Class act: On Laurel Street, visual cues help writers blossom
Published: June 14, 2011
When Francisca Owoaje took over as principal of the Laurel Street Elementary School in the Compton Unified School District, she quickly realized that the school’s writing instruction needed a major overhaul.
Even after they mastered other academic subjects, Laurel Street’s English learners—who constitute more than 60 percent of the school’s 517 students—continued to have problems with writing. Their native English-speaking classmates were also struggling with written English—even when their oral English and reading skills were strong.
“Even after we’d worked very hard to bring up their skills in other areas,” Owoaje recalls, “our students’ writing wasn’t something we were proud of. The things we were teaching in English and language arts weren’t showing up in their writing.”
Students had excellent ideas about what they wanted to say when they put pen to paper, but they were having trouble transforming their thoughts into coherent and organized paragraphs.
“There was a missing link,” says veteran teacher Angel Chavarin, who has taught third and fourth grades at Laurel Street for 14 years. “They would organize their ideas, but we didn’t have a link between the brainstorming or prewriting and the actual drafting stages.”
Laurel Street is one of 23 inner-city public elementary schools in the district that serve students defined as “at risk” of failing in school. Many are recent immigrants, and 90 percent qualify for free or reduced-price school meals. School staff felt it was essential that these students leave Laurel Street with all the skills they’d need to succeed—including writing.
In 2005, Owoaje recruited Chavarin and other teachers to meet informally with her during the summer to analyze the school’s writing programs and suggest improvements. It didn’t take long for the group to identify the problem.
“We had no schoolwide consistency about how we taught writing,” Chavarin says. “There was no explicit program, and the writing results were killing us on the state tests.”
Because Chavarin was an English learner himself as a young student, he was familiar with the challenges of learning to write in a second language. He and his colleagues compiled everything they knew about teaching writing. “We couldn’t find any ‘off-the-shelf’ program that would have worked for our students,” he recalls, “so we adapted and synthesized thinking and writing templates from other programs and made them our own.”
Laurel Street’s new writing program started on a very basic level. Teachers helped students “map” their ideas in a free-form outline before they began writing.
Over the next three years, members of the school’s writing committee developed a series of templates that illustrated the basic components of a paragraph and essay and enabled students to identify the essential ingredients that make up a readable paragraph.
“Part of the process of teaching writing is helping students think logically and critically,” Owoaje says. “Students need to learn the distinction between a major idea and a detail. Once that happens, the writing explodes.”
The writing committee also set goals for what students should be able to do at each grade level—benchmarks that sometimes exceeded the state’s own standards. By the end of first grade, for example, students need to be able to write a coherent and focused paragraph. By the end of fifth grade, the goal is for every student to be capable of writing a well-organized five-paragraph essay.
Laurel Street’s writing templates range from very basic for pre-kindergartners to more exacting for older students. The templates help students write engaging “hooks” to pull readers in, develop pertinent topic sentences and write “on-topic” paragraphs that include supporting details, logical transitions and a strong conclusion.
“We use thinking maps and templates that are kinds of graphic organizers that synthesize the paragraph format,” Chavarin says. “This helps kids take their ideas from the abstract to the concrete.” In 2010, CSBA awarded the program a Golden Bell for its success in bridging the achievement gap.
—Carol Brydolf
Who: Laurel Street Writing Program
What: Revolutionary writing program that helps students ‘visualize’ paragraph and essay structure
Where: Laurel Street Elementary School, Compton Unified School District
When: since 2006
Why: to close the achievement gap with disadvantaged students and affluent classmates by teaching students to become excellent thinkers and writers