Progressive mastery through deliberate practice: A promising approach for improving writing

Abstract

This study is an analysis of the curriculum used to teach writing at one US high school in which outcomes for students were extremely strong. The study surfaces what was different in the approach used from what is typically understood and promoted as best practice in the teaching of writing. It does so in order to surface what elements of writing instruction are fruitful for further research. Findings identify an approach to teaching writing called progressive mastery through deliberate practice. This article articulates the five elements that constitute this approach (understanding the final product, breaking down its critical elements, creating a hierarchy among the elements, layering and progression of elements, and gradual release of scaffolds), as well as the ways they work in concert to bring about improved student writing and thinking.

Keywords

High school reform high school writing writing and thinking writing for content learning writing instruction

There is virtual agreement across all sectors (policy-makers, researchers, educators, parents, employers) that there is a crisis in literacy internationally, not only in reading – which has been the focus of policy and research in recent decades – but also – a more recent focus of attention – in writing. A 2000 report by the US National Reading Panel crystallized the scientifically understood elements of effective reading instruction in English, and there is general agreement among reading researchers that if these elements were taught effectively, reading failure in English would be ‘largely avoidable’ – that the current 20–30 percent of reading failure in the United States, for example, could be reduced to between 2 and 10 percent (Walsh, Glaser, & Wilcox, 2006, p. 6). Current efforts to improve reading in the United States, therefore, focus on ensuring that teachers are trained in known strategies rather than on trying to determine the nature of effective strategies themselves.¹

This same approach would not make sense in writing, however, which rests on a much less robust research base (Graham & Perin, 2007). Writing performance is arguably more dismal than reading. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (US Department of Education, 2015), widely regarded as the gold standard of US educational research and referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, 75 percent of US 4th and 8th grade students write below grade-level standards, with a mere 3 percent of US students from across all demographics deemed ‘advanced’ – indicating that more than poverty is at play, that in fact US schools are not effectively teaching writing to any population, if they are teaching writing at all. While it is hard to get a handle on international comparisons (Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the widely respected international survey of 15-year-olds across 64 countries every 3 years, does not assess writing specifically), 2012 results indicate that more than one out of every four students in the nations studied – over 13 million students in 64 countries – has failed to achieve the ‘very basic level’ of academic proficiency needed to secure school and economic success (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2016). The absence of writing as a distinct measure speaks to its relative neglect in education reform efforts generally (Graham, Capizzi, Harris, Hebert, & Morphy, 2014), although this may be changing.

Revisions to the National Curriculum in England since 1999 have increased the emphasis on non-fiction writing and language-based instruction in an attempt to shift the ‘personal growth/literary model’ that has and may still dominate English instruction (Andrews, Torgerson, Graham, & McGuinn, 2009). In the United States, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), released in 2010 and currently the major focus of US school reform, prioritize expository writing as a lever for improving life chances for individuals, closing achievement gaps between populations, and improving US competitiveness internationally. High expectations and frequent expository writing in English, social studies, and science are core pillars of the standards. One problem is that research-based understandings of effective writing practices are insufficiently captured in national/state standards (Soiferman, Boyd, & Straw, 2010; Troia et al., 2015). A second problem is that current research-based understandings of what it would take to raise student performance in writing to meet the new standards are inadequate. Graham and Perin (2007), gurus of writing research, write, ‘Research is clearly needed not only to identify additional effective practices that already exist but to develop new ones’ (p. 26).

This study seeks to expand the notion of what elements of writing instruction show promise for future research. It does so by looking closely at a particular approach to teaching writing as implemented in one specific US high school in which results (improved writing, graduation rates, and measures of college readiness) were dramatic and in which for the most part methods used were different from those currently understood and promoted as ‘best practice’ in the teaching of writing. The school studied – New Dorp High school in Staten Island, NY – and its turnaround were documented in the widely read and acclaimed ‘The Writing Revolution’ (Tyre, 2012). The article describes, in brief, the role of writing instruction across subjects and grades in improving student writing. This study compares New Dorp’s approach to writing instruction with what is generally accepted as true, assuming that differences in this school’s approach account for differential outcomes. The hope is that doing so will point to promising directions for future writing research.

Effective writing instruction: what do we know from research?

