Help Students Generate Ideas Through Prewriting

Brainstorming is like free-writing: The goal is to take away the barriers that keep people from thinking creatively. This technique relies on either verbal or written lists of components — students create lists of words or ideas related to a topic, then choose the best ideas to use in their writing.

Juniors beginning a paper on responsibilities and rights generated the following list of topics while brainstorming ideas:

Their teacher recorded their responses on the whiteboard and asked students to select a few to put on paper in front of them. From the larger list, they could narrow or add items if they chose to do so. Like free-writing, brainstorming sometimes yields great ideas and sometimes does not.

Prewriting does not always involve words. Images can also spur thinking. You can model for students how pictures can spur thought. Put a large piece of chart paper on the board and begin to doodle, draw, web — whatever comes. Visual learners may feel more comfortable thinking on paper with images rather than words. Imaging can be done like free-writing — very fast or more slowly.

We are wired to tell stories; many cultures have rich oral traditions that rely on verbally transferred information. Tapping into that skill can help students to improve both their oral and written literacy skills. Some teachers take out small tape players and ask students who like to talk more than they like to write to speak into them. Students can then replay the recording and try to note the good ideas that were once verbally fleeting. This is constructing meaning in much the same way that writers do and can be used as a transition to more conventional writing.

One writerly quality is the ability to look around, to notice, to inspect. Writer’s notebooks are both places for recording these inspections and tools to encourage the activity. They can be used as journals, as observation tools, or as a combination of many kinds of writing. Some teachers require students to keep writer’s notebooks, and others suggest this as an ongoing prewriting activity. See What a Writer Needs by Ralph Pletcher for an in-depth discussion of writer’s notebooks.

Although writing is generally a low-resource subject, there are products on the market that can assist students in many aspects of the writing process, prewriting included. Programs like Inspiration or Kidspiration help students by showing them ways to organize random ideas. For instance, Inspiration allows students to select various-sized and -shaped icons and shows them many ways to manipulate those icons to consider relationships and organizational patterns. This can also be done on paper, without the assistance of a computer. Other programs, like Writer’s Helper, help by asking questions about a topic. If the student submits the word “freedom,” for example, the computer prompts questions about the subject. Again, if students don’t have continuous access to computer programs like this one, they can still learn questioning as a technique for seeing ideas in new and complex ways.

The Internet can also play a significant role in helping students decide what to write about. Bloggers regularly post ideas that beg for responses. Responding to a real person, even one who cannot be seen, has innumerable benefits for student reading, writing, and thinking. In addition, blogs, like all kinds of reading, can spur ideas that generate new writing. One level of participation may be a student interacting with others about the topic. Another might be the student using something said to begin a new piece that can be worked on in writing workshop. Note: There are security concerns related to these kinds of activities in schools, but school media specialists and instructional technologists can help you limit access to online environments that are educationally appropriate.

The difference between skills and strategies is that skills are automatic and strategies are intentionally activated. For example when a reader engages with a text that is simple and interesting, he or she likely makes connections as a matter of course. As he or she reads, there are automatic tie-ins to personal experience or the world or another text. When that same reader is faced with a far more difficult text, he or she must be intentional about making connections, so that self-talk occurs in order to slow the reader down for this text and activate metacognition (e.g., “Do I understand this?”, “What kind of connections might I make to better understand?”) Thus a reader might be skillful when confronted with one text and operate strategically on another.

It is the same with writing tasks. There are many kinds of writing that people do effortlessly. They need or want to say something, so they do. When students text message or IM each another, they rarely think carefully about what they are going to say before writing and pressing send. Like the reader who moves easily through a text, any strategies that they might use are invisible and automatic. That is because the cognitive demands of this kind of communication are manageable. We all do a variety of writing tasks with ease. There is no reason to incorporate explicit planning in these easy, often pleasant writing tasks. When confronted with a less familiar or more demanding writing task, though, writers often slow themselves down to say, “Ok, now how do I begin this?” This is approaching the task strategically, slowing it down and activating processes that have been successful in the past. Student writers often have little experience with strategic writing. Like all parts of the writing process, students need discussion, modeling, and guided practice, even in something as simple as asking oneself how to begin. This strategy might seem ineffectual, but it serves an important purpose by stopping students long enough to think.

In a mini-lesson on planning you might bring a writing task that you need to do for your professional life. Maybe it is a grant application, maybe part of a curriculum project or a memo to parents. By placing the “assignment” in front of the students or on the overhead projector or whiteboard, you can think aloud in the following way:

“Ok, I know I have to do this. I see that my audience is the assistant principal and curriculum specialist, so what do I know about how much background information I will have to give them in order for them to understand? I think they know XYZ, so I will skip that and just begin writing at the ABC point. Now that I have a good sense of my audience, I want to think through my purpose. Am I trying to convince them of something or trying to get them to do what they already said they would do…”

By doing this think-aloud, you model the way that writers use previous knowledge of tasks, audience, and purpose to begin to write. Although planning is often implicit, understanding how to do it in an explicit fashion helps students to confidently approach a range of writing tasks.

You can provide scaffolds for students as they learn to do strategic planning. The RAFT strategy can assist students in writing preparation. This acronym is to remind students to consider the Role, Audience, Format, and Topic for their piece. This can help students to reflect on important writing components prior to writing. You may ask students to write these out so that you can see their thinking, which will help some of them. Others will ultimately elect to do this as a part of their metacognitive processes. See the table below for a list of planning strategies. The specific strategy is much less important than that students understand the need to have a strategy. It is worth returning to the ideas of skills versus strategies when working with students in these ways. Teachers can remind them that some writing tasks do not require explicit planning — students can start drafting because planning is part of what they are doing without thinking about it, but they need to learn strategic planning so they can use it when faced with a challenging writing task.

The following mini-lesson is designed to help students think about how to plan their writing. Another mini-lesson focusing on this state of the writing process might show students how to free-write, brainstorm, or practice another kind of prewriting as discussed above.