From Acronyms to Autonomy: A Better Way to Teach Writing Ep 5

🏀 What does Steph Curry’s pregame warm-up have to do with writing instruction? Everything.

In this episode, I'm comparing the basketball legend’s unpredictable, skill-building practice routine with the way we should be preparing students to write. You’ll hear two stories...one courtside, and one from a humid gym in 1986... that illustrate exactly why rigid acronyms and overstructured templates can freeze young writers in their tracks.

If your students ask, "What do I do next?" every time they write, this episode breaks down:

• Why too many acronyms can backfire in the classroom
• How to build confident, intuitive writers using quick writes and daily reps
• What “joy points” and “sophistication” look like in middle school essays
• The two acronyms I do use (and why they actually work)

Whether you're a teacher or homeschool parent, this episode is a must-listen if you want to raise writers who can “shoot” from any direction...just like Steph.

➡️ Learn more about the FULL Structured Writing training PD

📆 Grab my yearlong writing planner for free (it includes my eBook!)

🎥 Watch the teaching strategies in action on YouTube

📝 Read the latest blog posts for writing tips & ideas

HAVE A QUESTION? Email me at robin@structuredwritingteacher.com

Transcript

Ep 5 From Acronyms to Autonomy: A Better Way to Teach Writing in upper elementary and middle school 

