amplify teachers’ impact and support leaders with actionable insights to make timely decisions and celebrate student success. If you’re looking for trustworthy and innovative AI tools for your school or district, Renaissance can help. To learn more, visit renaissance.com/ai.
Support also comes from Erikson Institute. If you love working with young children but feel drained by the pressures of the classroom, you’re not alone. There’s another way to make a lasting difference: by supporting children and families at the very beginning of their developmental journey. Erikson Institute’s online Master’s Degree in Early Intervention offers a different path. You’ll support children ages birth to 5 through one-on-one work, addressing early developmental challenges and helping set children up to reach their full potential. Competitive grants are available to help make this transition more accessible. It’s still meaningful work, just quieter, more focused, and more sustainable. To learn more, visit cultofpedagogy.com/ei
Now here’s my conversation with Melanie Meehan and Maggie Roberts about some fun, creative, and effective ways to squeeze writing instruction into small pockets of time.
GONZALEZ: Melanie and Maggie, welcome to the podcast.
ROBERTS: Thank you so much.
MEEHAN: Thank you for having us. We’re so excited to be here.
ROBERTS: Great to be here.
GONZALEZ: Okay. So anyone listening, we are laughing because this is our second take of the welcome conversation.
ROBERTS: We’re on a roll.
GONZALEZ: We’re on a roll. It’s fantastic. So Melanie I am actually welcoming back. She was on years ago to talk about a really cool differentiation strategy called backward chaining. So welcome back.
MEEHAN: Thanks.
GONZALEZ: And just tell us what, you’re here with Maggie Roberts, but let’s start with you and just tell us a little bit about what you do in the world of education.
MEEHAN: I love that you’re asking me that. I’ve gotten way better at answering that question over the last couple of months because I had a big change in my life. And on Oct. 3, I had my last day of working in public schools as a curriculum coordinator. And on Nov. 3, I opened my own writing business called The Writing Clinic where I’m teaching kids to write just full time. That’s my job, and it’s so amazing. And it was kind of perfect timing with the publication of our book that we’ll talk about more. But boy, my life is happy right now. I’m just doing what I love.
GONZALEZ: Oh.
MEEHAN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. That’s, I love that. Okay. So you’ve got your own space, I’m going to want to ask you a bunch of questions about that later because that sounds like something that, like, every town needs. And so I would love to learn more about how you’re doing that. Maybe we’ll do another episode about that.
MEEHAN: Yeah. It’s pretty, it’s been pretty amazing.
GONZALEZ: Okay. And then we have Maggie Roberts. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
ROBERTS: You know, so I am a former middle school teacher in the Chicago public schools. I started teaching when I was 22. And my first class of kids were 12 eighth-graders.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
ROBERTS: And I was just, like, this is, this is how teaching goes. You get 12 kids a year.
GONZALEZ: Right? Isn’t that, wouldn’t that be amazing?
ROBERTS: It was a really, it was a really good caseload of kids from my first year of teaching. But for almost the past 20 years, I have been working supporting teachers with professional learning on site in schools, guest teaching alongside teachers, working together to plan and work on curriculum. And I also spend time working with my partner with our small consulting business, just the two of us.
GONZALEZ: I saw that. I saw it on LinkedIn.
ROBERTS: Yeah, we —
GONZALEZ: You consult on literacy issues, basically.
ROBERTS: We mostly consult on literacy curriculum development, looking at student work. Between the two of us, we span supporting grades 2 through 12. And we get the opportunity to write professional texts together. And when we’re not doing that, we are busy raising our two boys.
GONZALEZ: Fantastic.
ROBERTS: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Love this. So the two of you have co-written a new book that just came out like a month ago, I guess, called “Foundational Skills for Writing: A Brain-Based Guide to Strengthen Executive Functions, Language, and Other Cornerstones for Writers.” So we’re going to, we’re going to drill down to some of the strategies in the book in a few minutes, but tell me about how this book came to be and what it is and who wants it, who needs this book.
