S5 E19 - Why Students Find Writing Persuasive Texts So Difficult

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Hi there and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania, the home of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn and I'm excited to bring you today's episode about persuasive writing.

Persuasive Writing in Our Curriculum

Persuasive writing has become a core feature of our English programs. There's significant pressure to have students writing persuasively to perform well in NAPLAN, and we often attempt to connect persuasive text writing with our HASS curriculum. But if you're like most teachers I speak with, you've found that students really struggle with this kind of writing, despite your best efforts to teach it well. Let's begin by getting the lay of the land in relation to persuasive writing and look at exactly what is expected in the Australian curriculum so that we can have a clear understanding of what good performance looks like in this area. We will be using different curricula across the country, so you will always refer to your state or territory's curriculum, but I'm going to refer to the Australian curriculum in this episode.

Persuasive texts themselves aren't mentioned explicitly in achievement standards in the Australian curriculum. However, they are included in the content descriptors for writing from Years Two to Six and beyond. In Foundation and Year One, the curriculum refers to expressing opinions. So that's the start of the journey for our primary school students. Looking a little deeper into the curriculum through the general capabilities, we'll see that persuasive texts first enter the picture in Year Three. So they're there in the understanding text section and they're there in the writing sections, and I'm quoting directly from the document now. It says:

Includes a simple introduction to orient the reader. Example: states a fact to introduce a report. States an opinion to introduce an argument.

So the concept of argument is definitely present and as students get older and move through the grades, the expectations of what they will do in terms of structure and features adjust. When students hit the point in the progression that would sit at typically Year Six, there are genre-specific elements to examine, and that continues up into the secondary space. So that's what the curriculum says. Let's reflect now on student experiences in the writing process.

As a central element of writing, persuasive text should be simple, right? After all, children are all good at trying to get their parents to persuade them to buy something at the shops or to get a friend to share a toy. Well, that's what I was told, told that children were natural persuaders and that writing persuasively would just come in time. Well, guess what? Children are natural persuaders, that's true. It's also true that persuasive writing most definitely does not just come on its own for so many of our students. And I know that I'd done all the "right" things, in inverted  commas.

I'd done the I Do, We Do, You Do writing structure with modelled, shared and guided writing.

I'd done the right thing and made the topic of my writing for my older students centre on real world issues for authentic problem solving.

I'd provided written scaffolds to help students with text structure.

I'd done all of these things and yet many children still found it incredibly difficult to write persuasively.

In speaking with teachers and leaders, I know I'm not alone in having done all of the so-called right things and still found that students' experience of persuasive writing was sometimes agonisingly difficult.

So in this episode, I'm going to share the reasons that what I used to do didn't work and what I now know to be important elements in helping students to write strong, persuasive text. Let's start with the first mistake that I made.

Mistake Number One

I thought that because I had modelled writing and told students about text structure that they would learn it, I would model the whole text and then send them off to have their turn. This resulted in them being at a loose end when they got to the desk and didn't know what to do, and guess what? They weren't the only ones. I was also at a loose end because I thought I'd done what was necessary.

The approach that I used there completely ignored what we know about cognitive load theory. As Sweller explains, our working memory is incredibly limited. We can only process a small amount of information at any given time. When we model an entire persuasive text at once, with all of its structural components, persuasive devices and content knowledge, it's very likely that we're overwhelming students' cognitive capacity.

What I Do Now

What I do now is break the writing process down into smaller parts and explicitly teach them one at a time. I focus on a single element, perhaps just constructing a strong opening statement, and we practice just that component until students have mastered it before moving on to the next component. Now it doesn't mean that we have to take three months to write a single text, but I will know in any given unit what the main focus for new learning is.

Mistake Number Two

Expecting that written scaffolds would fix any lack of knowledge students had about text structure. The reality was that students who understood the text structure didn't need the scaffolds and the students who didn't understand the text structure, didn't know how to use them. I'd provide these beautiful templates with sentence starters and outlines of what should go into each paragraph, thinking this would solve the problem. But looking at it through the lens of cognitive load theory, if students don't have the foundational understanding of persuasive structure stored in their long-term memory, a template just becomes another thing that they have to process.

What I Do Now

What I do now is ensure that students really know the text structure through repetition, retrieval and frequent practice. Students need to have the declarative knowledge of text structure, including being able to write a brief outline of the structure. So now I have students practice retrieving the basic structure so frequently that it becomes automatic, freeing up their cognitive resources to focus on the content of their arguments rather than struggling to remember what comes next. This doesn't mean that they're writing a whole text, but simply that they're taking their whiteboard marker and writing down introduction, body paragraph one, body paragraph two, body paragraph three, conclusion. When they know how to do that, then they can add in what needs to go in each body paragraph or each argument.

Mistake Number Three

Placing all of my focus on text structure, and this came from my initial teacher education and the training that I had early on in my career. I was taught, as you were, that if I exposed and immersed my students in text structures, if I just read text and modelled writing them, students would then internalise all of the features that were needed and reproduce them. This approach is based on what we now recognise as a constructivist view of learning that just doesn't align with the evidence.

