Writing Across The Curriculum (Yikes)

Every year, somewhere in the country, some school official gets an idea. "Writing is super important (and also kind of on the Big Standardized Test)" or maybe "I went to a conference and heard about this cool thing," and so BAM it's time for Writing Across The Curriculum!

WAC has so much history as instructional approach that it even has its own Wikipedia page. It's particularly beloved at the collegiate level, which means of course that it has percolated down into K-12, getting a particular juice from Common Core as some fans declared it a "perfect fit" (because if Common Core was good for one thing, it was good for prompting cries of "Hey, this thing that I already want to do turns out to be a Perfect Fit for these new standards! Who'da thunk it?")

But if you are a high school English teacher and an edict that "all teachers will have writing as a part of their class, now" gives you a Mariana Trench-sized pit in the sinky parts of your stomach, your sense of onrushing disaster is well-founded. 

Here are all the ways this is going to go wrong.

The sheer time suck

One of the most discouraging phrases in the teaching world is, "Don't worry. This will just take a few minutes of class time every week." It's an arrow into any teacher's heart because

1) No, it won't. Not if it's going to be done well.

2) Nobody outside of the classroom counts transition time. Even if it only took ten minutes, it would eat more than ten minutes of class time. 

3) "A few minutes" every week adds up to a school year that is days, even weeks shorter.

Number of high and middle school teaching colleagues excited about giving up yet another chunk of time? Zero. Also

4) The discouraging realization that your admins think your job is so easy anyone can do it.

No, not just anybody can teach writing

In your high/middle school, there is a non-zero number (possibly a very high non-zero number) of people whose last writing instruction came in their own high school days. Maybe in college some professor asked them to write a paper, but that professor probably didn't provide any guidance on how to do it.

In other words, WAC involves recruiting a whole lot of people to do a job they're not qualified to do. Any English teacher who has worked for more than fifteen minutes can tell you the stories of unteaching something that has been taught in other classrooms. No, you don't just put a comma anywhere you take a breath. Yes, you can start a sentence with "because." No, a paragraph doesn't have to have exactly three sentences. Or just the incredulous who in God's name ever taught you to do that?

A non-zero number of colleagues know this would put them in over their heads. Holy hell!" They will exclaim. "I don't know anything about teaching writing!" with either fear or anger. Much the same way I would have reacted had my administration told me I was going to start including trigonometry or band saw operation in my weekly lesson plans.

Hey, we can hire a consultant!

Of course, there are plenty of people ready to make money from help you with your WAC distress. We used such a consultant at my old district, and I see that these days they are doing gangbuster business on the backs of such proprietary genius as making students write only on every other line and reducing all writing to five simple categories. It did not last long at our district, nor did it deserve to.

WAC programs generally involve some version of turning to the scared/angry not-English-teachers and saying, "It's okay. We'll just scale this down and make it really simple for you." Preferably something that can be taught in a short professional development session or two. The notion that writing instruction can be reduced to something quick and simple and easy is a bad place to start, but you can ask two questions to determine if your consultant is lost far in the weeds:

1) Would this be a good way to train teachers whose job was primarily to teach writing?

2) Would the teachers who already teach writing have to dumb down their program to comply with your consultant's super-duper WAC program?

About "instruction"

WAC defenders will have already muttered at their screen, "Why are you talking about writing instruction? We're just talking about using writing in all the other classrooms, not teaching it."

Really? You are going to assign your students a task, but you're going to provide no instruction about how you want them to do it? 

What the heck are you even doing?

Oh, what's that you say...?

Where does it all eventually land?

The very worst iteration of WAC is the one where some non-zero number of non-English teachers just pass the buck back to the English department. 

"I don't know. Just go ask your English teacher about that." 

"I'm not sure how to grade these, really--could you just scan through this stack for me?"

"Hey, English department, people are really freaking out over this. Could you just whip up a set of guidelines and stuff for every other department in the school? Just use a couple of your prep periods. And if anyone has any questions, they can just come to you, right?"

WAC programs are a great way to send English teachers into hiding.

So is WAC utterly hopeless?

Not necessarily. It's possible to hire your own teachers to develop a program that will work in house (by "hire" I mean pay them for their time and expertise rather than asking them to throw something together during the five minutes they use to scarf down lunch). It will be better than hiring some consultant or, worse yet, just running off some handouts you got at that last administrator conference where you heard about WAC.

Nor am I suggesting that English teachers should be the gatekeepers of the mystic, esoteric art of writing, preserving it as a special practice accessible only to the elite few. 

It's not only possible but desirable for teachers to use writing in certain focused ways. "Write an explanation of this concept" is a far better assessment than "answer some multiple choice questions sort of about pieces of this concept" -- but only if you are clear about expectations and focus. Don't dock a student point because they explained quantum entanglement well but broke some punctuation rule you half remember from your tenth grade English class. 

Teaching writing is hard; the teachers in your building who already do it do not agree on precisely the best way. Ditto assessment. Assessing writing is hard--and it's also messy and not at all conducive to hard-numbered data. And all assessments have to be created with a deliberate specific purpose, or they're junk. All of these assumptions have to be part of your WAC program. 

Also, please note. There is absolutely, positively no such thing as the Science of Writing. 

A WAC program that starts with an administrator gesturing vaguely Over There while announcing that from now on, students will regularly write in all their class is destined for a non-zero amount of mess and frustration and very little useful, meaningful building of skills.