Assigning writing is not teaching. Writing and having students write a lot is not teaching writing. It's just like if you put a lot of books in a classroom, students don't magically begin to read.
This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. This is episode 11 in our reading reboot, reexamining and building on foundational literacy concepts. If you've been on this journey with us, you know that we've been bringing writing into this season's conversations, as we've talked about again and again. It's so important to understand the interconnectedness of reading and writing.
And now, as we head into this season's home stretch, we have some episodes lined up that are specifically focused on the critical role of writing. Today, we're fortunate to be joined by the perfect person for this topic, Dr. Judith Hochman, author and founder of The Writing Revolution. Dr. Hochman is a longtime educator whose approach to writing instruction was featured in an award-winning 2012 article in The Atlantic.
From there, she founded The Writing Revolution, a not-for-profit organization that spreads evidence-based strategies for writing instruction. Along with Natalie Wexler, she authored "The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades," which recently released a second edition. And on this episode, Dr. Hochman talks about how and why writing is so critical to literacy development.
And she details some explicit writing instruction methods. Also, we've gotten lots of great listener mailbag questions about serving students in middle and high schools. Dr. Hochman lays out some strategies that are effective for students at all grade levels. Here's the conversation. Judith Hochman, we are so excited to have you on today's episode. Thank you so much for joining us.
And thank you for having me.
Is it OK if I call you Judy?
Of course.
OK , that's great.
Everybody else does .
Perfect. Well, Judy, we would love for you to introduce yourself to our listeners. And just tell us a little bit about your background.
I'm with The Writing Revolution, a not-for-profit organization that we founded 10 years ago in response to a lot of interest about the method, the approach, we use to teach writing. Prior to that, as a classroom teacher in general education classes, and later as special education in a school for learning- and language-disabled students, my interest in writing became very acute. For a variety of reasons.
As a possible tool that could help kids express themselves with more facility. And I heard about a conference given in Hoboken, New Jersey, of all places . This was in the 80s. They were dealing with a very large influx of Spanish-speaking students. And they were focusing on writing. And I decided to go. It was there that I had an epiphany, that our students really had to learn writing as a second language.
Just like they are today, many times students write the way they speak. And, I might add, not just students.
Yes. We do that too, don't we?
We certainly do, including me. You know, using fragments, and run-ons, and pronouns with no reference. So the notion of adding the precision and the accuracy that writing requires became something that I really wanted to focus on.
Interesting. Can I step back just a little bit? So you started as a classroom teacher.
For many years.
What brought you into education to begin with?
Necessity. Because the person I was married to was in law school in Ithaca. And I really wanted to be a journalist, which is very hard to do in Ithaca. So I went to a school of education and decided one of us had to be earning money while the other one was in graduate school. But, I have to say, the minute I walked into my first sixth grade classroom, that was it for me. I knew I was where I belonged.
Were you also an administrator? Did I get that right?
Yes, I started to go over to the dark side, as my colleagues reminded me . after some years of teaching, I became a director of curriculum. And then I became the head of this independent school for learning- and language-disabled students.
And the 12 years that I was there was when I had, let's say, the freedom to put in place the kind of reading programs that I felt were gonna be most beneficial for them , as well as the kind of writing and math programs. And during that period was when I became very focused on writing.
And it's really interesting, I didn't know that you were interested in journalism before you got into education. And so there's a writing thread that goes through there isn't there?
There is a writing thread.
Alright . So you go to this conference in Hoboken, New Jersey to learn about writing. What did you learn there? And what did you bring back? And how did that develop?
Even when I was an administrator, I did not leave the classroom. I made it my business to keep teaching. Because when you're standing in front of kids is really the best way to learn, I think always, what works and what doesn't.
I learned that even though I didn't know much about working memory and cognitive load at the time, that if we broke writing, the most difficult skill to teach and to learn, down into manageable segments, the ability to acquire what they needed to learn would be easier for kids and put less pressure on them.
And then, in the limited time that we had to teach writing, I decided that it might be best not to teach it as a separate skill, but to embed it in the content that we were teaching. If we were learning about the history of the early Central American civilizations, we should be writing about that. And , I often had teachers come in and watch me, because their feedback was very important to me.
And through some trial and error, we focused early on on the sentences. The foundational building block for all of this.
And so, this approach that you sort of outlined developed over time. Then by trial and error, with students in the classroom, to see what worked and what didn't work.
And you have to remember, Susan, at that time, there's very little research on writing. Particularly what would be most applicable to classroom function. Now, I was focused on learning- and language-disabled students, the students that were in our school. But a couple of years after I became the head of that school, we started a teacher training institute.
