Creative Teaching Methods to Improve High School Writing Skills

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to examine what creative teaching methods may improve the writing skills of high school students. Many educators are concerned over the standardized test scores of high school students today. More than ever before, there is a trend of declining student performance, and increasing numbers of educators are attempting to re-evaluate their approach to learning in order to better motivate students and engage them inside and outside of the classroom. The more students are able to learn and appreciate what education has to offer them, the more likely they are to succeed in their lives and careers after graduation.

Many studies have focused on various creative learning approaches for students with disabilities, for students who speak English as a second language, and for younger or middle-school-age classrooms. Relatively little attention has been paid to older students, especially those at the high school level. This paper hypothesizes that creative learning methods will prove just as beneficial for high school students as they do for other student populations, and that it is particularly imperative to help students at the high school level so they are better prepared to enter the workforce.

Far too many employers today report that students they hire after graduation lack the foundational skills they need to succeed in the working world. Enhancement of writing skills among high school students, however, may change this trend and improve the likelihood that high school students will graduate and move on to a successful career or pursue higher education at the collegiate level.

There are many methods that may enable better writing among students. These include metacognitive, affective, visualization, reciprocal teaching, writing about writing, recursive, drama, art, and peer-review approaches, to name a few. The following analysis uses an adapted annotative approach to show how students can increase their writing skills by employing the many creative methods introduced by teachers in the classroom. Each of these methods is examined through articles produced by researchers who have worked directly with teachers and students learning new methods of instruction.

The first article reviewed discusses the idea of reciprocal learning, in which the teacher and the student both participate in the learning process, making it a joint effort rather than a purely teacher-directed one. While much research exists on the traditional style of teaching, most of it suggests that students are no longer engaged by the lecture format. This is one reason researchers are investigating approaches such as reciprocal teaching.

Reciprocal Teaching as a Creative Learning Approach

Slater and Horstman address this technique in their work School Students: The Case for Reciprocal Teaching. Their findings are pertinent because they demonstrate that reciprocal teaching can be an "optimal choice for teaching reading and writing." Because this study focuses directly on reading and writing skills, it is well suited to the purposes of this paper.

The authors agree that reciprocal learning and other creative methods are ideal for education at any level. Reciprocal learning is a form of teaching that allows students the opportunity to learn what questions they must ask to understand reading material, what questions are necessary to clarify issues, and how to summarize information gathered during reading. According to the authors, in traditional classrooms teachers did not actually teach students how to write. Rather, they would provide students with an assignment and specific chapters or sections of books to read, and students were then expected to fulfill the assignments and submit them for grading. This outdated method does not inspire higher learning because it rarely engages diverse students who are looking for new opportunities to express themselves in the classroom.

Reciprocal teaching would be of particular interest to high school students because they are at an age where they want some control over the material they engage with during class time. Students in high school are either preparing to enter the workforce or preparing for college. Either way, they want to participate in school in a way that will allow them to succeed while enhancing their reading and writing abilities.

Reciprocal teaching, according to the researchers, even allows students the opportunity to "predict future text content," meaning students can formulate their own unique hypotheses about what may or may not follow based on the information gathered from their studies. As students develop this skill, they gain abilities they can later apply to predicting what choices will benefit them — or, for students who enter the workforce after high school, what choices they can make to improve their career outlook. Reading and writing comprehension skills are those most neglected by traditional learning methods, which is one reason reciprocal teaching is attracting so much interest.

The baseline used to research this method and measure improvement involves empirically validated learning strategies that emphasize cognitive instruction, meaning teachers and students must work together to think about the learning process and measure outcomes as a team rather than as individuals. According to the authors, the supporting strategies used with reciprocal teaching include "questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting." This, the researchers suggest, provides a "ladder" of sorts that the student must climb to arrive at a final result.

The obstacles this method may present include convincing educational institutions that reciprocal learning can help a school meet national and state learning goals. Too many school administrators today are focused on meeting state standards rather than on addressing the methods that would most effectively improve reading and writing skills. If students master the art of writing, their scores on any standardized test should theoretically improve, because students will have greater ability to comprehend material presented to them and more capacity to evaluate context and apply it to real-life situations.

