Ray Bradbury and Stephen King both believed in the discipline of daily writing. Use this writing strategy to boost engagement and creativity in your student writers.
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I cleverly coached my students into loving writing with this one powerful writing strategy. They never knew what happened.
It was ten in the morning on a cold, rainy day. My upper elementary students knew it was writing time. “What are we going to write?” one student asked. “What are we going to watch?” another one asked. More chimed in. “May we have extra writing time?”
Before you shake your head in disbelief, let me explain what writing strategy I used with great success, every single day in my classroom.
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The Writing Strategy Prolific Novelists Use
Stephen King is credited as saying, “You can’t wait for the muse to appear. You have to apply some butt glue.” (This is paraphrased.)
Ray Bradbury is famous in the writing world for his steady habit of writing at least 1,000 words a day, which contributed to his prolific novels, short stories, and essays. He believed in the discipline of daily writing, and encouraged aspiring writers to develop the same consistency.
How can you use this in your classroom?
The power of habit is your number one most powerful tool to improve your students’ writing. If you set up a habit loop with a cue, routine, and a juicy reward, you’ll be able to get your students to write every day and enjoy it.
Create a Love for Writing in Your Students
Imagine if your students actually looked forward to writing time. Some of my favorite teaching memories are those in which students told me that when they came into my class, they hated writing. But after the first term of the year, they loved writing every day and thought it was fun.
Here’s how. The key is a simple system of “cue, routine, reward.” These are words used in Charles Duhigg’s seminal book, The Power of Habit. This is also referred to as a “habit loop.” There are variations, but the idea is this:
The cue tells your brain to do the habit. When you’re finished, you get a reward. We can turn this into a super effective writing strategy.
No time to read this now? Pin the next image and come back later!
What’s in a Cue?
A cue isn’t just for actors who forget their lines. A cue tells your mind (or your students’ minds) that it’s time for a particular activity.
One type of cue is an alarm. What do you do when your alarm goes off in the morning? You get up. It’s as if it’s saying to your brain, “Hey, it’s time to get up!”
A cue can also be music. Music is so easy to incorporate into the classroom. We use it to remember things, to wake up from the doldrums, to signal a brain break.
Whenever my phone alarm played Mozart, my students would all stand up, push in their chairs, and line up. Where were we going? They knew that particular alarm meant it was time for music class.
When my phone alarm played the Trolls theme music, they knew it was time for a brain break. Obviously, that was in a younger class that appreciated the magic of trolls.
How Does a Cue Work?
What the cue does is tell the brain to do the habit associated with the cue. After a time, it becomes automatic to start the habit. What do you do when you hear the sound of the Netflix “Dah-dah!” Do you settle back into the couch and get ready for a show? Me, too.
However, a cue can be negative as well as positive. Choose cues that will bring up good feelings. Here’s an example. It’s what was happening in the opening paragraph of this blog post.
Our class writing time was scheduled immediately after recess. We were on a block schedule and had mandated classes before morning recess, but the time between morning recess and lunch was ours. Of course, students come in from recess full of energy, right?
To help them settle in and calm down, I chose to use a visual and auditory cue of a nature streaming video. The ocean is calming, so I chose a coral reef underwater video. When the students came back recess, it was the first thing they saw when they entered the room.
It flipped a switch in their brain that said, “Hey, it’s time to write!”
As soon as they saw the fish swimming on our presentation whiteboard, out came their blue writing journals. They sharpened pencils, and they got ready to write. It was magical.
But it wasn’t instant magic. This didn’t happen overnight. As with any habit, it took a few weeks to establish and solidify the cue.
More About Cognitive Triggers
One important tip about this type of cognitive trigger, according to cognitive neuroscientist from UC Berkeley, and frequent contributor on Headspace, Dr. Sahar Yousef, PhD., is to choose a playlist that doesn’t have words your brain can understand, nor sounds that might cue a person to draw attention away from what they’re doing. Cues from nature work well.
Speaking of cues from nature, Dr. Nicole Ardoin, the director of the Social Ecology Lab at Stanford University did a meta-analysis of empirical research into the effects of nature on our well being. What she found was that viewing nature, even if it’s from a window or on a video creates what she calls a “biophilic response”. Additional studies at UC Berkeley showed the same results.
So what does this mean for your class and writing?
When we see nature or experience nature, even if it’s in a video, we relax and we lose the tension of our day-to-day lives. That’s why hiking, camping, and other outdoor activities are so popular. When you bring nature into your classroom this way, and especially when you use it as a cue for writing time, it helps to reduce the fear, stress, and resistance students may feel toward writing.
How to Create a Habit You Won’t Want to Break
The definition of a habit is a regular practice or tendency that can be hard to give up, good or bad.
We all know that students love routine. If you have a guest teacher or substitute teacher, they’re certain to tell that teacher how things are supposed to be done in their class. Am I right?