Most of what is generally understood and accepted as true about effective writing instruction in English for students in grades 4–12 is captured and most concisely expressed in two reports of meta-analyses of existing research. The first, Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools (Graham & Perin, 2007), draws from prior meta-analyses and subsequent research (176 experimental and quasi-experimental studies of grades 4–12) to identify and recommend 11 instructional practices shown to improve the quality of student writing in varied contexts (see Table 1 for the recommendations along with their effect sizes and numbers of studies each was based upon). The second, Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading (Graham & Hebert, 2010), drew on 93 experimental and quasi-experimental studies and found three general categories of writing instruction and some specific sub-components that improve reading comprehension (see Table 2). Notably, some frequently studied strategies were not found to improve student writing. Traditional grammar instruction, for example, revealed a small but negative impact on the quality of student writing, and the simple act, often promoted, of increasing students’ time spent writing yielded no significant improvement. Graham and Perin (2007) cite Braddock and Jones’ (1969) earlier claim ‘that providing more opportunities to write without effective instruction and motivation is not enough to improve writing quality’ (p. 26).

Table 1.

Strategies found to improve writing quality (Graham & Perin, 2007).

Recommended strategy	Effect size	No. of studies
Strategy instruction (teaching strategies for planning, revising and editing)	.82	20
Summarization	.82	4
Collaborative writing	.75	7
Setting specific product goals	.70	5
Word processing	.55	18
Sentence combining	.50	5
Prewriting	.32	5
Process writing approach	.32	5
Study of models	.25	6
Writing for content learning	.23	26

Table 2.

Writing strategies found to improve reading comprehension (Graham & Hebert, 2010).

Recommended strategy	Effect size	No. of studies
I. Having students write about text they read
Writing reactions	.77	9
Writing summaries	.52	19
Writing notes	.47	23
Writing and/or answering questions	.27	8
II. Teaching skills that go into creating a text (process of writing, text structures for writing, paragraph or sentence construction skills)	.18^a .27^b	12 5
III. Increase how much students write	.30	6

For standardized norm-referenced tests.

For researcher-designed tests.

Policy, research, and practitioner audiences regard these recommendations as the best of research-based knowledge to inform writing programming and instruction in English. The recommendations provide some guidance. The first and strongest recommendation, with an effect size of .82, for example, calls for direct, explicit, and systematic instruction in planning, revising, and editing. Beyond naming effective strategies and providing varied examples within a category, however, the recommendations offer little clear direction. First, strategies were studied in isolation and need to be put together in flexible ways that constitute a curriculum or approach, but the interaction of elements has not been sufficiently studied to recommend how. Second, while impact in some categories relies on direct, systematic instruction, impact in others (summarizing, for instance) is said to result equally from either ‘a rule-governed or a more intuitive approach’ (Graham & Perin, 2007, p. 16). In other words, the nature and number of the studies drawn upon are, according to the authors, sufficient for making strong recommendations about strategies that work but insufficient for dictating overall approaches or implementation details.

While writing research has grown tremendously (Hillock’s 1986 meta-analysis included only 29 studies compared to Graham & Perin’s 176), there is much work to be done. Specific limitations of current research include the lack of numbers of studies overall (only five recommended elements across both reports yielded 10 or more studies that met the criteria for inclusion) and the particular dearth of studies about low-achieving writers, especially about adolescents in urban settings, although in the United States these are the students with the lowest writing proficiency and most in need.

What’s typically done?

Although research-based understanding of how writing is taught is severely limited, especially in middle and high schools (Applebee & Langer, 2009), the recommendations put forth in Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) reflect known trends and tensions in writing instruction (Gilbert & Graham, 2010), specifically the shift in recent decades from a more traditional, teacher-centered model to the ‘caught, not taught’ approach thought to dominate elementary and middle school writing instruction (Graham as cited in Tyre, 2012) and to influence high school writing instruction as well.² In this approach, students are immersed in rich literacy environments and expected to ‘catch’ most of what is needed to become effective writers. Most students, according to Graham, do not catch what they need – and those coming from poverty, with learning disabilities and/or limited English proficiency, and/or those with weak instruction may not catch much at all (as quoted in Tyre, 2012). High schools are less ideological, perhaps, although the recent emphasis on holistic approaches, such as collaborative writing, is evident there as well. While the emphasis in elementary schools has been on creative and narrative writing (although a shift to including more expository writing is occurring now, as a result of the common core), high school teachers are expected to teach mostly expository writing. The issues here are that high school writing is infrequent, of insufficient length, relegated primarily to English class, and not reflective of evidence-based practices (Applebee & Langer, 2009; Graham & Hebert, 2010).

Writing Next recommends strategies typically associated with both camps. Writing process, for example, is typically associated with a more wholistic approach, whereas direct instruction in sentence combining might be seen as ‘traditional’. These polarities may be less relevant to classroom teachers looking to integrate the best of what works for their specific students regardless of ideology of approach than to policy-makers or education schools. The tension is alive and palpable in US schools, however, along with the perception, not validated by systematic research, that holistic approaches along with those ‘favoring self-expression and emotion over lucid communication’ (Tyre, 2012) currently hold sway.

