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Marcia Freeman's CraftPlus® School-Wide Writing Program is built on a strong theoretical and research base.
In the late 1990s, an extensive four-year study of over 225 schools (1) found that an emphasis on writing is one of five common characteristics of schools with high academic performance irrespective of demographics. They found a "striking association" between writing and performance in other academic disciplines. The researchers summarized, "it is difficult to escape the conclusion that an emphasis on writing improvement has a significant impact on student test scores in other disciplines, including science." Emphasis on writing as used in this research includes an emphasis on "informational writing," using written responses in testing across the curriculum, and a clearly established high standard of "good writing," the very characteristics at the core of the Freeman program.
Every element and methodology of the Freeman program is consistent with universally recognized principles of developmental psychology, language and literacy acquisition, and the writing process. Among the most prominent sources of these principles are the works of Jean Piaget,
Noam Chomsky, Brian Cambourne, Donald Graves, Douglas
Fisher, and research by the NCTE.
Piaget's work is covered in college educational-psychology courses. One of his important principles pertains to the stages of brain maturation, notably the difference between the concrete operational thinker of age 5 to 10, and the abstract thinker of age 10 and higher. (Ages are approximate and of course vary from child to child.)
Some of the important ways in which the Freeman program applies these principles:
- Using physical sorting of listed details about a topic on the first occasions of organizing informational text.
- Introducing abstract graphic planners only when students have developed abstract thinking abilities.
- Refraining from asking kindergarteners and first graders to write stories, an age when they cannot yet sequence events in time.
Chomsky, a leading linguistics researcher, showed us that children acquire syntactical knowledge of their native language as early as their sixth month. (2) The Freeman program particularly utilizes this in its innovative Editing-by-Ear method of teaching punctuation to young writers.
Cambourne, a leading authority on language and literacy acquisition, teaches us that certain conditions are necessary before such learning can occur, and before children are able to use language in early literacy. (3) The Freeman program applies these findings in how it teaches writing skills, creating these crucial learning conditions throughout the lesson and afterward.
Graves defined the writing process for us -- the sequence of steps that all effective writers go through (4). He introduced the groundbreaking notion that young writers need to follow that process for their classroom writing. He then introduced to schools across the nation the concept of a daily writing workshop. The writing process is an integral part of the Freeman program. The program uses the process, in parts and as a whole, as the students apply, practice, and demonstrate the targeted writing craft skills they have been taught.
In the September 2007 issue of
The Reading Teacher, Dr. Douglas Fisher discussed
developing an integrated framework for oral, written,
and reading literacy in his article, “Aspects of
Building a Literacy Framework.”
Click
here for a chart that
extrapolates
the descriptors for a literacy framework and the
characteristics for the writing literacy. In the third
column, we at Maupin House have added our own commentary
about how CraftPlus responds to Dr. Fisher’s writing
framework.
NCTE
A National Council of Teachers of English Research Report examined the result of using the writing process approach to teaching writing. It concluded that
- Written language is closely related to oral language. Teaching should emphasize and exploit the close connection between the two.
- There is some evidence that sentence combining practice, without instruction in formal grammar, is an aid to syntactic fluency.
- The study of grammar is an ineffective way to teach writing.
- Teachers should give greater emphasis to the guiding of a careful development of a limited number of papers, with attention given to direct methods of instruction during the writing process, rather than on the hurried production of a great number of papers.
- Frequency of writing in and of itself is not associated with improved writing.
- Revision is critical to improving writing.
- Peer evaluation and editing are effective in improving writing skills.
Everything in the Freeman program, from its teaching of specific writing-craft skills, to how it emphasizes practice writing and taking only about 20% of written pieces through the entire process, to its enhanced peer conferences, to its approach to editing, is consistent with the findings of this report.
Finally, in a manner of speaking, classrooms are the ultimate research laboratories. Every day teachers observe student behaviors and reactions, and the efficacies of various instructional approaches. So it is most telling that the techniques and methodologies used in the Freeman program have all been field-tested in a large number and wide variety of classrooms, with universally positive academic outcomes and teacher responses that attest to the program's effectiveness, practicality, and classroom friendliness.
1) Douglas Reeves, Ph.D., Accountability in Action: A Blueprint for Learning Organizations. Denver: Advanced Learning Press, 2000. 185-191.
2) Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures. Mouton, 1957.
3) Brian Cambourne, The Whole Story: Natural Learning and the Acquisition of Literacy in the Classroom. Ontario, Canada: Scholastic-TAB Publications, Ltd., 1988.
4) Donald Graves, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann Educational Books, 1983.
5) Douglas Fisher, The Reading
Teacher, Volume 61, No 1, September 2007. |