MEEHAN: So I’ll take that one on because I feel like Maggie was always, I don’t know, I was always fangirling Maggie, right? Like, I first met Maggie when she came and gave professional development in our, in our schools. And at the time that I approached Maggie about this book, it was two years ago. Our school was really chasing, and I was really pushing with them to do science of reading practices. And as the writing coordinator, I was always, my refrain at the table was, “But what about writing? How does writing fit in?” So at the time, I was doing a lot of my own research about the role of writing in how kids learn to read and become literate people. And what was I missing in terms of foundational skills? And I was, Maggie and I live 10 minutes apart, and we see each other, we would see each other socially. And I’ve watched her kids grow up, and I’ve just been friends with her, but we didn’t, we hadn’t seen each other for awhile. And I went to her presentation in Denver, because that’s where I had to go to see Maggie. And she was presenting on neurodiversity of writers, and I just sort of sat there going, this just met perfectly with all of the thoughts I’m having about writing and foundational skills and where it all fits. And we sat down and kind of on a cocktail napkin, we outlined the book on the spot. I just said, this is what I’m envisioning. What do you think? And she, we just started going.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. You know you’re, I had never really thought about that. There is an absolute storm of conversation online about reading, and all the different ways we’re supposed to be teaching it and different points of view, and I —
MEEHAN: What about writing?
GONZALEZ: — I don’t hear anything about writing. That’s wild.
MEEHAN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: You know there, I mean, kind of used to be more, but there’s never, anyway. So yes. There was definitely more room for writing instruction books. Okay. So what was on the cocktail napkin?
ROBERTS: What was on that cocktail napkin? We should have kept it and framed it and had it hanging in one of our homes. But, you know, I think it stemmed from what does, what does that ask of the brain when we are asking kids to write and compose and generate ideas and draft and revise? The more we explored that question, I couldn’t help but notice when I was in classrooms guest teaching, and I think Melanie had the same experience in her home-based school that we would notice kids in the midst of writing and composing and then stop and maybe wring out their hands or stop and walk up to a word wall if it was in the younger grades and try to get a sense of how to spell a word and come back to their seats. And then stop and not be able to restart their writing.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
ROBERTS: There were kids that were struggling to be flexible, cognitively, if their teacher was asking them a different way their introduction could go. Or students who were struggling managing the impulses that might take over when you’re in the middle of writing. And so on that cocktail napkin framed by “what is really going on in the brain when we write,” we started uncovering all of these demands —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: — that are placed on the brain. And what can help is when you automatize certain skills, certain demands, so that it frees up resources so that that child can go back to their seat and continue doing the most important work, which is composing and idea generating and revising.
GONZALEZ: So you have these foundational skills. So tell us what those are.
ROBERTS: We bundle them in categories, and there are three different categories. One are transcription skills.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
ROBERTS: Skills like handwriting or keyboarding. Skills like spelling. Skills like small motor skill development and large motor skill development. Just anything that is really helping get writing on the page.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: So one category are transcription skills.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
ROBERTS: Mel, do you want to [inaudible] category?
MEEHAN: So then we also really dug into oral language hard because oral language is the other component of expressive language, and I think that, I was just at a conference in New Orleans at Plain Talk, and there was so much talk about oral language, and I was just feeling really happy that it was in there because it really is such a precursor to literacy. And if we can talk and understand language and really build that skill, then writing becomes a whole lot easier. And then, it was funny because we started with kind of the bookends of what I would say is executive functioning now with working memory on one and cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control on the other, and we ended up bundling that all under the same umbrella of executive functioning.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MEEHAN: So I think those are the, the categories that span throughout the book and how the chapters are organized. But then each one really goes into not just the why but the child in the classroom. I think it’s always great to be grounded to a child, but then really scientific explanations, progressions, and then what you can do to really help kids make the process easier and free cognitive energy for the writing process, which is at the center.
GONZALEZ: And so, and yeah, I’ve never heard writing broken down this way, and I’m actually listening to it very selfishly, which is two things. One, we talked right before we recorded about the fact that I’ve been teaching adult English learners for the past several months, and there may be some relevance there. But I’m listening to you now, and I’m thinking about myself as a writer and how much I hate writing. Hate it. And I do it for a living.