New Dorp High School

In 2005, New Dorp High School was a typical large, comprehensive US struggling high school with a population comparable to other urban schools and struggling for survival.³ In that year, they launched an intensive, multi-year improvement process coupling re-organization into smaller, theme-based learning communities with a strategy for instructional improvement in which teacher teams were supported to identify and close skill gaps for struggling students and in which what was learned from this process informed systemic, school-wide changes so that future students would not get stuck in the same places.⁴ By 2009, 4 years into their improvement process, teachers across the building, of various grades and subjects, had identified and come to a common understanding of fundamental skill gaps in student writing – gaps that they had not previously known to exist. They had identified, for example, that many students could not use the conjunctions because, but, and so correctly in a sentence.

At this point, there was no explicit or systematic approach to teaching writing. As part of the improvement process, teachers had observed, transcribed, and analyzed classroom instruction – leading them to realize that they were not actually teaching writing in ways that addressed the newly identified needs. As one English teacher said after analyzing transcripts of her own classes,

I used to think I was teaching writing. Now I realize that I’m having students write – a little at the beginning of the period, or in a journal, or even for an essay assignment. But I’m not actually teaching writing.

Starting in 2009, New Dorp selected and implemented Teaching Basic Writing Skills (Hochman, 2009) first in the Social Studies department and then, starting in 2011, school wide.⁵ Over the next few years, student engagement and on-track measures improved.⁶ Teachers and administrators reported that special education students and English language learners who had been disengaged in the past, reportedly putting their heads on desks during exams that they barely attempted, were now drafting outlines and using all the time allotted to complete and succeed on essay-based exams. Most dramatically, in 2009, one social studies teacher of upper level students who take a prestigious exam associated with a college-level US History course had all 23 of her students take the associated exam, passage of which affords college credit. Only two of her students passed, both with a score of 3.⁷ In 2012, the same teacher had students in her course who had experienced 3 years of the school’s new approach to systematic writing instruction. In her class of 28 students, 26 now passed the exam with a score of 4 or 5. The teacher, an experienced lead teacher who had initially resisted the program fearing it would dilute time spent on content, directly attributed the improved outcomes to the impact of the writing program – which improved student writing along with their content knowledge, thinking, and speaking. ‘Sometimes I can’t even sleep at night thinking about how big this is and what’s coming. I can feel it’, she said, marveling at the transformation in her own teaching and the sea change she imagined a broader knowledge of the practices could bring.

Teaching basic writing skills

New Dorp’s strategies are based primarily on those in Teaching Basic Writing Skills (Hochman, 2009), an approach to the teaching of basic expository writing skills developed by Judith C. Hochman. The approach aligns with some but not all recommendations by Graham and colleagues. It aligns in its overall emphasis on direct, systematic instruction and the explicit teaching of strategies for planning, revising, and editing (recommendation #1). However, the strategies used are more scaffolded and directly controlled than is suggested in the recommendations. Originally designed for special education students and most famously implemented at The Windward School, an independent school for special education students in a suburb of New York City, this was the first time the author knows that the approach went full scale (school wide) in a general education setting.

The approach has three elements – a focus on sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Most counterintuitive, perhaps, is its robust focus on sentence-level strategies – the explicit teaching of sentence-level strategies to improve the quality of sentences, to reinforce content, and to develop the elemental building blocks of expression and thinking. The paragraph work is highly structured as well, primarily with two core outlines – one for a single paragraph and the other for a multi-paragraph essay. At each stage, students apply what they learned earlier so that the work deepens and builds as students become increasingly independent.

This approach is not a program or a curriculum per se. It involves embedding sentence, paragraph, and essay level strategies in content instruction to develop written and oral expression simultaneously with content knowledge. What is most notable and atypical perhaps, especially for high schools, is that the foundational elements are taught discretely and slowly. New Dorp’s students focus almost exclusively on foundational note-taking and sentence-level strategies for their entire first semester. At the end of 9th grade, they are expected to have mastered only the paragraph. They begin writing full essays at the beginning of 10th grade, their second year. Social studies and English classes take the lead, introducing each strategy and providing daily practice. Other subjects select strategies that have been introduced and that support their content objectives, providing weekly practice. Foundational strategies are never dropped. Even when writing full essays, students continue to practice foundational sentence and paragraph skills.