Transcript:
(00:01) Today is the day that I am going to tell you my Steph Curry story steph is the amazing basketball player for the Golden State Warriors and this did not happen directly to me it happened kind of indirectly over the phone and I you'll listen to this and I'm going to give you two stories there's a Steph Curry story and then there's a Robin story from 1986 i'm going to compare and contrast the the two situations obviously there will be a difference between the two of us now what happened was is like our family as
(00:48) a whole we are big NBA basketball fans and we live right smack dab in between San Francisco and LA so when you live here you can go either way really you can be an LA Lakers fan or worries fan we are Lakers fans and my son who plays basketball he always wanted to go to an NBA game and my husband surprised him with tickets to the Warriors Lakers game and it was up in Oakland and they had really great seats so my son is freaking out right and he wants to get there early they were one of the absolute first people into the arena
(01:31) and the reason for that is because the teams come in way earlier and they practice before the game starts so you can kind of see what their ritual is and what they do and so my husband called me because he was like I am fascinated with what Steph Curry is doing right now and so he's describing it to me and he showed me some pictures and stuff but what Steph does and stuff if you don't know is like I don't know the stats but he's pretty much the number one three-point shooter in the world ever probably in history i don't know but
(02:05) he's the best at three-point shots he can hit anything so he was saying that they were shooting as a team and it was just kind of chaotic there was nothing really formal to it but Steph had a ball and what he would do is he would randomly like just start hopping he would he would start hopping around and then turn and shoot from a weird angle and then he would hop on one foot and then he would start skipping and then he would act as if he was falling over and shoot from the angle of falling over so you can kind of
(02:46) see where this is going but basically the way he practices is to be able to shoot the three-pointer in any situation no matter how fast he's going how slow if he's got if he got hit or pushed he can still shoot it he can still make it so he practices his skill from all different perspectives in all different situations and he is the best at it now let me take you back in time to 1986 I believe it was i played on my high school basketball team in Georgia and we one summer we all went the team went up to the University of Georgia for a high
(03:32) school basketball camp and these were high school girls from around the state it was enormous and they split us up into these other new teams and our coaches were I don't know where they were i don't remember seeing our coaches but we actually ended up on teams that were different from our own home team so we could learn new skills and their whole goal was basically to just wear us out so much that we had to figure out how to play basketball when we were also so exhausted that we were throwing up which was pretty much what happened cuz it was
(04:05) in the summer at in Athens Georgia and it was so hot and the gym that they had us in did not have air conditioning i have never sweated so much and then they tell us to go outside and get some water and the water was warm it was the worst week of my It was the hardest thing I've done besides like child birth natural child birth and climbing a 14er in Colorado and then basketball camp in Athens Georgia so we had all these new coaches and their thing was they would tire us down which I get that makes sense you know
(04:39) and I talk about that in my writing program of like you want to build stamina so that they can they can still do it even when they're tired or don't want to however this basketball camp they would like teach us how to do these plays um and they were very specific and they were really like intricate and complicated and so you had to memorize okay if I'm at this position I do this step here go up to here go up four feet step out to the right she'll go be behind you pass back with your right hand oh and although you also need to do
(05:19) this from any position so what happened was is that I completely shut down i could not remember anything so even though I had some basketball skills we would start doing these scrimmages and they would call out a play number and I'm like "What number is that wait what position am I in?" And so I'm like I'm stunned and frozen trying to figure out from memory like what do I do when it was actually just quite simple was just like run up a little bit catch the ball turn a shoe but the whole like you need to do it
(05:58) this way and this is the you know all the steps that you're going to take exactly what you're going to do sometimes it can cause you to freeze and so let's pull this out into a metaphor for writing and by the way if anyone knows Steph Curry please thank him for sponsoring this metaphor if I were to teach writing in either A the Steph Curry method or B the Robin 1986 humid gym in Athens Georgia method I would choose A because the what you want to give your students is the skill of autonomy and the ability to think for themselves so you want to
(06:45) create all these different situations like before you you know tell them all the parts of an essay they need to experience the parts of an essay that's why I use a deconstruct method where they put the strips of paper back together and they come up with well what should we do with these strips of paper what should this essay look like let's talk about it and give them the ability to think through some things what can be problematic sometimes is if we are overly like too heavy handed with our frames that we're providing
(07:20) them to do so if we have too many acronyms going on it's the same thing as me freezing in that gym um not cold freezing the other freezing um and not being able to move because there were too many lines and things in my head running around i couldn't remember what to do so I keep the acronyms down to a bare minimum in my writing program just the absolute base things that they would need to remember so that they don't get stuck and and the reason for that is one year I was doing the race strategy which is restate answer site and explain but
(07:58) then we were also doing the CER strategy claim evidence reasoning and race I was using like for literature if I had a question about theme or characterization we're going to use the race strategy and CER was typically for articles and things like that now my sixth graders can't seem to remember that and so when it came time to start doing some writing and I said "Pull you know use one of your tools that I've given you.
(08:25) " And they were like "I which one i don't remember the letters." And they were so stuck they couldn't start writing because they were so busy trying to remember the letters in the acronym that I give i'm like just write like you know what to do but it it was it was actually hurting them rather than helping them so the only two acronyms that I use in my writing program are hit which is for the hit introduction i do use that and they have told me that that helps them a lot because it calms down their system when we when I say the word
(09:01) essay like we're going to write an essay and they're like okay I just have to do my hit introduction and they love actually saying that I'm going to do my hit introduction which is hook introduce a topic and then T for thesis or that could be your topic sentence depending on what you're doing narrative essays there that's a different thing we'll we'll do a different podcast on that that one the other one is cer so now I have moved I I don't use race anymore it's just too many letters and the R and the A were
(09:32) too confusing because I was like actually you need to condense those down into one even though they're two letters and blah blah blah and they were like what so claim evidence reasoning for any other answer to any question is what we do and then a claim essentially can be an answer to a question so if I say what is the theme of blah blah blah they state their answer as a claim that's what they are saying is true based on what they've read their evidence and here's why and so we use that in history and in science you could also use cer in
(10:07) math so I would keep it to a very very simple construction of like here's your frame to help you and then the rest of it I want you to trust yourself now the way that they learn to trust themselves is to build up those skills and metaphorically be Steph Curry and do writing in every direction in every situation so that they know whatever comes their way they can tackle it and I did have um recently a fourth grade teacher told me that after the state test one of her kids came back to her and said that the writing part was easy
