Donald Graves: A Fresh Look at Writing – Time

I first met my friend Donald Graves in 1992 when I attended the University of New Hampshire Writing Program. Donald has had a greater impact on my teaching than any other mentor. When I visit writing classes to see if they are successful I always use his chapter titled, “The Seven Conditions for Effective Writing, from his book, A Fresh Look at Writing, 1994 , to determine if that teacher is on the right track. Donald explains in detail why “Time” is so key to a successful writing workshop classroom:

My best recollections of learning to write are connected to the “theme a week” in junior and senior high school. The essay was due on Friday and that ruined my Thursday evenings. I moaned, I struggled, I asked my parents for help, but most of all I procrastinated. Only the late night tenor and embarrassment of having nothing but a blank paper to hand in to my teacher the next day coaxed words onto the page.

But people don’t learn to write that way—at any age. Fifteen years ago students wrote an average of one day in ten. By “write,” I refer to compositions in which the student presents new ideas on a specific topic. Although the amount of writing has increased in recent years, we are a long way from having both the time and necessary condi­tions that make it possible for our students to learn to write.

Professional writers experience near panic at the thought of missing one day of writing. They know that if they miss a day it will take enormous effort to get their minds back on the trail of productive thought, it is extremely inefficient to miss a day. In addition, as our data on children show, when writers write every day, they begin to compose even when they are not composing. They enter into a “constant state of composition”

A fashionable educational dictum these days is “time on task.” We look to see if every child’s mind is on the book, on the paper. We want to see minds engaged, pencil and pens moving across the paper. What we don’t consider is the most significant “time on task” of all, what students choose to do beyond the walls of the school. Only when chil­dren read and write on their own because they have experienced the power of literacy can we speak of the significance of time on task.

If students are not engaged in writing at least four days out of five, and for a period of thirty-five to forty minutes, beginning in first grade, they will have little opportunity to learn to think through the medium of writing. Three days a week are not sufficient. There are too many gaps between the starting and stopping of writing for this schedule to be effective. Only students of exceptional ability who can fill the gaps with their own initiative and thinking, can survive such poor learning conditions. Students from another language or culture, or those who feel, they have little to say are particularly affected by this limited amount of time for writing.

When a teacher asks me, “I can only teach writing once a week. What kind of program should I have?” my response is, “Don’t teach it at all. You will encourage poor habits in your students and they will only learn to dislike writing. Think of something you enjoy doing well; chances are you involve yourself in it far more than one or two times a week.

How well I remember the seventh-grade students I had in my first year of teaching. I taught writing once a week on Friday afternoons— just as I had been taught in public school and at the university all my teaching was compressed into that one day, and that meant that I had to correct every error on student papers. Today I know that correcting errors is not teaching. Teaching requires us to show students how to write and how to develop the skills necessary to improve as a writer. And showing students how to write takes time. They need daily writ­ing time to be able to move their pieces along until they accomplish what they set out to do.