Conspiring to Improve Writing?

We seem to be surrounded by standards, rules, and restrictions in the writing classroom. As a writing teacher, I often feel frustrated by the challenge of both sticking by what I know is good writing instruction and meeting the requirements imposed by outsiders (who are sometimes not educators).

I keep returning to the horrifying drill-and-kill vignette from the opening of Mike Rose’s recent Inside Higher Ed article, “Remediation at a Crossroads,” and shuddering at the thought that standardization and college-readiness campaigns have pressed writing instruction into the worst possible pedagogical molds when we know that effective basic writing instruction is organic and individualized.

Mike Rose explains that “The big question is whether we will truly seize this moment and create for underprepared students a rich education in literacy and numeracy, or make some partial changes—more online instruction, shortened course sequences—but leave the remedial model intact.” The Common Core leaves teachers at a similar crossroads: can we use the core guidelines to build a “rich education in literacy” or will we end up with one-size-fits-all drills and five-paragraph essays for every subject?

I don’t know if the Common Core is a conspiracy of some unnamed group to profit from educational design. I don’t know how many remedial classrooms resemble the one in Rose’s article. I do know that it’s time to concoct a little conspiracy of our own as writing teachers. It’s time to move from theories and philosphies to action and advocacy.

There have to be concrete things we can do that pay heed to what we know about the teaching of writing while helping students become confident and effective writers. It’s reductive to cast our situation as a strictly binary choice—if only the solution were as easy as a choice of direction at the crossroads. Nonetheless we are at a crossroads. What can we do to make sure we travel down the right path? What concrete things can someone do in the classroom today or this week that conspire to improve writing instruction?