Because we felt we were learning things about both reading and writing that we wanted to share. And as time went on, what we noticed was that more and more mainstream teachers were coming into these classes. Because the mission of the school was to return students successfully to the mainstream. And what they were seeing, both in private and public schools, was that our kids were writing better.
And so, it was just word of mouth, it got out, and the classes became quite successful. And then the research started to come out, which validated a lot of what we were doing, as well as taught us a lot about where our empathies should be.
What was happening. So if writing wasn't being taught well, what was happening? Were teachers trying to teach writing, or were they not teaching writing? What did that literacy block look like?
They thought they were teaching writing, just like I did when I started assigning writing. And some of their assignments were wonderful.
Yeah.
It's not teaching writing. And having students write a lot is not teaching writing. It's just like if you put a lot of books in a classroom, students don't magically begin to read.
Right.
And so, somehow I knew that intuitively, because writing doesn't come so easy to me. In spite of the fact that I wanted to be a journalist, you know, it took a certain amount of focus. So they started to do very well, and we moved from the foundational piece of sentences onward and upward.
It's really interesting. I've been watching a lot of kindergarten classrooms. Kindergarten teachers always ask questions, and say to students, "Can you answer that in a complete sentence? Can you answer that in a complete sentence?" But we often don't think about the power of sentences. What kind of things did you do with the students, as you were teaching them to write sentences?
Well, first of all, to expect a 5-year-old to understand conceptually what a complete sentence is, and I've heard some very interesting definitions in the hundreds of classrooms that I've been in in a very long teaching career. It's a noun and a verb. Well, OK.
Subject predicate, right .
Right, subject predicate, exactly. In fact, one of the courses that we give at The Writing Revolution is a K–2 course. And it's primarily priming the pump for writing through oral activities. So, we would ask them to expand kernel sentences. For example, here comes my journalistic background with who, what, when where, and why. So, we would give them a brief sentence like, "They Fought." Then we would ask them, "Who? When?
Where?" And if they were able to do it, "Why?" And you would get a complete sentence, a sentence that tells the reader everything they need to know, or the person who's listening to you everything they need to know. We would start at a very fundamental level with young children. He ran. Where ? To the park. When did he run? Yesterday he ran to the park.
Nice.
What does it start with? A capital. What does it end with? A period. So, that's the beginning of it.
So, I wanna talk a little bit about this Atlantic article, 'cause I think it's really important. You were seeing big gains with the students that you were serving, that were not typically developing. But your method then was being used other places with students that were?
Absolutely. And I'll tell you how this happened. The principal of a 3,000 student high school in Staten Island, New York was visiting art school for some reason or another. We were very big on displaying writing, and so she was very impressed with it. And she asked a little bit about the approach. And she said, "My students need this ."
This was a high school of 3000 kids, speaking many languages, that was actually a failing high school. The Atlantic article traced the trajectory of beginning this approach in a high school, to it becoming a showcase school in New York City, to really raising every metric you'd wanna see raised at a high school. And although it was famous for athletics, it also got famous for its moot court exercises .
And panels of kids used to answer questions to tons of visitors, from all over, who began to visit this high school. So that was basically what the article was about, with several examples of writing activities that produced this very nice outcome.
That must have been pretty gratifying for you to think, "Wow, we developed this in our school, and now it has applicability across schools."
Well, it really does. Right now I think it's in almost every state in the United States. And even internationally. We have big followings in Australia. All over.
That's really amazing.
It really is amazing.
Did the article call it the Hochman Method, or something like that? Was that the original method? I bet everybody knows it by The Writing Revolution, right?
Yes, that's right. But originally they just said, "All right , we're gonna do Hochman now after this lesson." I never named it Hochman , it really never had a name, but the article was titled, "The Writing Revolution." So we named this organization The Writing Revolution. We named our book "The Writing Revolution."
That's amazing.
We weren't very creative, Susan.
It sounds pretty creative, because it really has been a revolution. And now I am talking to a very famous person who put writing back in the hands of teachers and students, to help them be more successful in what they're doing.
We really wanted to empower teachers. I have three graduate degrees, from a well-known teaching institution. I did learn nothing about writing for any of my degrees. All of them could have incorporated something about writing. And, unfortunately, that's still pretty much the case. And then, in the decades that followed the 80s, there were other methods that were not as productive in teaching writing.
Because I always believed in very explicit, carefully scaffolded instruction for this very difficult skill. The only way we were gonna make it easier was to segment it into very granular pieces as we moved along.
Yeah. That's really important. And I think you said earlier that at the time you started doing this, there wasn't a lot of research on writing.
No.