This atypical approach to writing instruction used at New Dorp had strong results. What has not been understood, however, is how it worked to bring about these results. This study analyzes the key pieces of New Dorp’s approach and the interactions among these pieces to posit a theory of progressive mastery as a beginning explanation.

Method

Data and rationale

This study involves an analysis of the curriculum used to teach writing at New Dorp High School in order to deduce the approach used. Data include writing curriculum in the subject area in which implementation and outcomes were strongest in the school – Social Studies – and for the grade levels and courses (9th- and 10th-grade Global History and 11th-grade US History) that culminated in the first evidence of direct impact on a trusted, national measure (the advanced placement history exam taken at the end of 11th grade). Progress for 12th-grade students is measured primarily by course passage and graduation rates, providing less persuasive evidence of direct impact. Therefore, 12th-grade curriculum was not included in this study.

Specific data included worksheets created by members of the social studies department and presented to students at the start of each year in bound workbooks – one workbook per year-long course with one to two worksheets per instructional day. These materials mirrored the scope and sequence of writing skills determined by the department and that later guided roll-out of the work school-wide, allowing students daily practice of specific, predetermined writing skills embedded in content and for the department (and later school) to have a unified, systematic approach for teaching writing. They reveal a focus primarily on sentence and note-taking skills in the first semester of freshman year, the continuation of these skills and addition of paragraph level skills for the second semester of freshman year, and the continuation of these skills with the addition of essay level skills in the 10th and 11th grades.

The workbooks were collected for this research in the fall of 2013 (for the 9th grade) and the fall of 2014 (for 10th and 11th grades). Some activities, therefore, had been revised since the years leading to the US History exam results achieved in 2012. According to the principal, however, revisions were tweaks rather than substantial. For example, they involved adding or deleting the number of days on a particular strategy. Taken together, the three workbooks provide a clear picture of the curriculum and instruction that were provided to students in their social studies courses from 2009 to 2012.

Data analysis

In order to identify areas of overlap and disconnect with existing writing research, the data were coded using an open coding system with a start list drawn from the existing literature (Birks & Mills, 2015; Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 2014; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Grove, 1968; Martin & Gynnild, 2011). The recommended strategies in Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) and Writing to Read (Graham & Hebert, 2010) became preliminary codes, with new codes emerging from the data itself. A few codes overlapped. Writing for content learning, for example, appeared frequently in the New Dorp data since many activities were designed to improve writing and content mastery simultaneously. Summarization and sentence combining also appeared in both.

Most new codes were sub-categories of those in the start list. Most notably, there were 93 emergent sub-codes falling under Graham et al.’s first recommendation, writing strategies, which calls for direct instruction in strategies for planning, revising, and editing. This difference is to be expected, since the current study is of a particular approach, whereas meta-analyses by definition identify larger patterns. Some new codes emerged that did not fall under those from the start list. Most notably, note-taking and previewing emerged as important elements not found by the meta-analyses to improve the quality of writing. (Note-taking is identified in the meta-analyses as improving reading, however.) Of note as well were codes from the start list (found to improve writing and/or reading according to the meta-analyses) that did not show up at all in the New Dorp curriculum – for which there were no data coded. These include collaborative writing, word processing, and inquiry activities.

After initial coding, materials were grouped and sorted to identify patterns, and six overarching categories were identified – the large ‘buckets’ (Ely, Anzul, Friedman, Garner, & Steinmetz, 1991) into which the sub-codes fell – as follows: what is (1) taught, (2) previewed, (3) practiced, (4) applied, (5) modeled, and (6) teaches content. Based on these categories, the piles of codes were stabilized. Then, the researcher sought to understand the relationships among the elements/categories. To do so, she created a schema – an overarching sense of how the six umbrella categories work together to capture, in essence, how the approach operates as a system (Lewis, 1992).

Findings

Progressive mastery through deliberate practice

Progressive mastery differs from typical writing instruction primarily in terms of the role of the teacher in providing a controlled, deliberate, and highly scaffolded instructional experience for students. The approach – progressive mastery through deliberate practice – requires that the teacher have a clear sense not only of the whole which the student must come to master independently and flexibly but also of the smaller pieces that comprise it. The teacher must understand how the particular small pieces function not only to develop writing but also to strengthen content learning, oral expression, and reading (how it is, therefore, that they are high-leverage), along with how best to sequence and layer them to gradually develop student mastery.

The teacher’s role in a sense is to protect the student from feeling overwhelmed by what he or she cannot yet master. The teacher deliberately selects and sequences small pieces of instruction based on knowledge of how they spiral and build in response to the evidence of student learning needs that each instructional activity yields. Students experience mastery of the small pieces along the way, which cultivates engagement and self-efficacy (for teacher and student) and spurs student motivation. There is no script. Rather there is ongoing strategic decision-making by the teacher based on expert knowledge (of the components of writing instruction and how they layer) and expert practice (responsiveness to formative evidence). In this approach, the students achieve progressive mastery through the teacher’s deliberate practice.

