The art of essay writing is an important aspect of the grades and helps your students boost their creativity and express their ideas and notions fluently. Nonetheless, as surprising as it sounds, writing an essay is not a walk in the park and requires proper preparation and effort to establish good writing skills.
The challenge is especially heavier for young teachers seeking to establish rapport with their students while also encouraging them to hone their writing skills. Ideally, even in the finest learning institutions worldwide, it is not uncommon to find students who need to enhance their essay writing skills. But how do you teach essay writing to your students, and ensure they perfect this so important skill?
Luckily, this post has everything every young teacher should know about how to teach essay writing. Here are useful tips you can use to help your students transform into better essay writers!
1. Start By Teaching The Basics Of Good Essay Writing.
The first and most important step to helping your students understand how to write an essay is introducing them to the basics of essay writing. Besides defining essay writing, you must help your students comprehend the proper structure of writing sentences and paragraphs. Once they have this understanding, they can focus on word choice and ideas, among other crucial elements of a good essay. This is often quite similar to reading-you can’t teach your students comprehension before teaching them fluency and decoding, can you?
2. Establish Strong And Regular Writing Routines
As you already know, Practice makes perfect, and this statement is true, especially so with essay writing. Incorporating regular and solid writing routines in your class creates a strong writing culture and promotes creativity.
Ideally, while it is easy for you only to mandate your students to write essays during the normal writing times without offering any extra activities, it
is best to push your students to write through the entire curriculum, especially if you want them to improve their writing skills faster.
It is best to extend writing into every subject area (math included!) by having your students compare, summarize, and contrast journal concepts and ideas. Better yet, incorporating writing into science with multiple activities and research projects allows students to be engaged with current events and even get better at other subjects.
In essence, your students need to see writing-essay writing in virtually everything to allow them to feel comfortable with writing. Oh, and if writing becomes too overwhelming, you can talk about writing in class and get your students engaged in answering questions and floating ideas.
3. Show Your Students Exemplary Essay Samples And Writings To Emulate
For your students to produce better quality essays, they must see a good essay, study how it is established, emulate it, and eventually compare their writings to the necessary standards-rinse and repeat!
You can offer your students two distinct essay writing samples, one weak and the other of superb quality. Initiate an appropriate discussion where the class highlights claims, assess to identify if the topic sentences aptly reinforce the claim and subsequently highlight the key areas of strong argumentation.
Once you grade the samples, your students can then compare their essays to the analyzed samples. The goal you should establish is for your class to make their essays as much as the best sample as possible.
4. Analyze Various Essays Highlighting Both Their Merits And Flaws
On establishing a rapport with your students, you can start offering them various writing pieces regularly for your students to analyze. Depending on their level of understanding, you can twist it, either starting with only a paragraph or offering them a full piece. The best way you can do this is by separating them into various groups ranging from ‘need improvement’ to ‘very good.
Here, you should require your students to justify their reasoning, and when you identify a ‘needs improvement classification,’ ask them to rewrite until it is a good essay.
5. Offer Student-specific And Timely Feedback.
Finally, another crucial aspect you should grasp as a young teacher to help your students create better essays is ensuring you provide them with timely and specific feedback. Once all your students have it, you can spend an entire classroom period analyzing the feedback.
Starting with a mini-lesson is the most effective approach and then divide the classroom into pods, specifically focusing on different essay aspects where your students struggled. What’s more, experts recommend that you pair weak and string writers together to discuss various ways they approach their essay writing process.
With your students having timely feedback regularly, you can spend much of your time planning on re-instruction and better ways to write better essays.
Final Word
Eventually, with a little desire, effort, and the right guidance from you, every student turns into a better writer. It is upon you to invest both your time and resources in establishing conducive learning and writing culture while offering the necessary guidance to promote their growth and development in the area of essay writing. Using these five easy tips is only a matter of time before your students achieve essay writing success.
Happy Writing!