So, there's two things that I wanna talk about here. First of all, let's talk about how when the research started to emerge. I remember in our pre-call you were telling me it was very affirming, because the work that you were doing with your students actually was aligned with what the research was saying. Did I get that right?
When the research began to come out? Yes. And we learned a lot from the research that came in. Such as Steve Graham's "Writing Next" and "Writing to Read." And we also followed the research of some of the language people, Anthony Bashir, Cheryl Scott . We learned a lot about syntax. We learned a lot about what doesn't work.
And we learned a lot of that by standing in front of the kids K–12 and really field testing this five days a week.
Yeah. I often talk to teachers and remind them that they can be their own researchers in their own classrooms. To try something small, like you did. Watch to see the impact that it has. Make adjustments when needed. And if it's working for the kids and you are actually seeing outcomes ... but I don't think all teachers are empowered or think that it's OK for them to do things in quite that way.
You know, teachers are very wise, and the fact is that they don't know enough about writing themselves. They weren't taught it. It's never, never the teacher's fault when the kids don't write well, if the teacher doesn't have a good grasp of the material himself . So it's great to build a community of teachers, and they share ideas.
But if the shared ideas are based on evidence and on some knowledge of working memory and cognitive load, you're really going to get these very developmentally inappropriate assignments of asking very young children to do things that they're simply not ready to do. And that's why a lot of kids hate to write.
Yeah. You know, I love that you said that, because I feel like when I was a teacher, I didn't teach writing either. I didn't know how to do it, and I just assumed that all the writing activities I was providing my students were, you know, that was instruction.
And so even though my kids were writing a lot, again, I was just giving them activities rather than helping them to understand, what you called, those building blocks. Starting with sentences, understanding sentences, and building up from there. So I can really relate to that.
And although we have a sequence that we teach the strategies in and the activities within each strategy, it's a recursive approach. You keep going back to the sentences.
So when you move from sentences to outlining for paragraphs, and writing the paragraphs themselves to compositions, and the outlines that they must write before they write compositions, and along the way we teach them how to summarize, and we teach them how to take notes, and how to revise. This is not learned by osmosis. And it's not learned by vague feedback, like, make it better or add more details.
You've got to be very granular. This is not a naturally occurring skill in human development, for any of us.
For sure. That is a really great segue. We had a question from our listener mailbag, and it comes from Chantel Little. She's a professional development lead in Brownsville area school district in Pennsylvania. And she wondered what a good scope-and-sequence is for elementary students to go from like sentence composition to paragraph and then whole text.
Can you give a couple of examples that might be in that scope-and-sequence that you talked about? Like what does sentence composition look like before we move to paragraph writing?
I wanna say something before I respond to that, which is a very good question. What's good for the elementary school is good for the high school and beyond, because the principles of teaching someone how to write coherently and with clarity don't change. Let me give you an example of a couple of sentence strategies that we would teach children in elementary school.
OK, great.
The big fan favorite are the basic conjunctions of because, but, so. Everybody seems to know about them. But that's made a very big change in teacher practice, for a lot of good reasons. When you give a student a sentence stem like, Abraham Lincoln was a great president, instead of asking, why was Abraham Lincoln a great president, and leaving that open-ended.
If you give them the stem ending with Abraham Lincoln was a great president because, Abraham Lincoln was a great president but, and so on, you're going to get a level of thinking about what they're being asked that you will not get with an open-ended question. You're targeting the thinking in a way that you're also doing a very interesting comprehension check.
Because this can look very elementary, like the birds flew south because, but, so, if we're reading a book to them. Or it can be very complex. If you're doing a research paper about Isaac Newton and what he's discovered. So the rigor of each of the activities is really driven by the content. I see writing as a very powerful learning tool . So, if you give them the colonel they fought. Well, who?
Union and Confederate soldiers. When? In 1863. Where? At Gettysburg. OK. You can teach them to begin with when, which is a structure seen very often in writing, beginning sentences with when. In 1863, the union ... and you get a sentence, which is giving a reader much more information than the complete sentence they fought.
By getting them to understand what fragments are, by repairing fragments, what run-ons are by repairing run-ons, you're moving them from writing the way they speak to the written structures of English. In third grade and beyond, we teach them a use that you almost never hear in spoken language, but you see very frequently in written language. That's a grammatical term, the appositive.
So, Susan Lambert, an excellent interviewer, meeting with Judy Hochman today. Instantly the sophistication of the sentence is ratcheted up a bit. But also the reader knows more about the topic. So, these are the types of strategies that we're doing with kids. One more strategy at the sentence level. We have a few more, but I wanna add one more. It's the subordinating conjunction.