Persuading administrators and government officials to embrace creative methods of learning may still prove difficult, especially where not all schools are adopting similar approaches. It may also be challenging in some urban areas where teachers are scarce and school environments can be volatile — conditions that are not optimal for implementing reciprocal learning. Schools in low socioeconomic areas may also lack access to the instructional resources other schools have, limiting their ability to implement this type of program. The authors also caution that reciprocal teaching "assumes" all members are willing participants and that students will at some point "internalize use of the four supporting strategies practiced," which may or may not prove true. If students are unwilling to engage, teachers will face an uphill battle without administrative support. The advantage of reciprocal teaching, however, is that it does not require technology or expensive equipment — only texts, teachers, and students willing to embrace new methods of learning.

Reciprocal learning is not the only creative approach facilitating better outcomes in schools, but it receives the most attention in this review because there is an extensive body of data supporting its use in enhancing reading and writing comprehension. Other programs are equally or marginally effective in improving students' writing skills, and these can also be implemented at the high school level.

In the article "What's Right with Writing?" Rief explores the creative learning approach known as "writing about writing." This is an interesting and also somewhat controversial approach because it can be interpreted in multiple ways. For example, Rief notes that some students or professionals may view it as a journaling process — a learning method that encourages students to self-express when responding to reading materials — which can take the form of documentation and journaling. However, the author is quick to point out that this approach is also distinctive because it is the one method that explicitly requires both teachers and students to pose questions throughout the learning process.

This research is relevant to the topic of improving high school writing because the author demonstrates how students can use a unique method to enhance their writing skills, comprehension, and interpretive abilities. Introducing a new form of writing into a classroom is innovative but not yet commonplace, and would therefore invite considerable questioning — a potential obstacle for teachers attempting to implement this learning style. This approach views all students as independent thinkers; thus, in an environment that is "sterilized and standardized," it may encounter resistance. By and large, however, once educators observe the significant improvements among students who adopt this method, they are likely to become more willing to implement the program.

The baseline approach used to measure improvement is the students' ability to write using their own thinking, so that they can, in theory, teach others about writing. This is challenging because the approach does not emphasize grades. In fact, the author clearly states that the grading system can be detrimental — particularly when teachers assign a grade without explaining what contributed to it or what steps the student could take to make their writing more effective. This feedback, according to the author, is the key to success, and implementing this type of learning program may require that teachers revisit their own understanding of what information they should be providing to students alongside any grade.

Early in the research, the author notes that she herself was never truly "taught" how to write, but was instead given assignments that required her to investigate, document, and report on the findings of others. While some may see nothing wrong with this premise, the author emphasizes that such an approach does not encourage independent thinking and therefore cannot improve a student's writing skills. The only way to genuinely improve writing is to have students both read and write — and when they write, they must not simply reiterate what they have read, as this contributes nothing to their learning.

Rather, students must learn to objectively analyze the information they read and then relate it to their own life experiences and interpretations. This teaching approach could easily be combined with reciprocal learning because both encourage the student and teacher to reflect and adapt during the writing process. The author notes that writing about writing must include the writer's "beliefs, feelings, discoveries, opinions, or stories" (p. 32).

The questions students must ask to achieve these goals include asking "what do I believe and why." This may be difficult for students accustomed to traditional methods of teaching who have never been required to think interpretively about their own learning. The method may also prove challenging for teachers, who must evaluate whether the work returned to them reflects active intellectual engagement with the material. If it does not, the students are likely merely reiterating the views of the authors they have read rather than forming their own. Teachers must consider who their students are and ask, as Rief puts it, "Who are the students with whom I learn and teach, for whom I care and have a responsibility?" (p. 33). These are deep and probing questions suggesting that students must learn to write not by summarizing others, but by expressing their own informed opinions.

Writing About Writing

The author's central argument is that writers must receive "constructive responses" when they submit papers, rather than just a grade. These responses, according to Rief, must include questions that prompt the author to think and revise their writing in a more complex manner — one that encourages cognitive thinking and cognitive responses. When evaluating writing, the teacher must understand, and communicate to students, that writing involves thinking; in evaluating writing, the teacher should "highlight the strengths of process, content and conventions" and provide tools to address a student's weaknesses (p. 34). The problem with implementing a writing program using this creative approach is that many schools are standardized in both teaching methods and writing instruction.

Thus, it may be difficult to persuade administrators on the basis of this study alone. Actual empirical analysis will need to take place to allow educators to generalize the findings to students at large, especially at the high school level.