What I Do Now

What I do now is reflect on the syntax and vocabulary needed to achieve specific goals that are relevant to the age of the students, and I teach these explicitly, one at a time. I don't expect that I can teach all elements of a genre at once and have students just pick up what they wanted them to notice. I also recognise that repetition and practice is needed for students to develop fluency. One and done lessons are not sufficient for students to learn to effectively use specific subordinating conjunctions or persuasive devices. I make sure I'm teaching the specific language features of persuasive text, things like modal verbs, causal connectives like because and therefore, and the necessary vocabulary for students to build a strong argument. They're taught directly. They're practiced for a little while in isolation a very short time and then applied in increasingly complex contexts.

Mistake Number Four

Not building background knowledge for the topics I wanted students to write about. I recall so clearly asking students to share ideas about why it was important that we have parks or why we shouldn't throw our rubbish on the beach, only to be met with the same two or three raised hands that I always saw, with everyone else looking at me blankly. I thought that because I had read a text to students or we'd watched a clip on YouTube, that it was enough for students to be able to comment on the issues.

What I Do Now

What I do now is make sure that units are designed to spend more time than I ever thought was necessary building background knowledge. This includes reading texts and watching clips, for sure, but I now build in opportunities for retrieval of knowledge, checking for understanding, partner talk and really careful consideration of students' existing knowledge in expectations, and I'm not talking about us dumbing down expectations, but rather taking the time to build knowledge needed for strong outcomes over time.

Mistake Number Five

Not understanding that the difficult part of persuasive text writing was not using the modal verbs or writing with appropriate structure. That stuff was easy, once you teach it, it's quite constrained. The hard bit, though, is the thinking. Now, background knowledge is critical, but so is perspective. I used to take it for granted that, because I could come up with reasons for parks or what we should do for responsible rubbish disposal, that that meant that students could do it too. So I'd ask who knows why we should have parks, and then I'd wait, then I'd give a hint and I'd wait, then I'd provide one of the answers and I'd ask again and wait, and in the end I'd have fed all the answers to the students in a way that just led to them all producing pretty much the same cookie cutter written response.

The approach that I was using failed to develop the critical thinking skills that are at the heart of persuasive writing. But please do not misunderstand me, these are not skills we build in isolation. They're grounded in the knowledge that we want the students to base their suggestion or their persuasive plan on. We have to create the knowledge for students so that they can think. We can then walk them carefully through processes of reflection and questioning that helps them to develop the capacity to think deeply.

What I Do Now

What I do now is make sure that the issue or problem has enough nuance to make it worth focusing on. I also walk students through a thinking process that involves asking questions like, what are all the things that could happen if people throw rubbish on the beach? Or what are the problems that will be solved by having parks? But this kind of thinking shouldn't just be confined to the times we're wanting students to write persuasively. In all subject areas, we can promote deeper understanding by building knowledge and engaging students in discussion and thinking about the topic at hand.

Helping the Students

Fundamentally, I don't just ask students to come up with the reasons. I scaffold the thinking needed for them to do so, and part of that is considering perspective. Perspective of the people who live next to the beach, perspective of the people who use the water recreationally, perspective of the animals that live in the water. If we want to talk about water pollution, students have to have all of the knowledge to be able to think critically. It just doesn't happen on its own. The final error that I made was to assume that because a concept or topic had been done in the previous year or even earlier, that I could just pick up where I had imagined the teachers left off. I assumed that what had been done was firm enough to form the foundation of the learning that I had planned. This was a big mistake and meant that in the early days, I was planning in a way that virtually guaranteed cognitive overload for the students.

Now, as an alternative, we can spend time activating background knowledge about text types before we officially begin a unit. However, we need to be very careful that students actually have the background knowledge and skills in their schema that we think they do, because if they don't have this in their background knowledge, if they don't have existing schema, we're not activating anything. We're just engaging in really bad teaching.

When we think about persuasive writing through the lens of cognitive load theory and information processing, we can see why students struggle so much. Persuasive writing requires simultaneous mastery of text structure knowledge, language features, persuasive devices, background knowledge and the processes of thinking and discussing that help us generate and evaluate arguments. We also have to have foundational skills in writing, including syntax, spelling and handwriting. For a novice, coordinating all of these elements places an enormous burden on working memory. It's no wonder they struggle. The key is to reduce cognitive load by ensuring that as many of these elements as possible are automatic, and we've done this through explicit instruction and practice.

Prerequisites for Persuasive

So what are the prerequisites for successful persuasive writing? Well, here's a little list:

• Automaticity with basic transcription.
• Thorough knowledge of the structure of persuasive text.
• Familiarity with persuasive language features.
• Deep background knowledge about the topic.
• An understanding of the thinking processes required to generate and evaluate arguments.
• Regular opportunities to practice each new component separately before integrating them.

And remember, one and done is not sufficient. We need to hold space. So that means having fewer goals within a unit of work and doing each of them really well before we bring it together, and that is how we write text-based units in our space.

Conclusion

I want to reassure you that we can absolutely help students become competent persuasive writers if we follow evidence-informed principles. The research is clear. When we break down complex writing tasks, teach the components directly, provide models, provide guided practice and gradually release responsibility to students, they can achieve remarkable results. This is the aim of the structure we use for text-based units.

As you reflect on your own teaching of persuasive writing, consider which of the elements I've described might be limiting your students' progress. Then choose one area to focus on improving in detail. Perhaps you'll break instruction down into smaller steps, or maybe you'll spend more time building background knowledge before asking students to write. Whatever you choose, know that by aligning your practice with what we know about how students learn, you'll be giving your students the best chance possible of success.

Until next time, happy teaching everyone. Bye.

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