Writing across the curriculum
Content-area teachers often cringe when administrators mandate a school improvement goal for writing across the curriculum. And they’re right; you can’t ask students to write personal narrative essays to explain the lab experiment they just completed in chemistry. But writing across the curriculum is so much more than simply adding an essay question to your latest chapter review test.
To say that writing is valuable in any and every subject is an understatement. As William Zinsser put it so well, “Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.” Writing across the curriculum (WAC) allows students the possibility of thinking on paper — something everyone needs to do in order to grapple with information that is new or different. Those who encourage WAC value writing as a method for learning. But the advocates of WAC also recognize that different disciplines require different writing structures. It’s true — you wouldn’t ask for a first-person narrative to highlight a student’s knowledge of reciprocal identities in trigonometry. No, for that you’ll want something a little more specific to the content area. But, you can still offer writing as an option within the math arena or any content-area arena.
To help teachers across the disciplines, I’ve developed a cheat-sheet full of practical writing options. All provide the opportunity for students to write out their words to deal with any subject matter. Click here to order the Writing Across the Curriculum card, available at The Literacy Store.