(And how that debate has helped me to be a better writing teacher)

My friend group in college had a running joke about whether any given thing qualified as a Bachelor of Arts (BA) or a Bachelor of Science (BS). I can’t even remember how it began, but for a period we would label everything as either a BA or BS. Is cooking a steak an art or science? Is cooking someone in a game of air hockey an art or a science? We would approach these debates with mock seriousness (often siding with our majors; Go Arts!), but the underlying punchline was that the clean divide put up between arts and sciences is more than a little ridiculous because most things are a bit art and bit science, including art and science. 

I bring this up because I’ve noticed that a similar divide often exists in educational circles. On the one side are the scores of Pinterest-perfect classrooms on social media and the speakers, podcasts, and conferences that lean heavily into pageantry and personality. These inspirational, aspirational influencers and presenters often focus heavily on the idea that adding more style, humanity, and/or artistry to teaching is an underutilized key to improving student outcomes.   

On the other side are those who make the case that the key to improving outcomes is to bring in more science. A number of pedagogical trends since I began my career—from the push for more “Brain Science” in the early 2000s to the recent hurricane of the “Science of Reading”—have argued that if we teachers were simply more scientific, our students would be in a far better place. 

What frustrates me about this divide is that, like my mock debates in college, both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Teaching is a double major—a Bachelor of Science and Arts. The human brain works and learns in many predictable ways, and our teaching and curriculum should absolutely be built upon that science. 

At the same time though, simply following the science is not as easy as it sounds. Education is infamous for how difficult it is to replicate study results and pedagogical practices across classrooms and contexts. Something that works in the lab often doesn’t work the same in a classroom, and what works beautifully in my classroom may fall flat in a classroom across the country, or across the hall for that matter. 

This is where artistry comes in. Results and practices struggle to replicate in schools because teaching doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a unique classroom, in a unique school, and with a unique blend of personalities in each class. 100 researchers given 100 years likely couldn’t fully unpack the various dynamics at play in my classroom over a given year. It takes artistry to successfully read and respond to our complex day-to-day.

This is why, at least within the walls of this newsletter, I’m calling for a truce. Only by combining our best understanding of both the science of learning and the artistry of teaching can we have the largest impact. In this spirit, I want to talk over the next few weeks about how both science and art factor into my approach to writing instruction for the year. Today, I want to start with a simple concept that lies at the heart of my writing instruction all fall: Starting Small While Looking Big. 

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The importance of starting small ironically comes from the fact that writing is a very big and complex task. Let’s just take a moment to marvel at some of the concepts a student must understand to write an essay well:

• Letter sounds and shapes
• Word spellings and meanings
• A whole textbook worth of grammar concepts
• Various types of punctuation and their various rules
• Different sentence structures
• Organizational tools ranging from transitions to topic sentences
• Rhetorical tools and literary devices
• Audience, exigence, and purpose
• The surface and deeper features of the text being discussed
• Genre conventions
• Important elements of argumentation, ranging from having a clear thesis to thoughtful evidence
• The student’s understanding of and approach to the steps of the writing process

The list could go on, and it’s enough to make one’s head spin. And indeed many of our students’ heads do spin when an essay arises and they must orchestrate these many things in concert with each other. The complexity of writing is a big part of why it perennially headlines the list of skills that students struggle with the most, which brings to mind an important question: How do strong writers do it well? 

The answer is long-term memory. As humans, our short-term memory and focus are very limited. We can only really pay attention to one thing at a time and hold a handful of things in our conscious working memory (aka what we can pay attention to in a given moment). Our long-term memory though is vast, and when we do something complex like writing, we lean upon our long-term memory to do a lot of the work. 

What that means in practical terms is that, as I type these words, I’m relying on my long-term memory to automatically remember spellings and word meanings, where the comma goes for an introductory clause or list, and that “long-term” gets a hyphen when acting as an adjective. Once a writer has internalized these sorts of basics in long-term memory, the basics become automatic, allowing the writer’s attention to turn to higher-order issues of style and content.