ROBERTS: Right?
GONZALEZ: So it’s kind of annoying that, and I think I’m fairly good at it, and yet I hate the act of it. I also have fairly recently uncovered the fact that I’ve got at least a light touch of ADHD.
ROBERTS: Yes.
GONZALEZ: And so I think that it’s in the category of the executive function and the dopamine drain.
ROBERTS: Absolutely.
GONZALEZ: And the, like, my main issue with writing is staying in my seat. I have an itch to get up and do something else, and I fight it constantly, and I hate it.
ROBERTS: It is such, such big work. As someone who also has more than a touch of ADHD —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: — thinking about when we designed with the help of Melanie’s unbelievably talented daughter Larkin Meehan, when we designed our illustrated writing model, it almost looks like solar system that is encircling the writing process, right, because we know that that is the apex and the most important thing that we can guide kids through when we’re thinking about writing. What is holding all these foundational skills together on the outer orbit are those executive functioning skills. The skills, like Melanie said, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: Those are all skills that help us initiate a task —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: — something that is what we ask kids and writers to do all the time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And not just initiate the task but continue it past —
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Stick with it and finish it.
ROBERTS: Stick with it, butt in seat, going for it.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
ROBERTS: And then regulating all the distractions that could come up, whether it is the person at your front door or ready to fill the dishwasher or if it is the doubt that is creeping in to say, I don’t know if anyone’s going to understand what I just wrote.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And so this book really launches its investigation of foundational skills with those executive functions.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: Because everything really stems from them.
GONZALEZ: Right, yeah. Man. Because writing really is, and that was, as an English teacher with middle school kids too, that was my emphasis. I mean I liked the literature, but I always was much more concerned with how are they doing as writers? And it is a struggle, you know. And I had probably insufficient empathy for a lot of them because I just didn’t quite get how many things have to come together in order for you to be able to write.
ROBERTS: Exactly that.
GONZALEZ: So the way that you’re handling these, you’ve got them bundled, and you’re sort of explaining why these are things, and then you offer basically strategies that teachers can be using to help students get a handle on this stuff and do better with it.
MEEHAN: Yes.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: So on that cocktail napkin, we had really done our best to have alliteration section throughout. So we had like the brain basics and predictable progressions, but then we have leveraging literacy and minute moves.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: So I think, I feel like, if you’re looking at a curriculum map, you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, the standards, yeah, yeah, yeah, the assessments, where’s the learning? What am I teaching, what am I saying?
GONZALEZ: What am I actually doing in the, yes, with them.
MEEHAN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And so the minute moves are a piece of that, which is what we were actually going to cover today because as I explained to you before we decided how we were going to do this, I really like to give my listeners something they can actually take away from the podcast and try immediately. And I would encourage them to actually get the book and read everything else you have, but what we were going to do today is just talk about these eight strategies that are just ways of squeezing writing instruction into just a couple of minutes here and there. You’ve got a couple minutes at the end of a class or you’re transitioning or I think you even said when you’re on your way to lunch.
ROBERTS: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: So we can either talk about them as a collection ahead of time or we can just dive right into them. It’s up to you.
MEEHAN: Let’s dive in. Let’s go.
GONZALEZ: Okay, okay. And I don’t know how you want to trade off on these, who you want to take the lead on these, but the first one that we have, and it looks like we’ve got, we chose three that are spelling related exercises, three that are sentence construction, and then two that are executive functioning. So the first one, which is a spelling one, is a word family brainstorm. So whoever wants to go.
MEEHAN: I’m taking that one.
GONZALEZ: Melanie’s going to do that one, okay.
