Reviewed
by Kathie Marshall
Literacy Coach
Los Angeles Unified School District

What I love about teaching writing is there's always something
new to learn. So whether you're relatively new to the classroom
or an experienced teacher who loves crafting ever better lessons,
Kelly Gallagher's new book from Stenhouse Publishers speaks
to you. In Teaching Adolescent Writers, Gallagher,
an English teacher and co-director of the South Basin Writing
Project at California State University-Long Beach, builds
on two earlier best-selling works, Reading Reasons
and Deeper Reading. It's an easy book to read, sprinkled
with humor, yet chocked full of pertinent research and theory
and infused with practical mini-lessons that can improve students'
ability to write.

Gallagher begins with an analogy that likens students without writing
proficiency to people facing a herd of stampeding bulls. What
should students do about what he terms the "Literacy Stampede"
in this age of information?

A) Watch more MTV and hope the demands of the Literacy Stampede
disappear.
B) Scream in the face of the Information Age to scare it away.
C) Stand still and pray the Information Age will avoid them.

D) Scream at parents for conceiving them in the shadow of
the Literacy Stampede.
E) Improve reading and writing skills so they can keep up.

Gallagher
backs up his literacy concerns with some interesting vital
statistics, culled from a variety of sources:

•Ninety-seven percent of elementary students write less than
three hours a week.

•Compositions
of a paragraph or more are infrequent even at the high school
level, and 40 percent of twelfth graders report they never
or hardly ever are assigned a composition of three or more
pages in length.

•In a writing survey by the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP), only 31 percent of eighth graders and 24
percent of twelfth graders scored at proficient or above.

•On the California High School Exit Exam, two-thirds of students
scored a 2 or lower on a scale of 4.

•The SAT has eliminated the analogy section, and in its place
requires on-demand writing.

•The job market increasingly demands writing competency from
its employees.

•In the last 30 years more information was produced than in
the preceding 5000 years, and information is doubling every
four years!

If, as Gallagher asserts, "Today, writing is foundational for
success," what's an English teacher to do? Acknowledging
that many secondary students struggle with writing, Gallagher
offers several recommendations, including providing students
with an understanding of real purposes for writing and avoiding
"fake" school writing assignments. By creating authentic
writing activities, he says, teachers can help students
to develop the intrinsic motivation to learn to write well.
Gallagher also addresses our concerns with unmotivated,
anxious, negative, or reluctant writers and their learned
helplessness.

He recommends "intensive hands-on writing instruction," which
he delineates in his Six Pillars of Writing Success:

1.
Students need a lot more writing practice. (In fact, Gallagher
supports the National Commission on Writing's declaration
that students must double their current amount of writing.)

2.
Students need teachers who model good writing.
3.
Students need the opportunity to read and study other authors.

4.
Students need choice when it comes to writing topics. (Teachers
can work students into the desired discourses and genres slowly,
Gallagher says, by designing writing assignments that allow
for partial student choice.)

5.
Students need to write for authentic purposes and for authentic
audiences. (As a strong proponent of service learning in language
arts classrooms, I particularly valued Gallagher's arguments
on this topic in Chapter 6 of his book.)

6.
Students need meaningful feedback from both the teacher and
their peers.

Once he's made his case for the Six Pillars, Gallagher then shows
us how to accomplish these objectives by addressing the practical
means of instruction. He offers a wide variety of mini-lessons
appropriate for middle and high school students and their
teachers. The strategies incorporate both daily and weekly
writing, on-demand assessments of writing, a focus on the
writer's craft, and the use of assessment to drive improvement.
I especially appreciated the section in Chapter 3 on both
teacher and peer revision strategies-a tough issue for many
English teachers. He finishes up with a very strong appendix
of great practical use.

Teaching Adolescent Writers ends as it began, with a return to the
Literacy Stampede. "The stampede is now upon our students,"
he writes, "and there is no time to waste." With Gallagher's
book in hand, teachers of writing-in English classes and across
the curriculum-have a great new tool for helping students
speed up their progress toward writing proficiency before
they get trampled.