Notably, the small pieces of instruction are in fact very small – smaller than those typically taught in high schools. The sentence-level strategies that form the heart of the approach and that demand substantial instructional time include, for example, completing given sentence stems using the conjunctions because, but, and so, as in the following example (note that the stem given by the teacher is in italics; only the underlined portion is provided by the student):

The Neolithic Revolution led to new occupations because there was a growth in trade.

The Neolithic Revolution led to new occupations, but it led to reduced food production.

The Neolithic Revolution led to new occupations, so new towns and cities developed.

Critics may argue that this activity and others like it are too low-level, especially for high school. What is critical, however, is the teacher’s understanding of why and when it is worth spending the time on something so small. First, it must be the right small thing – something carefully chosen because it targets and develops an essential element of thinking that students lack. In fact, recent research of public school students in New York City indicates that its high school students do not, for the most part, know how because, but, and so function in a sentence and that when they are explicitly taught the function of these and other sentence-level components, their learning of content and expression about and beyond that content accelerate (Panero & Talbert, 2013).⁸ Second, the strategies chosen must teach and/or reinforce core content.

While this study draws on curriculum from social studies in particular, the analysis reveals the role of the strategies in supporting content learning in general. The purpose of the progressive mastery approach may be best understood not as teaching writing per se but rather as drawing upon writing strategies to develop the underpinnings of communication and thinking.

What are the specifics of how it works?

The overall framework described above can be understood in terms of the following five distinct and overlapping elements that comprise it: the teacher’s (1) understanding of the final product, (2) breaking down its critical elements, (3) creating a hierarchy among the elements, (4) layering and progression of elements, and (5) gradual release of scaffolds.

Understanding the final product

In progressive mastery, end goals are understood in the precise detail which then drives the instruction needed to achieve them. In order to teach argumentative and persuasive writing, for example, the teacher must know exactly what the final product for each will look like and require, including the distinct requirements of a thesis statement for each. In the curriculum studied, the argumentative essay is defined as presenting both sides of an argument without taking a stand, whereas in the persuasive essay, the author acknowledges both sides but sides with one. Students are expected to distinguish between and create thesis statements like the following, the first argumentative and the second persuasive:

While some claim that Shakespeare was the most important writer of the Renaissance, others argue that Machiavelli was the most influential.

While some claim that Shakespeare was the most important writer of the Renaissance, clearly Machiavelli was the most influential in his time.

Similarly, the end product for a body paragraph specifies more than a statement of belief followed by reasons. The body paragraph in the curriculum studied requires a general statement for the topic sentence, three to four detail sentences linked by appropriate transitions, and a concluding sentence, also a general statement, that comprises a concluding transition and that paraphrases the topic sentence.

The purpose of these examples is not to suggest that these are the only or best ways to write or teach thesis statements and paragraphs. Rather, they are intended to illustrate how the teacher’s understanding of the final product works in the progressive mastery approach. The clarity of what is expected in the final product (overall and at any moment in time) dictates and drives the resulting focus and grain size of instruction. This ensures mastery of the small pieces that build to the desired end.

Breaking down its critical elements

A related but distinct element of progressive mastery is the teacher’s ability to see the pieces that make up the final product – whatever it may be – separately, as pieces. The single paragraph, for example, is a piece of a larger product (the essay). Critical smaller pieces of the body paragraph as described above (including those as small as a sub-component of a concluding sentence, such as paraphrasing) must at times be broken down even further.

To teach paraphrasing, a critical smaller element of a concluding sentence as described in the prior example, the teacher must understand what more and less sophisticated examples of paraphrasing look like, the particular challenges involved in learning to do it, and the steps (scaffolds) that allow for gradual mastery. Drilling down within paraphrasing begins to make clear the complexity involved in doing and teaching it. How is a student to know what words to paraphrase? A student must be able to identify the most important words in a sentence and to supply words to replace them. To do so, students are taught to distinguish a synonym from a word that isn’t necessarily a synonym but that may lend specificity or nuance. Critical as well is the teacher’s understanding of the developmental arc of learning to paraphrase. In the curriculum for this study, students underline and restate first on a word and then on a phrase level. Gradually, they learn to paraphrase ideas in longer and increasingly complex texts.