MEEHAN: Yeah. So I think this one really comes from some, some words that I heard from Rebecca Treiman who was one of the people who we interviewed as part of our book. So she’s just this amazing, brilliant researcher about spelling. If you haven’t read her work, I would. She was so fun to talk to, and she’s like, words are cool. I get kids curious, and I think that the more that you can get kids curious and thinking words are cool with things like word family brainstorms, the better.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: So it really does fit into any moment because kids will find them. But “twa,” thinking about frequently confused words, like to, two, and too. If you start thinking about two the number as something that’s related to twin and twine and twenty, then it starts getting really kind of fun.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: Like wait, “tw” has, like, a correlation with two.
GONZALEZ: Two things, yeah.
MEEHAN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: I never thought about that. You’re absolutely right. Yeah.
MEEHAN: Right? Like, how cool is that? Even for your English learners. And instead of teaching “there” — there, their, and they’re — is like this confusing thing which teaches kids that “there” is confusing, teach “there” with you’re and we’re as they are and you are and we are.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: Those are related as opposed to there, their, and they’re that aren’t.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: And here and there are related and here and there, T-H-E-R-E —
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: — mean a more similar thing.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. And they’re spelled the same way, so yeah, yeah.
MEEHAN: Yeah, yeah. That makes more sense to kids.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: I had one kid who was confusing it just recently, and he’s like well, your and our and their, are related because they all have that, like a weird vowel combination. I’m like, how cool for you to figure that out!
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: Like, there’s a little word family for you.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: But another kid, we just, we were, he was struggling with the word decision.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: And I was like, well, it’s like decide, it’s related to decide, which ended up being related to incision, which ended up being related — and I didn’t realize this, but how cool, we looked it up, got curious — scissors. And scissors is a really tricky word —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: — but it means to cut, which is the basis of decide and incision and —
GONZALEZ: I’m thinking of the word concise too.
MEEHAN: Concise, yes.
GONZALEZ: The same spelling, yeah.
MEEHAN: And all of a sudden, decision has, like, it means something to him.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So how would you initiate this kind of an activity, because it sounds to me like sometimes it just happens spontaneously when somebody brings up a question. Yeah.
MEEHAN: It sometimes happens spontaneously. It can happen as you’re doing a read-aloud. You can have a little notice. You could make a game of it. I like word maps, and those are really quick, where I’ll put a word at the middle and how many words can you make of it? Later we’ll do another, we’ll talk in about another, minute move, and I’ll explain that one more. They’re related. But you can get kids really paying attention to the prefixes and the suffixes and the parts of words. I was, again, at a different conference and Anita Archer was giving the suggestion of getting kids to really circle the parts of words. So when you circle the prefixes and circle the suffixes it gives kids awareness. I had one kid that I was working with who tried to explain to me that report and reach were similar, and I was like, mmm, not really. “But they start with ‘re.’” I’m like, “Mmm, let’s reconstruct this understanding. ‘Re’ circle it.” But I think that we assume that kids understand parts of words, and they don’t.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: It’s not as intuitive as we think.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: So when we give them a word and we start saying, think of words that you could relate to this word, whether it’s relating transport with report, export, import or portable, going the other direction, then you start really building their understanding of words and how they fit, and it helps not just their vocabulary but also their spelling and builds that automatization —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: — that you’re looking for. It’s another way to get that orthographic mapping system going and have them really lock in and make those words be automatized instead of a constant struggle.
ROBERTS: Great.
GONZALEZ: Right. I would think too, the more you do these the better they get at just spotting these kinds of things too.
MEEHAN: And that’s the curiosity factor that Rebecca Treiman was alluding to and kind of, like the coolness of it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: Who, you know, who really thinks about scissors and decision?
GONZALEZ: Right.
MEEHAN: But what a cool connection.
GONZALEZ: This was, we did an earlier piece, probably now it’s been a couple years, Andrea Castellano wrote about working with multilingual learners. And that was one of the pieces of advice she said was to really nurture a curiosity for language, so that you’re sort of neutralizing, not that English is better than the dialect you speak at home or the language you speak at home but that they’re all languages and let’s look for similarities and let’s be curious about what this word is in this other language. And so this ties right into that, I think. Because you could make connections to other languages, which I’m finding when I’m teaching my English learners, I’ll teach them a word, and they’ll go, my one Spanish speaker, he’s like, oh, that’s like this in Spanish, and I’m like yes. It’s perfect, and he’s got it then. Yeah. Okay. No. 2 is word family stretch. So we had word family brainstorm, now word family stretch.