Even with little kids, teaching them to begin sentences with, before I went to school, after I go to school, if I go to school. They're putting a dependent clause in front of that sentence. There is research that suggests that students who write complex sentences are much better able to process complex sentences when they hear or read them. This is critically important as far as comprehension.
It's also important as far as comprehension checks. I don't like the analogy killing a lot of birds with one stone, but I think you get what I'm saying here.
I do. Yeah, yeah.
So those are certain strategies. And as we move along in this scope-and-sequence, we're circling back to them. Why? Because they're gonna form the backbone of revision. And they're gonna form the backbone of the feedback we give students in revision. If we say, "Make the topic sentence better," well, that's not telling them anything.
If we say, "Why not add an appositive to the topic sentence," that's being very targeted in your feedback. Why not start your thesis statement with a subordinating conjunction, such as, although?
That's brilliant. Brilliant. Shoutout to Chantel for this great question, because it unpacked a whole lot of things. And what I hear you saying is there is a really strong relationship between understanding written composition and reading comprehension. And getting at students' literacy skills through written composition will help their reading comprehension.
No question. You said it much better than I did . Absolutely, absolutely. And please note that grammatical terms, like conjunction, subordinating conjunction, appositive, they are taught these terms, but in the context of teaching the writing itself. If you are asked to brainstorm with the class about good, met positives for Nelson, and be little kids know what appositives mean at the end of third, beginning of fourth grade.
They know it because it serves the purpose of the writing they're doing.
That makes so much sense.
So, moving on from sentences, Chantel , we go into outlining for paragraphs. And planning what you're going to write relieves cognitive load.
If you put a linear outline in front of a child with a beginning, a middle, and an end, the beginning is a topic sentence, the middle is words and phrases written in note form — we teach note-taking — and a concluding sentence, they have in front of them something that they can replicate on their own. Quickly and easily.
And something that's far easier for them to fluidly go into a written draft, t han say, for example, a concept map or a Venn diagram, which is great for teaching vocabulary concepts, but not moving to paragraphs. And for the Harvard outline, you know, roman numeral I, A, that requires a very high order of classification and categorization skills, which a lot of kids are not terribly adept at that.
And that shouldn't stop them from becoming competent writers. So this very simple format, of what we call an SPO, not too creative, Single Paragraph Outline . We're just not that creative. Is where we go from there. And we don't wait until we're finished with sentences, by the way. This is not a c heck o ff, c heck. RECURSIVE. We're g onna keep going back.
And we're g onna teach these single paragraphs in various t ext structures. So it could be cause-and-effect, it could be problem-solution, it could be narrative. And as we're doing this, we're teaching the transitions, first, next, finally, and tons of other transitions that children need to make the w riting flow when they get to the next step, which is compositions.
So, as you move along, you're laying the groundwork for what's coming next.
Yeah. And I can see that process, now that you said it, it doesn't matter what grade level.
No.
I could see how that could work with content you're teaching in third grade. I can see how that would work with content you're teaching in middle school. And I could see that work with content you're teaching in high school. So you can continue to come back, and put the content in front, but use that content as a way then to develop more and more skill in writing.
Before I went to this very large high school in New York City, in Staten Island, I was superintendent of schools after leaving the school.
The language school, yeah.
Yes. For a special act district in New York, which is schools that are in K–12 school districts that serve students who really can't be served in their population, either because they have emotional problems that can't be handled or they've broken the law. And coming to these residential treatment centers is an alternative to being in prison.
And that was a tremendous learning experience for me in seeing what works, because I took what I learned from the special ed school to this district, and it made a significant impact on the students writing at the high school level. And they had missed a lot of school . I mean this was challenging.
Yeah.
Because not only did they have their problems, but they missed a lot of school. And, you know, they wanna learn. Kids really do wanna learn. Assuming that you're giving them something that they're able to do.
So you took all of this work ... I could talk to you for hours about this. We'll maybe have to have another conversation.
My favorite subject.
Yeah . But you took all of this, and it turned into "The Writing Revolution," that you co-authored with our mutual friend, Natalie Wexler, who happens to be a journalist. How in the world did the two of you get together? And how did this book come out?
That's such a great story . Natalie is the best. She's amazing! She really is the best. A wonderful person, a wonderful journalist, and a wonderful writer.
Yes.
Far better than me, I might add . So, we were invited to go down to Washington by a pretty high administrator in Washington DC, who had visited the school for learning and language kids. And they heard about this approach, saw the product, this approach, and they invited us to come down and introduce it to the administrators of most of the schools, K–12, in DC .