(10:46) and he said it was because of the daily quick writes they do in class quick writes that's what helped those are the fun things their like dessert that they do for their warm-ups every day this is a really cool image it could be moody it could be you know sometimes they're writing dialogue or they might be writing it like a newspaper reporter um or a diary entry they're doing all sorts of writing and just tackling it while a five minute timer is on and what that does is if they practice it over and over and they know they can tackle
(11:21) something quickly their confidence then soars when they get to the state test and it says it because there are short constructive responses on the state test it's not all essays you know and they just say "Write a paragraph that tells us about blah blah blah." They're like "Okay I do that every day." And so it's a great feeling to know that those quick writes and those warm-ups that you do every morning are tying into the whole bigger picture of their full writing program and what I've kind of learned from doing this and talking to
(11:55) now hundreds of teachers is that often times we start off at the beginning of the year and everything seems to be good we're trying to do engaging things and kind of take it easy as we go in there but then usually it's about November is when I've noticed this in November it's like the wheels have fallen off the the kids aren't actually writing up to the you know level that you want them and then the acronyms are confusing them the templates are kind of holding them up they're just they don't want to do it they're not applying the mini lessons to
(12:31) their own writing and then the writing still it like feels robotic and what you end up with is a lot of students coming to you often throughout the whole process saying "What do I do next what do I do next?" And they're looking to you the coach for to tell them what to do it would be like if I were playing in a basketball game and I got the ball and I didn't know what to do with this play and I just stopped and I turned and looked at my coach and said "What do I do?" I would get laughed out of the gym i need to pull on my skills
(13:04) and think intuitively and figure out where to go from here and that's how that experiential activity when they are putting together an essay beforehand you can when you're done with it you keep that essay up on the wall so that they can see that student example from last year and they can look through the process and go "Oh okay now I'm moving into this next body paragraph that's what that looked like.
(13:31) " Okay and then you go from there so it the problem can come in if your writing curriculum is front-loading too much direct grammar instruction right off the bat or if it's just straight into genre writing if it's straight into okay welcome to school we're going to get into essay writing we're going to start with a narrative and they have to build those skills up that intuitive writing you know their inner writer needs to be built up their confidence their ownership of what's going on otherwise they are just going to freeze when they're like I have to
(14:09) remember what goes next and let's do a little sidebar here about robotic writing because absolutely you would use a a frame for how to build that essay and then how is it though that we're going to get that essay to sound like that student's writing and how can you help this that's why I use the hit introduction mainly because of the H part the hook and we've practiced hook because it's the number two skill that they learn in workshop so they've already done hooks over and over and over again so they have this really unique way to
(14:53) come up with a a a like a sentence that will draw their reader in and make them kind of intrigued but not confused and you have to practice that over and over again that's not something that you can just bring up and have them suddenly know how to do and then that next sentence is the introduce your topic sentence which actually they've been practicing in those quick writes so one of the options for quick writes every day is to write this like a reporter no opinions you're just stating exactly what's happening in there and then you
(15:26) can draw on that first skill in the warm-up of writing complex and compound sentences and have them rewrite some of those so they get practicing you know how to do an informative sentence in several different ways now to level up their writing in the rest of the essay here are a couple of ideas one is that you you have the framework but all along all year long you want to encourage them to um I I sometimes I say with my middle schoolers to riff so I will put a little comment in there and say wild card sentence and and put a
(16:07) little arrow so like after they've given their next um thesis statement before they go into a direct quote riff right here it has to meet the the tone of the essay but I want them to write in their own words what what they think is the truth in all of this and even if it doesn't match up in tone that's okay get them used to adding in there their own editorial comment unless it's an informative paper that's a little different but even then you can still they can write their own sentence in there i mean I worked for a
(16:45) newspaper actually once a long long time ago and it was really interesting to see how the reporter can put in some creative sentences in there that are still factually correct but let's just think of it like if we're just doing an argumentative paper add in a wild card sentence where you riff and then you could also have them do that in their conclusion like and then when they do that you want to highlight that and say "Oh look at this this is amazing okay look what so and so did they added in here their wild card sentence and
(17:21) they talked about blah blah blah what do you think this is great." And you just want to call people out really highlight when they are taking action that you have not directed anytime you see that say it out loud or say it quietly but loud enough so a few other people can hear cuz it's cool and you got to be a cat and not be a puppy in middle school right so you can ask for more in their writing and then as they get comfortable with it and they see that you are looking for that they will start to slowly rise up
(17:58) to that expectation but it's a little too much to expect it right off the bat you want to kind of build up to this at the end and sometimes you want to hold off in your rubric don't tell them everything that you're grading them on and then in that revision process add some stuff in then reveal in the rubric okay now I want you to go in and add a piece of figurative language i want you to go in write a complex sentence or I want you to go in and add your own riff in here maybe require it by the end of the year
(18:34) and this leveling up idea came from some other teachers so I always want to make sure I call out whenever I get an idea from someone else um I want to let you know who that was so you can go back and trace back who it is and find them online and all that and we can share all the great information that we're finding out there now these two bits of like ideas they came from my son's teachers and one was from high school and one was from this last year at at college so his high school English teacher and the same concept but they just use
(19:12) different words and you could do this too um the English teacher had an additional line in the rubric that was called sophistication and you could earn up to an extra however many points don't remember but if there was basically something in there that you had done above and beyond what was asked in that in the frame of it in the framework of it if you rift if you took it a step further you get sophistication points and so it's kind of random like whatever the teacher sort of felt you know was interesting to him
(19:48) he would add in these points my son whenever he would write an essay for him he would go back and be like okay I gotta rework on this because I got to get those sophistication points like that was super important to him to He didn't really even care what the final score was he just wanted to get on that sophistication board so then fast forward he goes off to college he's getting degree in um English world literature and he again there's so many essays to write but this teacher she didn't use the word sophistication she called them joy
(20:24) points and it was very subjective and it was very like if there's just something in your essay that is so intriguing that it brings a little hint of joy to me you get an extra point it was the same thing but I loved it and I'd always ask him I'm like "How was your essay you get your joy points.
(20:46) " So sophistication or joy points thank you to those teachers it's such an awesome idea and with that I'll say go out there and help your students turn into the Steph Curies of the writing world thanks for listening and I will see you in the next one [Music] be sure to follow Beyond the Paragraph wherever you get your podcast and share this with a teacher bestie they will love you for it and so will I to go deeper and learn more about the structured writing method go to structuredwritingteacher.
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