1 Powerful Writing Tip: Use colour coding to teach organization in expository writing.

Sometimes, the simplest tweak does the job.

If you have students who struggle with executive skills , you might have noticed that these students find it very challenging to organize their thoughts during the writing process.  Using graphic organizers during the pre-writing/planning stage certainly helps, but what if a student doesn't have the time to do pre-planning?  Or, what if they are the type of student who balks at pre-writing. I just want my students to write and some students can actually edit and revise as they go along.

So that brings me to my class of ELA 7s in a school dedicated to students with diagnosed learning disablities.  ALL of my students struggle with organization.  And, most of them really don't understand what it means to "organize" ideas around a thesis statement. I also find that using a organizational graphic organizer like Maraconda's "Expository Pillar" doesn't always do the trick either.

What did work for my students? Colour coding.

And the best part was that we stumbled upon that little nugget totally by chance.

My students are reading Skellig and I want them to extract information from the text and describe what the main characters are like. So, we brainstormed word lists that describe the characters, we worked on establishing plot events that show these characteristics, and then we worked hard on developing very simple thesis statements such as "Mina is a fascinating person because she is kind, perceptive and critical".

This took a few days.  Such thinking is very challenging because students have to hone down all of their thoughts into one general, yet focused statement of intent.

I felt that this would result in simple, yet clear and organized writing. For some of my students that was the case, but for one student in particular, his writing was still profoundly disorganized.  It was clear to me that he had ideas, but even when I tried to map his writing out, I could see he was struggling to understand that each paragraph in his essay needed to correspond to 1 idea mentioned in his thesis statement.  As an emerging writer, this student had not yet internalized the organizational structure of formal, expository writing and, after going through his piece with him, I could see him beginning to lose not only his focus, but, most importantly, his confidence.  I could literally see him thinking: "Oh boy, another piece of writing that's sucks."

Desperate to find a way to make this highly abstract concept work for him, I appealed to one of his strengths: visual representation.  I went back to his thesis statement.

I colour-coded each one of his three main ideas.  Rather like a legend, we decided that kindness=yellow, perceptive = green, and critical =orange.  I also added a fourth colour, pink, which equaled "random".  Then, I asked him to go back to his text armed with four highlighters of those colours and  asked him to highlight each sentence with the colour that matched the idea being discussed.

Well.

Talk about a lightbulb moment for this young writer.  Excitedly, he turned to me, eyes wide with realization.  "I get it!" he excitedly proclaimed.  "I have to keep all the colours together, and get rid of everything that is pink!"

I love it when a simple "lifehack" has  a profound effect upon a student's learning.

To extend this activity further, when my students peer edit and I want them to focus upon organization, each student creates a legend for their thesis statement, and then their peer editor goes through their essay and highlights each sentence in the appropriate colour. It's hand-on, it's visual, and it's fun.  Furthermore, the conversations that the students have about organization and ideas is deeper and more critical than any lesson I could ever provide.

Together, let's re(vision) our practice. It's worth every lightbulb out there!