The Importance of Showing Not Telling for Writing Instruction

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Writing instruction has always been my area of weakness as a teacher (If I'm honest, it was always my area of weakness as a student). I’ve always struggled with how to differentiate the instruction for the different needs of my students. In my first year as a teacher, I can remember providing an essay prompt, and then saying, “Ok, start writing!” I remember grading those essays and feeling confused about how different they all were. My second year teaching, my site adopted the writing program “Write from the Beginning.” I fell in love with the use of the thinking maps for the brainstorming and planning stage of the writing process. However, many of my students were still lacking a strong introduction or conclusion paragraph or didn’t have well-organized body paragraphs. I found myself struggling how to teach them the skills of writing without providing too much for them.

“Doesn't it help to scrutinize that already-assembled bookshelf display at Ikea before going home to those often confusing instructions? (Clearly, I speak from experience on this one.)”

Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers

By Rebecca Alber

Showing not Telling

Generally speaking, most people find it easier to complete a complex task when they have a model to reference. Think of a Lego instruction booklet. They don’t just give you a 1000+ piece set and say, “Now, build a pirate ship.” If they did, not many adults would ever buy them for their children. Instead, the instructions provide pictures of diagrams and images showing where the next couple of pieces should be placed.

Using a mentor/model text for writing instruction is like a Lego instruction booklet. The mentor text provides a model of an end product (pirate ship a.k.a. an argumentative essay, personal narrative, etc.) and has examples of where to “place” the claim, thesis statement, evidence, descriptive details, etc.

Using a mentor text has proven to help my students over the past couple of years. This notion of showing them what a claim looks like in an argumentative essay helps them to form their claim when the time comes. Likewise, they can see firsthand how descriptive details can help the reader imagine and understand the setting better.

Using Mentor Text Before, During, and After Writing Instruction

1. I choose a mentor text or two before I introduce our next genre of writing. The Wonders adoption has some great “student drafts” to choose from. I have also done a simple Google search to look for mentor text before (i.e.” 6th-grade argumentative essay student draft”). The website Thoughtful Learning might be useful when looking for student drafts as well. If I can’t find something that helps with the writing prompt I am going to assign, I write my own mentor text.

2. 

   Mentor Text for Argumentative Writing

   Next, I make enough copies for all of my students with the writing rubric attached. We first read over the rubric, so they know what they will be graded on, and then we read and annotate the mentor text together. At this point in the year, I try to make this process more student-led by asking questions. For example, what do you notice about this author’s introduction paragraph? How do we know this author supports this or that? What do you notice about this author’s word choice? Then, using the rubric, we score the mentor text and discuss why that author earned a two instead of a 3. What could they have done differently? What should add in during
3. During the writing process, I remind students who seem to be struggling with their next steps to take out their mentor text and reread our annotations. This helps them to transfer the thinking we did together and apply it to their own essay. For example: If they can identify how the author used evidence to back up his/her claim, then they can see how to do the same for their own essay. This step helps me as the teacher, see where they are getting stuck.
4. Before my students publish their best work, we take out the mentor text and rubric and compare our essays to it. This step is where many of my students make revisions/edits to their drafts. At this point, I use the mentor text as a checklist for them. “Do you have a thesis/controlling idea? Let’s look at the mentor text to see an example of one?” “Did you use academic language?”
5. After everyone has turned in their essays, and as I grade them, I look for new mentor text to use in the future. This step is essential for me, as it helps me to plan for my next writing instruction. Here I can see what my students need to practice as writers.

Happy Writing!

Jenni Merry