The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades

The Writing Revolution is exactly as the title describes, a book that supports teachers to fundamentally change how they think about teaching writing for the better. Talking the reader through how to break the writing process down into steps, starting with sentence-level activities and building strategies whilst learning content at the same time, this book offers practical advice and examples throughout for all teachers. It has had a huge positive impact on our teaching as well as the teaching of many of our colleagues and friends in education, we highly recommend it. Dave Tushingham and Rhiannon Rainbow- Authors of The Edu-Book Club

I found The Writing Revolution while searching for “content area writing” and “writing across the curriculum” resources to use in homeschooling my daughter. While some materials that are written for the classroom are hard to put into practice in a homeschooling situation, such is not the case with this book. Rather, having tried several homeschool writing curricula, and not having found anything that really “clicked” for us, I feel like I have found what I have been looking for in this book. Some of the things that this book advocates and that work well in the homeschool setting are: starting with what the student is able to do, not what they “should” be able to do according to age or grade level; using the student’s work to inform instruction; using a “gradual release of responsibility” model (I don’t remember this exact term being used in the book, but it addresses starting with modeling, then doing activities together, and gradually moving towards students being able to do things independently); and writing in the content areas to reinforce what is being learned in subject areas such as history and science, rather than having a separate writing curriculum that is unrelated to what is being studied in other areas. In some ways, I think this method would be easier to apply in the homeschool than the classroom, because it is easier to differentiate instruction when you are working with fewer students, who are usually different ages, and homeschooling parents are more likely to be teaching multiple subjects to their children, so integrating writing instruction with content area learning makes sense and is easier to implement than in a school setting where, at least at the secondary level, you are more likely to have different teachers for different subjects. The only drawback I can see in a homeschool setting is that more teacher preparation is required compared to other homeschool writing curricula, because the lessons are meant to be integrated into the content areas, and are not all pre-planned. This might make it difficult for a homeschooling parent who is juggling multiple children of various ages, especially if they have babies and toddlers in the mix (I only have two kids, ages 12 and 16, and am only homeschooling my 12 year old). But the benefit of this method is that it will help you to provide a very individualized writing program that can be easily adapted to your child’s needs and abilities.

Not impressed

Great book

This is an excellent book containing a wealth of practical wisdom on teaching writing. The approach is grounded in research on best practices and the activities and strategies are explained in a clear, straighforward way that is very accessible to anyone implementing them. The methods are simultaneously both highly structured and flexible. The sentence level work is so valuable for students and often missing from other approaches to writing instruction. Explicitly teaching and providing deliberate practice with high impact grammatical structures like appositives and subordinate clauses is a brilliant move, effectively giving students important tools for thinking. The outlining template is excellent and makes a whole lot more sense than the multitude of graphic organizers students are often given and too often confused by. The sharp focus on embedding writing instruction in the content of the curriculum is critically important. This guide provides not only the broad strokes and a detailed blueprint for putting it into practice, but also a number of valuable nuggets of guidance and tips (how to prevent unintended confusion when giving students sentence expansion activiites; avoiding highlighters because students tend to highlight too much when using them; asking students to create multiple topic sentences for the same topic, etc.). The book also contains many useful photocopiable resources. It deserves a spot on every teacher's shelf; I know I'll be referring to it often!