ROBERTS: So this is going to be an activity that offers students a root or a base word. And then have students brainstorm as many related words that they can in like 60 seconds, 90 seconds, noticing what stays stable and what changes. So my, yesterday, I was working in a school and we offered up the root “struct,” meaning “to build.” And the teachers and I set the timer on the clock and brainstormed aloud all the words we could build with that. And we came up with I’ll start and we can even do a few together. Structure.
GONZALEZ: Destruction.
ROBERTS: Construction.
GONZALEZ: Construct.
ROBERTS: Structural.
MEEHAN: Instruct.
GONZALEZ: Yes, yeah.
ROBERTS: Instruct, instruction. And it is amazing how students can generate a surprising amount —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: — of words from a single root. And we want to pair that minute move with, well, what stayed the same here? Right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: Especially as I’m scribing out the words, or we’re scribing them together. What changed.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: How, I love, how did the meaning shift —
GONZALEZ: Right.
ROBERTS: — now that we added this prefix or this suffix. And that’s really where the learning happens.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: Kids start to understand or continue to understand that word parts carry meaning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: That there are patterns that show up in academic vocabulary.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And as kids are engaging in those associative brainstorm, stretching out a root to construct, a root to construct other words, this is all really helping achieve the bigger picture, right, which is these minute moves are designed to help kids automatize foundational skills.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: Right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And so the repetition, the association, the quick spurts of activity, are all really brain friendly to help kids internalize the spelling of those words and the meaning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And the pronunciation.
GONZALEZ: Hmm. Also just kind of fun too. Just a break from doing something, some other sort of classroom activity. So I love that.
ROBERTS: Exactly.
GONZALEZ: Okay, so the third spelling one that we have is prefix swap.
MEEHAN: So that one’s really closely related to what we’ve been talking about. I feel like all of these are really closely related. And what I will say is that you’re really building the neurological pathways. That is when we’re talking about the connections and the fun and the play, all of that is exciting because you’re building that. So I think just keep that in mind. But again, it’s building the kid’s awareness of prefixes —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: — and what they can do, and also building their understanding that there are some root words that are what we would call bound ones like “struct” that Maggie was saying that doesn’t have a meaning on its own. But when it, but it has to connect with others.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: And that’s kind of a cool thing for kids to become aware of. And then you have your unbound ones like form that has meaning on its own but you can start putting different prefix in front of it and really change it up. So like reform, transform, inform, deform.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: Right? And the more that they can start understanding that, the better they are with words. You would have a really good time with that with your English learners because those show up across different languages a lot.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: So like I was, I was working with kids with the vocabulary lessons, and it was easy for them to understand benevolent and malevolent because —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: — they know “bene” and they know “mal” from their French work.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MEEHAN: Just building their knowledge and understanding of how those words work, and there is a relationship between those two words in terms of their prefix, and then you can relate it back to what we were talking about before with words like benefit.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: And benefactor, like all of a sudden it just gets easier to do that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. It’s funny too because I think anyone hearing about these first three exercises would not automatically label them as spelling exercises because when I think of spelling it’s just sort of like, “Here’s your words. Memorize them and then we’re going to test you.” And this is really making it a much more active sort of almost deconstructive process where you’re pulling them apart and looking at how they’re built, and then you can transfer that knowledge into other words, which is probably got exponentially more benefit, basically, to their long-term ability to spell and learn new words.
MEEHAN: Exponentially. And even as you’re talking about, like benefit, right.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: The schwa is a, is part of spelling that really can mess kids up, and a lot of the times they can figure out and talk through and get curious about schwa based on the prefixes and the etymology.
GONZALEZ: So those are the spelling. We’ve got those first three. And now we’re going to move into three that are for sentence construction. So this is our fourth strategy called sentence scrambles. Tell me about those.