Understanding this helped me to understand my students’ struggles with writing. When a student struggles with adding meaningful analysis or interesting word choice to an essay, the root cause isn’t always that they don’t have anything to say about a book or have a small vocabulary; instead, the answer is often that their working memory and attention are so maxed out by things like spelling or punctuation, that they simply aren’t able to think about anything beyond those basics.

This is why a large number of influential writing programs advocate for starting with smaller basics. The science behind this is clear enough: If our students can encode the foundational basics in long-term memory first, they will be freed up to do more deep thinking and add more personal style later. This makes sense, but there is one large downside that often comes with this approach: Working on just the basics for weeks or even months can be really, really boring, which is why so many of these programs get less-than-favorable reviews from students and staff alike. 

This is where artistry comes in. When approached with artistry, the basics don’t have to be boring, which is where the idea of looking big comes into play. In my class, I start small in that I start focused on the basics, but we are also always looking at the bigger picture, which makes the basic information both more interesting and also easier for the students to learn. In particular, I am always looking big in three ways when I’m teaching the basics:

Using Expansive Framing

Expansive framing is something I’ve discussed before. It is where one looks beyond the bounds of a given assignment or lesson to see how it connects to the wider world. Expansive framing makes the basics more interesting because the students get to see the role those basics play in the larger picture. Expansive framing also makes the basics easier for students to learn because it gives them a larger framework to put the information into. This expansive framing can be seen in my metaphor lesson from my last post. The lesson makes clear that we aren’t just learning metaphors for a test on terms; we are learning them because they are powerful at helping our voices to be heard louder and clearer. This is why commercials, politicians, and authors speak in them. The right metaphor can also signal that there is a real human on the other end of the text, which is a very important skill in today’s world.  

Getting Nerdy

One thing to keep in mind about expansive framing is that it often focuses largely on utility. This isn’t a bad thing, as utility can be a powerful motivator. But as motivation expert Dave Stuart Jr. points out, utility is not the only motivator. Students can also be motivated by factors like novelty, beauty, purpose, or meaning. This is why I often seek to bring in the unusual, gorgeous, purposeful, and deep that are connected to a basic skill or idea. For example, when I discuss capital letters, I bring in their history:  

One might think that a class of 9th graders might glaze over at such historical minutiae, but my students really love it because it is so unusual and yet explains something so commonplace. It also opens up a deeper conversation about how many of the rules that exist in our language started in nonsensical ways and yet we’ve found ways to give sense to them.

Weaving a Web

Humans tend to remember things best when they have a schema for them and encounter them multiple times. With this in mind, I constantly seek ways to categorize and connect the things we learn. An analogy I got from Blake Harvard is that I’m regularly seeking to create spiderwebs of related information to help students understand how the basics fit together and encode them into long-term memory. If done well, I can also use these moments of connection as an opportunity to engage in retrieval practice to further improve memory.

In practice, this means I don’t just teach students what a sentence fragment is; we think how a purposeful fragment can be used for emphasis and debate when it makes sense to use a purposeful fragment over other emphatic tools like dashes or parallel structure. We also talk about other types of pattern breaks where writers purposefully break rules and patterns and why they would do that. I would argue that this connective tissue, especially when artfully woven to respond to the students in front of us, is a large part of why grammar seems to stick for my students better than approaches and curriculum that is missing that connective tissue.

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For me, starting small while looking large is a great example of why it’s important to think about teaching as both an art and science. The science of starting small has been a game-changer for my instruction, but it only made a major impact once I also embraced the artistry of looking big. I hope it helps you too, and next week, look for a shorter post with practical ways that I do this. 

Until then, I hope all of those who are starting school next week (like me), have a great start, and that everyone who has already started is having a great year so far. 

Yours in teaching,

Matt