The example below illustrates how the word-level strategy is modeled and scaffolded at New Dorp and how paraphrasing is taught concurrently with content and the skill of producing concluding sentences. In the directions, students are asked to produce a concluding sentence ‘for a given topic sentence and details’. First, they are provided with a list of concluding transitions to draw on and then the following model in which the concluding sentence is provided for them:

T.S. Alexander the Great, a powerful military leader, had a huge impact on Greece.

1. fought battles → many victories

2. built empire = Europe + Middle East + Asia

3. expansion → cultural diffusion

4. Hellenism = blending of Greek + Indian + Egyptian + Persian culture

C.S. Clearly, Alexander the Great had a lasting effect on Greece.

The example illustrates how closed (rather than open) assignments work within progressive mastery. The closed design focuses students on particular skills in order to ensure progressive mastery. It simultaneously embeds them in a larger context so as to reinforce previously taught skills (note-taking with key words and symbols) and to prepare students for future skills (writing a single paragraph outline).

Creating a hierarchy among the elements

In addition, the progressive mastery teacher must identify those elements that are most foundational and elemental and therefore most critical to teach and worthy of instructional time. These are the pieces without which students will not be able to progress – although a teacher might not know why – and that when taught explicitly and reinforced can spur jumps in student performance in the many areas they undergird: oral language, knowledge acquisition, reading comprehension, and writing (Tyre, 2012). They are also the pieces that high school teachers have not typically been trained to teach or to assess. In the curriculum studied, they include distinguishing general from specific statements and expressing complex ideas through use of subordinating conjunctions.

Typically, when teaching the paragraph, high school teachers begin by teaching the topic sentence followed by details. This seems logical since the topic sentence comes first and dictates the details. In the curriculum studied, however, the key distinction between topic and detail sentences is that the first is a general statement, whereas the second is specific. By beginning instruction by having students distinguish between the two, the teacher assesses (and reinforces) the students’ knowledge of the underlying, foundational skill that lies at the heart of all categorization. Many students, New Dorp teachers found, were not clear about this distinction until it was taught to them directly, as in the following activity in which students identify related statements as either general (G) or specific (S):

_____ The disease caused widespread labor shortages because skilled workers died.

_____ There were many economic effects of the Black Plague.

If a student grasps this distinction, the teacher moves on. If not, the teacher continues to teach it. If not thinking consciously about teaching a foundational, transferable skill, a teacher of topic sentences may be open to a range of what students produce, including one that contains a fair amount of detail. If the purpose of teaching the topic sentence, however, is not only the paragraph at hand but (more importantly) to assess and consolidate student knowledge of the underlying relationship between general and specific – one that will be transferable to a broad range of academic learning and thought including and beyond writing – teachers will require a clear general statement like the one in the example above until they are certain that students have mastered the core distinction.

Similarly, completing sentences that begin with a subordinating conjunction (since, while, although, etc.) is a useful tool for developing the underlying skills needed to express relationships, first within the bounds of a single sentence. Subordinating conjunctions introduce clauses that cannot stand alone – that are subordinate to another clause or clauses. Having students write sentences that start with one, therefore, pushes them to write complex rather than simple sentences. In the studied curriculum, students build this muscle first by being asked to complete given sentence stems that begin with a subordinating conjunction, as follows:

Since the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were unpredictable, ______________________________

While Sumerians did create the first schools, _________________________________________

Once they have demonstrated mastery of the more scaffolded version (above), then they are provided with only the topic and the first word, as follows:

Topic: Sparta

While _______________________________________________________________________

If ___________________________________________________________________________

What is critical is the teacher’s understanding that not all elements are equally important. Those that provide needed foundational underpinnings and that transfer to a range of academic tasks are prioritized. The coordinating conjunction ‘so’ and the arrow symbol (→) in note-taking, as modeled to students in the concluding sentence example shown earlier, may seem very tiny but support students’ expression of the bigger, critical concept of cause and effect and, in the hands of a strong teacher, build students’ capacity for increasingly complex expressions of that relationship. Learning to start a single sentence with a subordinating conjunction might at first seem too circumscribed to be effective in developing the underlying capacity to express complexity. Subsequently, however, students apply this strategy to writing argumentative and persuasive thesis statements that begin with a subordinating conjunction. This allows them to conceptualize and lay out their entire essay structure up front for the reader and reflect application and extension of the thinking that was the teacher’s primary target.

Layering and progression of elements

An analysis of the relationship between two discrete yet connected activities – expansion and revision of simple, given paragraphs – illustrates the importance of the proper layering and progression of elements within progressive mastery.