Also standing in the way, according to Rief, are standardized tests and the tools students are given. Today, students have access to computers with spelling and grammar checkers, so they never truly learn the writing process because their work is automatically corrected by the machines they use. Testing, says Rief, is a "scripted lesson mandated for all students by all teachers at the same time" — the antithesis of her argument that students must be treated as individuals when their writing skills are evaluated, making scripted lessons counterproductive (p. 39).

Angelillo (2005) agrees with this sentiment, noting that standardized tests are particularly daunting to students who believe their writing skills are not up to par (p. 21). Others have also observed this trend, and while they support the techniques offered by Rief, they acknowledge that the introduction of this method will be a gradual process rather than an immediate change. Atwell (2002) argues that it is critical for educators to take courses to improve their own teaching and writing skills so they can better support student learning, as outlined in her work Lessons That Change Writers.

In two related forms of writing research, Smith, Rook, and Smith (2007) discuss effective and metacognitive writing strategies. In their published work, "Increasing Student Engagement Using Effective and Metacognitive Writing Strategies in Content Areas," the researchers note that school failure at the high school level is commonplace and is largely a result of conventional teaching methods. They propose that cognitive, affective, and metacognitive questioning strategies at the high school level will increase students' "engagement and academic successes" (p. 1).

The baseline measurement used to support their findings involved the evaluation of "structured journal questions" over a three-month period. The researchers found that students who answered only "text-related questions" showed no significant benefit compared with students who responded to both "metacognitive and affective questions" alongside text-based questions. The latter group demonstrated greater ability to retain course content, "as evidenced by course grades at the end of the study" (p. 2). This baseline measurement is compelling because it uses tangible grade data to show improvement when a metacognitive or affective component is added to conventional learning. Metacognitive and affective approaches enhance student learning by encouraging deeper thinking and more personal connections to the material being studied. As students relate course content to their own experiences and lives, they become more capable of retaining it.

Rief (2003) in her work 100 Quickwrites: Fast and Effective Freewriting Exercises notes that a combination of writing about writing and affective components can dramatically increase learning and academic grades, confirming the research of Smith, Rook, and Smith (2007). It is worth noting that since the 1980s, researchers have documented how well creative techniques such as these enhance learning. Like Smith, Rook, and Smith (2007) and Rief (2003), William Zinsser in his second edition of On Writing Well (1980) argued that to write well, students must incorporate a creative thought process into their learning; otherwise, writing becomes tedious and unengaging for its participants.

Zinsser was among the earliest researchers to focus not on grades or outcomes except when those outcomes reflected the student's own opinions, ideas, and thought processes — both when writing for themselves and when writing for a broader audience. One of the most important aspects of creative writing is that it is genuinely creative: it is not merely a verbatim reproduction of information gathered from others, but an original interpretation of that information.

O'Donnell and King (1999) discuss the concept of peer-to-peer learning in their work Cognitive Perspectives on Peer Learning. This approach holds that peer learning involves "bidirectional approaches" and that multiple theories underlie it, originally influenced by the work of Piaget and Vygotsky, who discussed scaffolding and "sociocognitive" learning methods.

All of these methods recognize that exposure to the perspectives of peers while learning is valuable to the student because it improves competence by introducing different viewpoints on similar material. Peer processes involve bringing students together in multiple ways, including small groups assigned by the teacher to tackle learning objectives in engaging and collaborative ways. The teacher's role in this type of learning may vary; the teacher may participate in the learning group or may simply provide an objective or problem that the students must work together as a unit to solve.

The baseline for these findings is grounded not only in the philosophies of Piaget and Vygotsky but also in measurable student outcomes. Student grades, much as they improve when metacognitive or affective approaches are used, often improve when students are given the opportunity to learn alongside peers who hold both similar and different views.

Peer-to-peer learning is perhaps the least controversial approach when one considers the contemporary classroom, since few professionals would object to group-focused learning sessions among peers. Students' interest often peaks as a result of the diversity present in many classrooms today, especially when students gather and have the ability to use technology to communicate with peers who may live hundreds or thousands of miles away (O'Donnell and King, 1999). The primary obstacle for the teacher may be rearranging the syllabus and schedule to accommodate the varied learning styles of students in a diverse environment.