By Deana Hippie

    We all know the feeling: I’ve tried everything, and they are still not getting it. I had volunteered to teach the intervention class for students who failed the California High School Exit Exam. The exam includes a direct assessment of writing, and my students were all basic or below basic writers. They just didn’t understand the necessity of providing adequate support for their ideas. I said the words specific ideas, evidence, and elaboration time and again, but they just didn’t “get it.”

    Over the course of my career, I came to understand that if something wasn’t working, and it should have been, then there was either a gap in the instructional sequence or in the student’s conceptual understanding. I was confident the instructional sequence was fine, so it had to be a conceptual gap in my students.

    I wish I could say that I sat down and thought the problem through, but I can’t. Fortunately, my principal had introduced us to the work of Robert Marzano and his colleagues that resulted in his book Classroom Instruction That Works. The book is a product of a meta-study of educational research and lists the Top 10 strategies for increasing student achievement.

    First on the list is identifying similarities and differences. Included in the strategy are the concepts and skills of sorting on the basis of comparison and classification based on levels of comparison and contrast.

    At some point, a thought surfaced and led me to wonder if my students could sort and classify. Closely following that question was the understanding that if they could not sort and classify, they would not be able to understand the structure of informative/explanatory text: the movement from general to specific to more specific ideas.

    My first step was to find out if my students did understand how to sort. I gave each of them an assortment of buttons that I purchased at a local craft store and asked them to sort the buttons. Absolutely nothing happened. In high school, when kids respect you and have no idea what to do, they do not make eye contact. That morning I was looking at the tops of 28 heads. 

    After a few moments, I asked them to look at the buttons and see if there was a way they could separate them into at least two piles so that every button in the pile had at least one similarity. Finally, one of them said, “I have big buttons and small buttons.” I responded that he had just sorted the buttons based on the criterion of size.

    Then, things started happening. Students noticed different ways to sort: color, number of holes, the surface (flat, concave, convex), the kind of clothing it could be on. I asked them to choose one criterion and divide the buttons into at least two piles based on the criterion. I then asked them to look at each of the resulting piles and find a criterion they could use to sort each of the smaller piles.

    They were engaged; I felt like a real teacher. However, when I tried to use their experience to transfer to an understanding of the structure of expository, it didn’t work.

    I had hoped that they would then be able to understand how to use an informal outline to plan an expository composition. It was now a problem of gaps in the instructional process.

    We sorted the buttons again, but this time we not only sorted the buttons into piles but also created an outline based on the topic of buttons. The first sort led to the specific ideas of small, medium, and large. Then they chose the criterion for the more specific ideas, such as color, number of holes, etc. I asked them what they noticed as they sorted the buttons into piles. They could see that the piles got increasingly smaller.

    At that point, I introduced the terms general, specific, and more specific. I had them label the outline as follows: the topic is the general idea; the first division yields specific ideas, and the final more specific ideas. (Later, several students told me that it was the first time they really “got” what those terms meant.)

    Because of the previous failure to transfer skills, I learned that making the leap from manipulatives to creating their own outlines didn’t work. Therefore, I provided words and phrases that the students had to sort, classify, and organize into an outline similar to the one we used to plan our compositions. For example: transportation, air, land, sea, planes, helicopters, cars, trains, motorcycles, animals, ships, sailboats, and canoes.

    When we returned to working within the writing process, I first used topics that asked students to essentially sort and classify information, similar to the word sort above. We then moved to topics that were less concrete, such as the qualities of a good friend. It was then I began to see that they were finally beginning to understand what it means to explain and elaborate.

    When I pointed out that they needed to provide more specific examples of those qualities, such as loyalty and generosity, they began to understand the meanings of specific ideas, evidence, and elaboration—and were on their way to becoming proficient writers.

    Deana Hippie taught language arts for 33 years in the Corona-Norco Unified School District in Southern California. During the last three years of her teaching career, she worked with students who had failed the California High School Exit Exam. She was Riverside County Teacher of the Year in 2005 and a member of the United States Department of Education Teacher to Teacher Corps for three years.

Since retiring in 2006, she has been a trainer for Step Up to Writing®. When not working, she enjoys spending time with her horses and competes in carriage driving.