So three of us go down, me and three teachers from this high school, who had a lot of experience. We talked about it. We presented it. And, to our shock, the chancellor at the time introduced us as what she was bringing in as the writing program. We thought this was an audition, or at least gaining some knowledge about what we saw, what worked. We didn't expect to be working in Washington.
Oh, wow.
So, as I stood sort of stunned at the elevator, there was Natalie, who was invited to be at this presentation. So she said, "I heard you mention that you're forming a not-for-profit." We were still in the process of forming this. And she said , "When you need a board of trustees," she said, "I'd be very interested in being on the board." And the rest is history. I don't know what I would've done without Natalie.
The organization formed. The book was written. We just put out the second edition, which is I think the new and improved second edition, which in the first one surprised us, because we didn't know the demand for teaching writing was as widespread and intense as it is.
Yeah. And I will say something about that first book, "The Writing Revolution." I think, just from hearing people across the country talk about it, the power of it is the way that it can be implemented into whatever you're doing. How you sort of support this idea of content development in kids learning content. And just the successes people are seeing. Both with students writing composition, but also as better comprehenders.
Better comprehenders. And guess what they're seeing? In England — and Natalie recently wrote about this, and showed me some research about this — they're seeing improvement in spoken language. And we saw this some time ago at that high school. Instead , they had a moot court presentation, and there were kids using therefore , and as a result, and in conclusion. And we were stunned. I mean, it was so exciting.
And when I mentioned this to the teachers, they all said, "Oh yeah, we see this in the classroom!"
That's amazing!
This is ripe for a doctoral dissertation here.
Well, there you go. All those folks out there that are thinking about doing a dissertation, think about doing some writing. Any final thoughts for our listeners?
You know, the gift of writing is really tremendous. Because, you teachers know, it's much more than the product on a piece of paper. It's helping students think more analytically, and critically. It's helping them read with more understanding. It's a powerful learning tool. You are judged by how you communicate. All of us are.
And it's not as heavy a lift as you think it is, because once you break it down into its component pieces, it's gonna work for you.
That's amazing. And so listeners, if you don't have "The Writing Revolution," go out and get the second edition. Practice with it, just like Judy Hochman did in her own classroom. And it has been such an honor to have you on today. Judy, thanks for your passion for writing. And thanks for all that you do. We appreciate you.
And thanks for having me. It's an honor to be with you, Susan.
Thank you. That was Dr. Judith Hochman. She's former head of The Windward School in White Plains, New York, former superintendent of the Greenburgh Graham Union Free School District in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Founder of the Windward Teacher Training Institute. And founder of The Writing Revolution.
She's also author of "Basic Writing Skills, A Manual for Teachers," and along with Natalie Wexler, "The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades." After we hung up, Judy sent us a note saying she wished she'd talk more about the importance of planning and revision. First of all, Judy, we will gladly have you back any time to talk in more detail about all of that.
I also want to remind listeners that she did have wonderful things to say about circling back to sentence strategies as the backbone of the feedback we give students in revision. You might remember she gave those great specific examples of offering feedback along the lines of add in a positive to the topic sentence, or start a thesis statement with a subordinating conjunction.
And when it comes to outlining, don't forget her great advice on Single Paragraph Outlines (SPOs). Coming up in our Season 10 reading reboot, we'll have more episodes explicitly focused on writing, including a wonderful conversation with Dr. Young-Suk Grace Kim from University of California, Irvine, who's done fabulous research in this area. And next time, we have an interesting conversation, with Michigan State University's Dr .
Adrea Truckenmiller , about writing, writing, assessment, and building academic language.
Instead of bucketing off words, sentences, and discourse or text level into three distinct buckets, I don't think it's a distinct bucket. I think it's rather a continuum from word to sentence to text.
That's next time. And don't forget to listen to the most recent episode of Beyond My Years, which features Kareem Weaver. In this conversation, with host Ana Torres , Kareem details some of the pivotal moments in his journey as a literacy champion.
Matter of fact, I had a kid, a young man who asked me, 'cause he was supposed to be released, he's like, "Weaver, can I extend for like just a few more months? I'm learning to read. I just need a little more time." I was like, "Man, I can't really. That's above my pay grade . I don't determine how long." And then he said this, "What I gotta do to extend for a few more months?"
Wow.
What he was really saying was, "Don't make me have to knock somebody upside the head to stay in here longer. I'm learning to read. Don't mess this up." That's really what he was saying.
Wow, in so many words.
Yeah. So I was like, "Listen. No , no , no. Don't go there. Let me work on it for you." But that's how desperate he was, trying to stay in jail.
That's available now in the Beyond My Years podcast feed. Remember to subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast on the podcast app of your choice, and share it with your friends and colleagues. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.