ROBERTS: So it is just that, right? We are going to take a sentence that kids are ready for. It might be a simple sentence. It could be a complex sentence, a compound sentence, and we’re going to put those words out of order. I like writing the sentence on index cards and being able to physically scramble the sentence. I’ll let students know that they need to recombine those words or phrases together to form a sentence. And sometimes I’ll say there’s nothing extra. There are, all words or phrases are going to be used. And when kids build or unscramble the sentence, again, it’s like that, that important work is right after that activity, because we can ask students, like, how did you figure out the order of these words and phrases? What clues did you use? What words had to stick, they had to stick together?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And why?
GONZALEZ: Right.
ROBERTS: That’s going to build a real authentic deeper understanding of sentence structure. As you are building sentence scramble activities, you could raise the rigor by removing punctuation, let’s say if you included a comma or a period or you could add a distractor word. You could ask kids to add in their own words and phrases that would continue to build the sentence.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: You know, the ultimate goal is for kids to carry their understanding of how sentences work and how to build them into their own writing. And so I always keep in the back of my mind that I’m hoping this activity is helping to build an internalized understanding of sentence patterns —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: — and sentence construction for kids to produce clearer, more grammatically correct or interesting sentences in their own writing.
GONZALEZ: Right. I love that.
ROBERTS: Really fun.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So the next one is one sentence expanders.
MEEHAN: And again, these are, these are really closely related and similar but a little bit different.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: And again, I don’t think that it is intuitive for a lot of the kids that sentences, almost by definition, have a doer and something that’s being done.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: We talk about subjects and predicates but they’re really vague terms.
GONZALEZ: Yes. I like those terms: Doer and something being done, yeah.
MEEHAN: Or someone or something is doing something. But it really helps their comprehension and their writing if they can identify the doer and the doing in a sentence.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: Because as reading gets harder, those doers and doings get farther and farther apart —
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yes.
MEEHAN: — in sentences.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: And tougher and tougher to spot. So this really helps them isolate those really key components of a sentence. So start with that. Like, “The cat purrs.” Okay. How wild is it that you can have a two-word sentence like “Cats purr.” Okay. That’s sort of mind-blowing to some kids, but then you can start adding in the, okay, where, how, and adding in what, which cat, and all of a sudden you can start tucking in those key phrases even to the point of why.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: And then once they have those, so it could be, “The orange cat is sleeping on the couch in the afternoon because he’s tired.” You can start doing what Maggie was doing before of changing up that order and shifting around where the different parts of that sentence go.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: One of the things that I loved thinking about from Rebecca Treiman’s conversation about spelling is statistically what letters tend to go together, but also there’s that statistics about sentences and what tends to go together in sentences. And how cool is it to surprise readers with different ways of combining words when it’s allowed.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MEEHAN: Like, “Because he is tired, the cat is sleeping on the couch.” Right?
GONZALEZ: Right.
MEEHAN: Or, “The cat, sleeping on the couch, because he is tired.”
GONZALEZ: Right.
MEEHAN: They can start having fun with that, and it becomes almost poetic with the words as they shift around those phrases.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: So that’s pretty cool.
GONZALEZ: I would think too that there’s just like a new awareness in them of sort of the permission to just, I think sometimes when kids see a book, they just sort of think it happened, and they don’t think of these sentences as decisions that a writer made. And also, the whole revision process is not just about finding spelling errors. It’s, you can flip whole things around and oh, that actually sounds way cooler in that order. So it probably just would expand a lot of possibilities for them.
MEEHAN: One of the things that I’ll talk about with kids when I’m working with them, and these are more sophisticated writers, but I think any writer can start to get it and kids can start to get it, is like the real estate of a sentence. Right? At the beginning of a sentence, readers pay attention, and at the end of sentences, readers tend to pay attention.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: So where do you want your keywords to be, and how can you structure your sentence that way? It’s just like, it’s a cool way for, for them to build that awareness.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay, and then No. 6 is our last sentence one. This is sentence combining.