The primary purpose of sentence expansion is to support students to provide more information than they typically do within the context of a single sentence. In this activity, the teacher provides a simple, unelaborated sentence and two to five related question words (who, where, when, how, and/or why). The student then writes one expanded sentence containing information from the simple sentence and answers to the questions posed, as required by the following example:

Athens and Sparta fought.

When? ……………….…………………………………….………………….

Why? ………………………………………………………………….….……

Expanded Sentence: _______________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

The expansion strategy looks backward in that students must draw upon some of what they have learned previously to complete it correctly. Before trying expansion, students learn that dotted lines require notes only (solid lines call for complete sentences); the basics of note-taking using key words, symbols, and abbreviations; and the function of the coordinating conjunctions because, but, and so, which they draw upon to answer why in the example above.

The activity is forward-looking as well, preparing students to apply what is learned in a contained fashion more broadly and with increasing independence in future tasks. In a subsequent activity, for example, students apply knowledge of how the question words function in expansion to improving simple, given paragraphs. Students are provided with a paragraph made up of three to six simple, unelaborated sentences, such as ‘Caesar was a leader.’ ‘He ruled.’ and ‘He gave land.’ Then they are asked to interrogate the paragraph – to draw upon knowledge of the question words that the teacher provided in the prior activity (along with a few other previously taught sentence strategies) and to annotate the paragraph with those question words to indicate what specific information in what places, if provided, would best improve it.

The following model indicates for students how their annotation might look:

(Appositive) (When? Where?) (How?) (Why? to Who?)

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

Caesar was a leader. He ruled. He gave land.

(What jobs?) (How?) (Closing transition and what impact?)

↓ ↓ ↓

He created jobs. He reformed. He had an impact.

Once introduced, most strategies within progressive mastery are taught concurrently. Sentence activities, for example, are never dropped, even when students write full essays. Complexity depends less on the length or nature of a specific strategy drawn upon than on the complexity of the reading material and/or ideas filtered through it. There is, however, a logical order and progression to when many activities are introduced, guided by knowledge of what the current layer depends upon and enables.

Gradual release of scaffolds

Scaffolds are, by definition, temporary supportive structures which must, as students become increasingly able, be released. The approach to teaching the introductory paragraph for a multiple paragraph essay in this study illustrates how gradual release of scaffolds operates within progressive mastery.

In the curriculum studied, students learn a formula for a three-sentence introduction: a general statement, followed by a specific statement, followed by the thesis statement (GST). When students are first exposed to the multiple paragraph outline with which they plan an essay, they are not asked to plan an introduction at all. Instead, a thesis statement is provided for them. Their task is to elicit the categories embedded within the thesis statement, place them on the outline tool, and complete the outline using notes – all skills they have learned previously. The first exposure to the thesis statement, then, is to work with one that has been provided for them.

Next, the teacher breaks down and allows for progressive mastery of each element of GST. Students learn, for example, that adding a date, place, or definition to discussion of a topic will yield a specific (rather than a general) statement and are guided to generate ideas in a chart before writing their own specific statement for given general and thesis statements, as follows:

Specific Statement Chart

Date	Place	Definition

Directions: Write a Specific Statement (Sp. St.) for the given General Statement (G. S.) and Thesis Statement (Th. St.)

1. G. S. Many leaders have experienced periods of greatness.

2. Sp. St.

3. Th. St. Napoleon had many social and political achievements.

To consolidate students’ skill in creating each type of sentence and the paragraph overall, the teacher gradually releases scaffolds. First, there is only exposure. Then, as in the example above, students are supported to write one type of statement when provided with the other two. Next, the student is asked to generate two when provided with one. Finally, the student must create the entire paragraph independently, as in the following subsequent activity in which students are asked only to ‘write a GST introduction’ for the following prompt:

Many controversial domestic issues have divided the American people. The United States government has taken action to address these issues.

Select two controversial domestic issues that have divided the American people and for each

● Discuss the historical background of the controversy

● Explain the points of view of those who supported and those who opposed this issue

● Discuss one United States government action that was taken to address this issue

For a time, a simple outline tool with only solid and dotted lines is all that remains. Eventually, by necessity, even that is removed, since students are unable to bring an outline with them when taking a standardized exam. By then, the hope is that students have internalized the core outline structures and foundational pre-requisites and that they can and will build upon what’s been internalized for the rest of their writing lives.

Discussion

Findings from this study suggest that progressive mastery is different from what is typical and/or generally accepted as best practice in writing instruction in terms of the role that writing plays in the curriculum as well as the roles of teachers and students in relation to each other and the curriculum. In addition, it reveals differences in the assumptions and beliefs that drive all aspects of writing instruction (see Table 3 for a distillation of these differences).

