The next literacy challenge: Teaching students how to write
The next literacy challenge: Teaching students how to write
It was the middle of a writing lesson in Gabrielle Graceâs first grade class at Sand Creek Elementary in suburban Denver, and students were furiously jotting down details about their summer plans, the first step in composing a paragraph on the topic.
Except for 6-year-old Dean, who was already done.
âThis stuff was just too easy for me,â he told . He pointed to his worksheet, fully filled out with a topic sentence (âI do many things over the summerâ) and a list of his summer activities (âpark, ipad and vacationâ).
âI wrote this, like, before the bell rang,â he said nonchalantly.
At the beginning of the year, many of Graceâs students couldnât write a sentence. âNow, they do this on their own,â she said. âTheir writing is very organized. They write in complete sentences. Itâs just like clockwork.â
Deanâs writing prowess â and confidence â is what many elementary school teachers dream of. For years, teachers have bemoaned the state of student writing â and have struggled to manage studentsâ complex, largely negative feelings about it. Across grade levels, educators say children struggle to write basic sentences, let alone use proper spelling and punctuation. In upper elementary grades, when students should be writing paragraphs and short essays, teachers are finding many students still lack fundamental skills and struggle to write at length.
In recent years, concerned by low writing scores on state exams, some districts have started to rethink how theyâre teaching writing. For example, in the 61,000-student Douglas County district, administrators have added more professional development for teachers in evidence-based writing approaches and are prioritizing explicitly teaching writing to students. Similar efforts are underway in , , and .
Many school leaders say theyâre seeing promising results, indicating that Americaâs children can write better â if they have the right instruction.
âWriting is the last bastion of education,â said Randy Barth, CEO of , which trains teachers in the âscience of writing,â encompassing a growing body of research on effective writing instruction. âWriting, I would say, is the last thing that the education system is putting money towards.â
For years, while America has been focused on math and reading â and in recent years, the â writing has largely been ignored.
Unlike for reading and math, national data on writing proficiency for elementary-age students is sparse. America has not released nationwide standardized writing scores from elementary school grades , when 27% of fourth graders scored proficient or higher.
Nationwide, thereâs no good way to know how elementary students are doing when it comes to writing, said Vicki McQuitty, a professor in Towson Universityâs elementary education program and director of the Maryland Writing Project, an initiative aimed at improving writing instruction. âBut the word on the street is that kids canât write.â
An analysis of recent state test results seems to confirm this. In 2025, more than half of Texasâ 360,000 third graders for their responses on an essay prompt in the stateâs annual English language arts test that asked them to compare and contrast two texts. In California the same year, only met the standard for well-organized writing on an essay asking them to demonstrate research skills when responding to a prompt. And in Florida, students on average scored 6 out of 12 possible points on the stateâs writing test.
The results arenât much better as students age. For years, , and high school teachers have that students struggle to write coherent, multi-paragraph essays when they arrive in their classrooms or apply for jobs.
Elementary teachers, responsible for the heavy lift of early writing instruction, say theyâre up against a host of challenges. Writing is a demanding task for students, requiring a certain amount of to understand the material, fine motor skills and vocabulary, among other skills.
âI think writing is the hardest thing to teach,â said Chrissy Everett, a fourth grade teacher at Prairie Crossing Elementary in the Douglas County district and an educator of 23 years, because it involves executive function skills and knowing âhow to piece it all together and what steps to do next.â
While the âscience of writingâ as the science of how children learn to read, experts generally agree on practices that are key to teaching students how to write. For example, students should be given time each day to write and taught different genres and purposes of writing. Educators should also explicitly instruct students in individual starting with handwriting, spelling and vocabulary.
Adrea Truckenmiller, an associate professor at Michigan State Universityâs college of education, whose research has focused on writing, said students need to learn that a complete sentence includes a subject and a verb, not just a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end. Later, they must be taught how to connect ideas by expanding and combining sentences. Finally, they can tackle essays, using worksheets and charts to plan their writing.
But research shows vary in how much and what they teach aspiring educators about writing instruction. Many courses. âEven teacher educators do not always feel comfortable teaching preservice teachers about writing,â said McQuitty, from Towson. âItâs always pushed to the back.â
Once in the classroom, teachers are under pressure to prepare students for standardized tests that emphasize , experts say, often to the detriment of other subjects.
âI just assumed writing instruction was happening, but every time I walk into a classroom my assumption is proven wrong,â said Truckenmiller.
Adding to the challenge is that after spending their early years scrolling iPads and pecking at keyboards, some kids struggle to even hold a pencil. Christina Bretz, an occupational therapist with Learning Without Tears, a company that sells early reading and writing curriculum and materials, said she recently met a kindergartener who had never seen crayons and only knew how to color by using his finger on an iPad.
âAs weâre seeing more children use devices, we start to see less of them manipulating objects with their hands,â said Bretz.