ROBERTS: So, you know, this is, sentence combining is short, it’s flexible, it can be incredibly powerful work. It stems from the scholarship of Saddler who would say, we want to start kids off with what Saddler would call a kernel sentence. You know, just something basic with the simple subject and a verb, and then we are going to give two kernel sentences side by side to students. And think about different ways we can combine them. So it could be, when I was thinking of examples I had my big orange cat in my lap, and so I had “My cat is orange,” “My cat is big.” If I had those two kernel sentences, I would put that together as perhaps, “My big cat is orange.”
GONZALEZ: Yes.
ROBERTS: And, you know, when you’re beginning this work or when students are really novice to it, you can give kids cues so they know what word to harvest from one kernel sentence and combine it with the other. So it might be something like, “The cake was delicious,” “The cake was strawberry.”
GONZALEZ: Right.
ROBERTS: Not a perfect example, but you would underline the word strawberry for students.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
ROBERTS: So they understand, oh that’s what is actually being combined here.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And if I can identify it, and then I can also, that will guide my placement for that word or group of words.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: So that I can build a more syntactically complicated sentence. And we can extend it, conjunctions. “The student was nervous because,” “The student was nervous but,” “The student was nervous so.” Right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And so kind of teaching kids the different conjunctions that they then could use to combine two kernel sentences. When kids get more comfortable you can elevate it to here are three sentences that we want to work with you to combine.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And so they really pay off because kids can see what they did, notice what kind of sentence they built. Again, notice how if any meaning changed or when certain words were combined, where did it, again, guide the reader’s eye to what part of the sentence to really focus on.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And it is, sentence combining is a really high impact quick way for kids to graduate from writing in a series of simple sentences —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: — to ones that are more syntactically complex, interesting, precise. Highly recommend.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. I feel like I remember hearing two years ago that, it’s what you said about the high impact, that it was something that there had been research on, maybe they were comparing it to just teaching grammar out of context, and that really just does not have any real effect on students. But sentence combining exercises really elevate their ability to write correctly and well.
ROBERTS: Really.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And you can see, right, the transition to, now let’s look at your draft of writing.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: I see two sentences here.
GONZALEZ: Right.
ROBERTS: What would it look like if we were to combine them?
GONZALEZ: Right.
ROBERTS: So the transfer opportunities are plentiful that teachers can take advantage of.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Which I guess we should sort of add that, I’m assuming this too, but that these are all sort of done under the assumption that kids are actively working on real writing pieces this whole time. These are not just standalone drills that happen, and then you just go back to reading passages and answering multiple-choice questions about them. They’re writing stuff too.
MEEHAN: Kids are writing stuff.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: The goal and the whole premise and the writing model that we have is based on the writing process at the center to create their own text and composition.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MEEHAN: So yeah.
GONZALEZ: Okay. I wanted to just add that in. We don’t just do these exercises and then move on. They should be applied in their writing, yes.
MEEHAN: These writing lessons — yeah, yeah. No.
GONZALEZ: Okay, so our last chunk, our last pair, these two are the executive functioning ones that we pulled out. So this is No. 7. It’s called “what’s another way.”
MEEHAN: So even as Maggie was talking about the sentence combining, I was like, I want to jump in and talk about what’s another way you could do it, and then I was like, oh, I can talk about it during the executive functioning part.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: Because you’re not just always as a writer combining sentences and trying to make longer ones. Sometimes you’re shortening sentences to make short ones because the whole art and the craft of writing is varying them and having that skill set to be able to intentionally go from long and complex sentences when they’re impactful —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: — to short sentences when they’re impactful and have the wherewithal to vary that and the skill set to do it. So I think that as you think about what’s another way, that’s a perfect way to apply it. Like, what’s another way that you could write this sentence or what’s another way that you could write these sentences? And how does it change because of that? And when you start really naming that as cognitive flexibility for kids, that’s exciting to them. So it’s not just about changing the sentences, it’s about practicing that beautiful skill of being cognitively flexible. And kids, kind of no matter who they are and what they’re neurological diversity or non diversity is, love the idea of being cognitively flexible. And naming that for them is really powerful.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. It’s also kind of fancy sounding too. Teaching an eighth-grader that term would, just got to feel good to know it and understand what it means and know that you have it.