Table 3.

Different understandings of roles and assumptions/beliefs driving writing instruction.

	Typical	Progressive Mastery
Understanding of role of . . .
Writing in the curriculum	To develop writing	To develop thinking
The writing teacher	To foster discovery and self-expression through relatively open or unstructured tasks, allowing for struggle and exploration; to provide guidance primarily on the writing process.	To foster mastery through relatively closed or structured tasks, allowing for progressive mastery of small pieces that build and transfer; to provide direct instruction in specific skills
The student	To discover, experiment, find one’s voice	To meet specific, clearly articulated goals
Assumptions and beliefs about . . .
What cultivates student motivation	The opportunity to engage with rigorous, high-level tasks and/or those that students can relate to on a personal level; student choice about what to write about and how	Precise skill needs being addressed via tasks that are challenging but achievable; the teacher determining what students will write and how it should look (specific expectations and aligned feedback)
How rigor is defined	Extent to which task requirements align with an objective standard at a moment in time; length of writing produced	Extent to which task requirements target precise student learning needs at a moment in time; quality of thinking developed
Who is responsible for teaching writing	English Language Arts and/or humanities teachers	All content teachers

In the typical approach, the role of the writing teacher (usually the English or humanities teacher, especially at the high school level) is to develop writing. Other subject teachers see themselves primarily as content experts. In the progressive mastery approach, these two notions are not in opposition. Since the role of writing in progressive mastery is not only to develop writing but also to develop content knowledge, expression, and thinking, all teachers play a key role. This does not mean that it is everyone’s job to teach the expository essay. It means that all subject teachers draw upon a similar language and set of writing strategies to the extent that these serve their specific, content-based instructional goals and with the knowledge that doing so simultaneously improves students’ writing.

The typical approach assumes that poor expository writing results from a lack of student interest and motivation, and that dry, formal, overly structured tasks are ineffective in cultivating the needed motivation. The response is to hook students with topics that are more creative and/or rooted in their personal lives and to maximize student choice – with the idea that much of what students need to become strong writers is inside them already, needing free expression before it can then be shaped through practice and with help from the teacher.

Progressive mastery is rooted in a different set of assumptions about the underlying causes of poor writing and about what best cultivates engagement. It assumes that disinterest is a symptom rather than a cause, that students are missing fundamental skills without which they are unable to engage successfully in many of the writing tasks that are put before them, and that when the missing skills are explicitly taught in ways that can be rapidly mastered, students feel effective and, as a result, engaged. Choice is secondary not because proponents of progressive mastery dismiss its inherent value, but rather because the approach requires teacher-generated, highly controlled, content-based tasks that allow for gradual mastery. Creating, monitoring, and adjusting these tasks in an ongoing fashion to ensure that they hit the mark for both skill and content are labor-intensive and therefore much more difficult for multiple topics at once than for one.

Finally, the two approaches define rigor differently. In the typical approach, rigor is understood in terms of the extent to which a writing task (and the resulting student work) aligns with an objective standard at a specific moment in time. A rigorous essay adheres to grade-level expectations regarding the type and length of writing expected and the complexity of reading materials drawn upon for evidence. If a student falls behind, the core strategy is practice of the complete form. Similarly, it is believed that complex texts from which students draw evidence should not generally be modified, even for students who read below grade level. Exposure to and grappling with complexity will, the thinking goes, foster mastery.

In progressive mastery, however, rigor is defined as the extent to which instruction and task requirements target the precise learning needs of specific students at a specific moment in time. Rigor is associated with a just-right instructional intervention that allows for sequential, progressive mastery of the critical small pieces that eventually allow students to meet grade-level standards.

Implications for future research

The current study is of writing curriculum at one high school using one version of progressive mastery – a particular set of strategies laid out in a specific sequence within one subject department. Future research should test the replicability of outcomes in other settings as well as the extent to which the strategies themselves and/or their repetition or sequencing accounts for the difference, as opposed to the progressive mastery approach itself. Anecdotal evidence suggests that progressive mastery improves writing for all student populations; but future research should seek to understand its differential impact, especially for those who have struggled most and about whom research is most lacking, as well as what adaptations work best in specific settings and for whom. In addition, some recommendations from the meta-analyses, such as peer collaboration and inquiry learning, were not present in this study. Further research should explore the extent to which these elements are in fact needed to improve writing at scale. Finally, this study suggests that progressive mastery holds promise for improving more than writing. The extent to which and the ways in which progressive mastery improves content knowledge, oral language, vocabulary acquisition, and reading comprehension are fruitful areas for future research.

Footnotes

Notes

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