In 2023, district leaders in Douglas County noticed scores on the elementary writing portions of state tests were far lower than on the reading portions. As they dug into the districtâs approach, âwe found that teachers didnât know how to teach writing,â said Janet Merrill, literacy coordinator for the school system.
District officials realized teachers had largely been left on their own to teach writing and were using a hodgepodge of methods. âIn the past, really just whatever a teacher could find from Teachers Pay Teachers or something online was where we were,â Merrill said.
Without districtwide common strategies, writing instruction varied greatly from class to class, and teachers often felt like they were starting each year from square one, Merrill said. Teachers largely focused on creative writing, asking students to write about a favorite vacation or birthday, Merrill said.
âWe did âDescribe your shoeâ for like a month. And then you described your backpack,â she added. âItâs just this random writing.â
Merrill started researching science-backed ways to teach writing and learned about an approach that disability advocates in the district were championing, called Self-Regulated Strategy Development. Rather than focusing on creative writing, SRSD is prescriptive, encouraging students to respond to texts using evidence and giving them specific strategies for planning and organizing writing.
With help from a group called , the district rolled out a new approach to writing with 100 instructional coaches and teachers across its more than 70 elementary schools. Three years later, every elementary teacher in the district is following the same process: reading and analyzing examples of writing with their class; using a routine for analyzing and responding to a prompt; and relying largely on writing responses to texts, rather than creative freewrites. Teachers model the strategies and their easy-to-remember acronyms, like âTIDE,â which stands for âtopic, important details, and ending.â Students at every grade level repeat the same process, with slight variations for younger students.
The districtâs new approach also teaches students to be resilient as they write. They start their drafting process by writing a positive phrase to themselves, which they can read when theyâre feeling frustrated or stuck.
Around the corner from Graceâs classroom, students in Kristin Allenâs kindergarten class had just finished reading a story about a group of animals who made a gift for a turtle.
Now, Allen was working with small groups of students to help them retell that story in writing. Before the four students sitting with her got started, Allen asked them what they should write at the top of their papers.
The children thought for a moment and started scribbling down affirmations on their pages. Allen asked them to share.
âI can do this,â said one child.
âI am smart,â said another.
Then Allen asked them to write a topic sentence about the story, followed by three details from it.
âThe anumls make a gift for turtle,â one girl wrote.
Allen was quick to correct spelling and punctuation. She paid close attention to how students held their pencils. She encouraged them to leave spaces between words.
This was Allenâs first year back in the classroom after taking several years off to spend with her own children. Prior to that, she taught kindergarten in New Jersey for 10 years. When she first started teaching, âI did not see anything like this,â Allen said, motioning to papers covered with her studentsâ writing, which in some cases included full paragraphs. âSome people have the attitude that âOh, theyâre kindergarten, theyâre five and six, they canâtâ.â They can.â
Allen was eager to learn the SRSD method. But not all teachers are. Merrill said some veteran teachers were reluctant, worrying that kids wouldnât love writing with such a prescribed process â but sheâs not sure students enjoyed the old process as much as their teachers believed.
âThey saw this blank page and they just were like, âI donât even know where to start.ââ Merrill said. âNow, students love writing because they have the skill to actually write.â
What helped convince teachers was seeing near-immediate effects from the early adopters who piloted the approach. After the first year, educators in higher grades noticed kids who had been taught via SRSD were entering middle school with better writing skills, and they started asking their colleagues what had changed in elementary classrooms.
Federal research has found the SRSD approach across different genres, grades and assignments, and can be an effective for students with learning disabilities. But despite the behind SRSD and similar approaches based on the science of writing, they havenât made it into mainstream curricula and classrooms in part because thereâs still not widespread awareness of them among educators, experts say.
âWe have this knowledge base concentrated in a really small number of people that hasnât been scaled yet,â said Truckenmiller, from Michigan State University. In addition, schools have competing priorities, she said, often thinking they need to get reading instruction right first before focusing on writing.
But in Douglas County, officials say focusing on writing is key to improving reading. And theyâve already noticed a difference in test scores: After a year of rolling out the strategy in a handful of schools, the district said it saw state writing scores increase by 3 percentage points. Math scores increased too, which district officials attribute to students having the skills to better analyze questions and problems. This summer, at the request of educators in the district, Merrill and her colleagues will begin training all their middle school teachers in SRSD.
Students have noticed the difference as well.
Last year, âyou just had to sit down and write,â said Connor Miles, a fourth grader in Everettâs class at Prairie Crossing Elementary. How did that make him feel? âCompletely lost,â he said.
One of Connorâs classmates, 10-year-old Arya Melancon, said this year, teachers are better able to explain the process of writing. They are providing her and her peers with strategies and systems, and she likes sorting through evidence from texts and âbuildingâ paragraphs and responses.
âWeâve definitely improved this year. We have a better understanding,â she said. The difference was most glaring to her and her classmates when they sat down to take their end of grade state test in the spring, she added.
âLast year we were all scared of writing prompts,â Arya said. âThis year, we felt like we were ready.â
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