ROBERTS: Yes. Even kind of voicing over executive functions are finite, as in we lose steam across the day —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: — with our executive functions. And so Period 1, I might be very cognitively flexible, but by Period 8, not so much.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: And so —
MEEHAN: We have a protein bar.
ROBERTS: Exactly. And so they’re finite. We use the energy source that powers them, but they’re renewable.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, okay.
ROBERTS: And whether it is glucose or sleep or sleep-like meditative moments can help with the refuel. But to Melanie’s example, being cognitively flexible at the sentence level might be what the kid can handle in the moment.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: Versus being cognitively flexible about revising an entire paragraph.
GONZALEZ: Right.
ROBERTS: Or an entire essay. So having language of how cognitively flexible are you feeling in this moment, and letting kids tap into that meta awareness about where their mindset is, so that they can kind of tackle, tackle the work of writing.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love putting that back on them and having, giving them the power to really think about it, because again, that transfers beyond your classroom.
ROBERTS: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: One hundred percent.
GONZALEZ: Okay, our last one, No. 8 is called a new angle. This is our last executive functioning one too.
ROBERTS: I can start us off, Mel, and, and just jump in. This might be inviting kids to retell a familiar story or retell a critical scene from a text from a different perspective. They might write or talk out that scene or moment from a different character’s perspective. They might shift the narrator entirely. But we’re asking kids to engage in this small change that will push them to reconsider how this story works, how this moment unfolds. If I am telling the moment that the food fight started in the cafeteria from the perspective of me, a ninth grader, or if I retell it through the perspective of Ms. Rendleman.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
ROBERTS: Who had an applesauce poured in her hair in the ‘90s at that high school because yes, this is a true story. Thinking on different perspectives, again, just nurtures that skill of cognitive flexibility, whether we’re asking kids to hold multiple viewpoints in their mind at once or revise their thinking. And that will help them make more intentional choices of the voice that they use for their interpretation of the story.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MEEHAN: They actually love doing it. I do it, I do a lot of work with short videos, and there are so many things that you can do with them and sometimes with the kids I’m tutoring, they’ll be like, “Oh, I’ve seen that,” because teachers use short videos for teaching reading skills. But I don’t know, “Snack Attack” is a short little Pixar video. I think it’s like 3 minutes long, and it has two very different perspectives. Jenn, I’ll be happy to give you the link if you want to put it in the show notes.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, I would love to.
MEEHAN: Because it’s actually an amazing little video of an old lady who tries to get cookies and gets, gets her cookies and sits down next to a kid who’s listening to music, and they have kind of a feud.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MEEHAN: And it was so much fun for me to sit next to a student and we did this on a document where I was writing the old lady’s perspective in scenes. I had broken out the scenes, and he was writing the kid’s perspective in scenes. And then we flipped.
GONZALEZ: Oh.
MEEHAN: So he would switch over to the part where I was working and I would switch over to the part where he was working, and it did two really great things. Because it, yes, it expanded his perspective, so that was really good. It also put a little pressure on him because I was writing more than he was. So it was an unintended benefit, bene, good.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Yeah.
MEEHAN: Benefit that he was like, “I gotta write as much as Ms. Melanie’s writing.” I’m like, “Yeah, you do.” So, but he was flipping back and forth the perspectives, and what an amazing skill that is as a human.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MEEHAN: It’s not just about writing and it’s not just about watching this show, but it’s also about democracy and thinking about how other people think and what their perspectives are.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MEEHAN: So just really beautiful work you can do with that.
GONZALEZ: Oh, that’s a nice one to end on then. So the book is called “Foundational Skills for Writing.” Melanie and Maggie, thank you so much. I’m excited about the book, and I hope that it benefits a lot of teachers and writers.
ROBERTS: Thank you so much.
MEEHAN: Appreciate you. Thanks for having us.
To read a summary of these strategies or a full transcript of our conversation and find links to the book Foundational Skills for Writing, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 270. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.