As a Humanities teacher I was always frustrated with my inability to showcase the depth of learning and growth that happened as a result of students writing in my class. Let’s face it, at an exhibition of deeper learning a piece of paper with handwriting, scribbles, arrows, highlighters and typing isn’t nearly as sexy as robots and roller coasters or performances and fieldwork. But today while working with two wonderful Language Arts teachers it hit me…it’s in the process that we go deep.  It’s not just what you write-which we are typically looking for to assess deeper learning-but it’s how you write… the writing process is deeper learning at its’ finest.

In the New Tech schools where I coach teachers are implementing Project Based Learning at various levels. Regardless of fidelity to the New Tech model and PBL, I frequently hear concerns about students writing fewer essays than they do in traditional classrooms. Teachers will tell me “last year my students wrote 10 essays, but here they only write 6. Is that OK?” From that question I tend to get on my soapbox about “depth not breadth” and the beauty of PBL, but today the teachers I worked with didn’t let me off the hook-they pushed me to give concrete examples for what that really looks like. I shared with them the following writing process that I followed in my PBL classroom:

1. Start out by looking at various models of writing in the same genre as the writing task. Use a Visible Thinking Routine such as “See, Think, Wonder” to get students to start analyzing good and not-so-good writing.
2. Give students the actual task and add to the visible thinking routine above. From the “think” column of this exercise start generating a list of what makes for an ideal piece of writing. From the “wonder” column start to generate a list of workshops and necessary scaffolds for the project.
3. Provide the following benchmarks, each checked off by the teacher: brainstorm, graphic organizer, outline.
4. Writers workshops as needed based on benchmarks.
5. Draft #1: based on the list of an ideal piece of writing in this genre (generated by the class during the visible thinking routine), develop a self-check where students look at their work against this list. Create a goal for their writing moving forward. Highlight any changes they make to this draft in the next draft.
6. Writers workshops as needed based on benchmarks
7. Draft #2: Peer critique. Based on the work of Ron Berger, facilitate an in-depth critique session that gives students kind, specific, and helpful feedback on their work. Have students write their goal above their work and have peers give feedback/resources/support on that goal, as well. Have students identify 3 things they plan to address in their work, based on the feedback they got from the critique session. Highlight any changes they make to this draft in the next draft.
8. Draft #3: 1:1 Conferences with the teacher. During this time the teacher gives the student specific feedback on their goals, while also differentiating-if they need additional support the teacher provides small group workshops, or capitalizes on strong writers’ skills by pushing them in their writing. Students return to their work and address what was discussed with the teacher, again highlighting their changes.
9. Draft #4: final piece of writing with steps 1-8 above attached behind an in-depth reflection of their work, their agency and their growth as a writer as  a result of this process.

Because this is such an in-depth process, it is not possible to cover “more” ground by having students write more (numerically speaking) essays in a year. However, I would argue that the depth students dive into these pieces of writing is what earns the title “deeper learning”. This process requires students to think deeply about writing-what makes it good, not-so-good, how to analyze it and help others improve their work, and how to apply that all to their own work. The amount of drafting welcomes (forces) students to see that persistence and iteration are what help a final product reach it’s potential.

So it turns out I was doing agency and didn’t even realize it! So for my friends who are a bit more intentional than I was at the time, I encourage you to take it a step further and think about what the writing process could look like if the grade was almost entirely based on agency (Check out this NTN rubric ). In what ways would it foster and reinforce the value of agency? In what ways would we be able to see content mastery improve as a result of agency?… Oh the possibilities!