You can use this love of routine to create a habit of writing every day. Structure this time any way that works best for you. Maybe you’ll allow students to write at their desks, write on the floor, write with a partner, or whatever works in your class and that’s comfortable for you.
Why the Free Writing Strategy Doesn’t Work
I encourage a writing focus for each day. I don’t use the “free-writing” technique. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
Students sit down to write and are encouraged to write about any topic they desire. They can keep ideas for future writing in a notebook or journal. However, this teaching strategy is an open invitation to indecisiveness.
Think about your class. How many students sit there, wasting precious minutes trying to decide what to write about. Maybe they’re waiting for their muse to appear. Remember Stephen King said, “You can’t wait for the muse to appear.”
Especially in a busy classroom. Nobody has time to wait for a muse that may have called in sick that day.
Free writing is a counter-productive teaching strategy. To get past the hurdle of, “But what should I write about?” I suggest giving the students a specific topic, task, and audience each day. You might want to focus on the same type of task and audience for one or two weeks.
Deciding on a Writing Prompt and Topic for Each Day
Pin this to your Pinterest board and come back to get your writing prompts!
I have so many ideas for you. Here are a few.
Give your students a snippet of an article or video and read it or watch it together. (Of course, you previewed it first, right?) Take a couple of minutes to have students share their thoughts on the topic. This is especially helpful for students who are learning English and may struggle to find the correct way to express their thoughts.
Next, after the discussion, be clear on their task. What genre do you want them to use?
- Summary
- Opinion
- Narrative Fiction
Do you only want them to list key points? If it’s a fictional story, maybe you just want them to describe one of the characters.
In the early grades, you can use picture books as a jumping off point for writing. The writing task in grades one and two could be 1, 2, or 3 sentences about the main idea, or the setting, or the part they like the best. It’s completely up to you and the level of your students’ abilities.
Set a timer for the amount of time you’ll give your students to complete the writing assignment.
If you need more ideas for writing prompts and topics, try these posts:
- Want to Unlock Creativity? Try These 52 Journal Entry Starters
- Students Can’t Resist These 15 Topics for Persuasive Essay Writing
- A Nine Grid, Nine Genre Writing Choice Board
- Check out the Member Vault of Free Resources, Including Writing Prompts
Granting the Reward
This is the fun part. Make the reward exciting. Make it something the students value. That immediately takes stickers and kudos off the table. It has to be something they love to do. Let’s call it a juicy reward.
The reward doesn’t have to cost you a thing or take up any of your time. In fact, it shouldn’t. I can even give you back some time.
Here are a few rewards upper elementary students love:
- Five minutes to visit with friends
- Five minutes to play a game in the back of the room
- Five minutes to draw or color
- Five minutes of free choice activities
The reward is something your students will happily engage in after the hard work of writing. You can use the five minutes to get ready for the transition into your next lesson or activity.
Rewards are the culminating piece that solidifies the habit and makes it satisfying.
Final Notes About Using a Cue, Habit, and Reward in Your Writing Lessons
Once you’ve chosen a cue, stick with it. Cues are powerful because they set in motion a cascade of reflexes that turn into actions that develop into habits. The reward is the one thing that makes a person want to respond to the cue.
In no way do I want to compare students to pets, but I do have a strong example of a habit loop with my beagle, Dahlila. This dog loves chicken. She loves chicken more than anything.
If you know dogs, you know that beagles follow their noses. If they smell something, off they go, tracking the scent, and they won’t respond to recall training. That means they won’t come back when you call them. The smells are far more intriguing that you are.
When Dahlila gets out into the front yard, she immediately goes into her sniffing mode. To get her to return, I simply call out the word, “Chicken!” She comes running!
Then she sits right down and waits for her reward.
- Cue: Freshly cooked shredded chicken
- Habit: Run back to me.
- Reward: A piece (or two or three) of cooked chicken.
I keep a stash of fresh cooked, shredded chicken in the refrigerator at all times. (Just in case you’re wondering!)
So much research has been done on the power of habit, but it isn’t talked about often in an educational context. But for something this powerful, why wouldn’t you want to use it in your classroom?
Action Steps You Can Do Now to Begin This Writing Strategy
Think of three cues you could use with your students that won’t get annoying if they’re used every day.
Next, decide how you’ll structure your writing time and how long it will last.
Finally, think of three rewards that don’t cost any money. You want rewards that are intangibles.
Write the cues and rewards down. Take your time to decide which one you’ll use. Only choose one cue and one reward. This will solidify and strengthen the impact.
Take your time and choose the one that will work best in your classroom and with your teaching style. It may take three or more weeks to cement the habit. But if you teach them with the same emphasis you use to teach your classroom procedures at the beginning of the year, they’ll become automatic for the rest of the year.
Who knows? Perhaps your students will start asking you, “May we have extra writing time?”
