Modelling academic writing to make explicit the connections between concepts
This series of blogs is based on the following premise: that we need to think carefully about how concepts are connected within our discipline if we are to get subject-specific pedagogy, curriculum planning and assessment right.
It is not enough to talk loosely about building schemas, represented by dots and lines that tell us little more than we already know by intuition. We need to make the logical connections between concepts explicit to our students, and provide them with an understanding of how those connections differ according to the different branches of knowledge.
In my last two blogs, I focused on dual coding. I attempted to show why dual coding works in science and why it is much more difficult to get right in history and other humanities subjects. The logical structure of the knowledge produced by those disciplines is much more complex than that characteristic of science.
In this blog, I will explore a pedagogical tool that really does make the connections between concepts manifest in history. Building on Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s book, ‘The Writing Revolution’, I will argue that modelling academic writing offers a highly effective means of showing students how historians and scholars in other disciplines connect concepts. In my next blog, I will go on to show how such modelling can be useful for science teachers too.
The Writing Revolution
‘The Writing Revolution’, published in 2017, offers a wealth of advice about how teachers can model the process of writing formally to their students. It makes two main claims.
Firstly, that writing is something that needs to be explained and practised explicitly and systematically. It is taught, not caught, at a word and sentence level rather than through unstructured extended writing tasks.
Secondly, that writing is not something that can be taught discretely. Students must be trained to write well through their subjects, not just by their English teachers or in standalone ‘literacy activities’.
While I’m a huge fan of Hochman and Wexler’s book, I think the explanations they offer as to why their methodology works lack clarity. For example, in their introduction they argue that, “when students write about the content they’re studying, they learn to synthesize information and produce their own interpretations. That process helps them absorb and retain the substance of what they’re writing about and the vocabulary that goes with it. …
“Writing and content knowledge are intimately related. … the process of writing will deepen [students’] understanding of a topic and help cement that understanding in their memory.”
As we saw in the case of the diagrams representing schemas, there is a problem with explanations of this sort. Such explanations use metaphor to attempt to express what we already know, but they do not give us any clear idea of how modelling academic writing actually helps students learn.
What is this substance being absorbed and retained? What does it mean for understanding to deepen and be cemented in memory? We all know that writing and content knowledge are intimately related. The important question is: how?
Second order concepts and word choice
I would argue that the power of modelling academic writing lies in its ability to make the logical connections between concepts manifest. I first observed this in history, after being fortunate enough to work with the brilliant Haighley Cobbson.
She explained to me how she introduced second order concepts into her lessons. First, she would choose a second order concept to focus on over the course of a unit of work. We can consider the simplest example: continuity and change. Next, she would choose three words that capture that second order concept and explicitly teach the meanings of these words to her students over the course of the unit of work. For continuity and change, these words might be rapidly, inexorably, and unexpectedly.
The magic happened when she modelled the construction of sentences to her students. When writing about hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, she would take time to explain why she was using a word like rapidly to describe the increases in prices.
By adding such an adverb, (she might also have chosen words like dramatically or even alarmingly), she was making it clear to the reader that she understood the second order concept of continuity and change. This was no ordinary inflation; it would have been incorrect to use qualifiers like gradually, or steadily, or predictably.
The whole meaning of the sentence thus hinged on the correct use of one word. Drawing students’ attention to this fact is a seriously powerful pedagogical tool.
Making connections explicit
This is a simple example, but hopefully offers an illustration of how thoughtful modelling of academic writing can make the logical connections between concepts in history — in this case, the use of an adverb to highlight the second order concept of change — manifest to students.
As we saw in an earlier blog, we all know that experts in a field can weave together complex arrays of ideas into a seemingly coherent narrative or pattern. Our job as teachers is to take what is implicit within the writing of an expert — namely, the logical connections between concepts — and make it explicit to our students.
I believe that this is what makes the approach outlined in the Writing Revolution effective: if we can emphasise how certain words convey the logical structures of our disciplines to our students, we are making explicit how the concepts within our subjects are linked together. As I shall discuss in my next blog, this is as true for science as it is for history or other humanities subjects.
