Travis: Hello! Hello! Welcome back to another episode of PoPCast. I am Travis.
Whitney: and I'm Whitney.
Travis: And we are back again this week to talk to you a little bit more about Patterns of Revision, revision strategies for you to take into the classroom and support your students in their writing success.
And in this episode, we are going to talk about sentence combining. In our shared resource, Patterns of Revision, we have an entire section dedicated to instructional strategies for combining ideas together. Helping students to combine ideas as writers to create more complex, sophisticated writing.
Where does this come from? Why Do we feel like this is important? Well, we took a look at research on effective writing practices and we really landed in the realm of the writing next research. This is a research report that was put out to the Carnegie Corporation a few years ago and it highlights 11 recommendations for educators to use to enhance writing instruction for students.
One of those 11 recommendations from the report is sentence combining. That involves teaching [00:02:00] students to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences. So Whitney, do you want to talk to us a little bit more about that research, where we're at with that and our thinking behind it?
Whitney: Absolutely. So this research report is just fabulous. First of all, it just really solidifies everything that we do as educators of writers. And in this piece with the sentence combining what this research report showed was that positive strategies for teaching writing produce a positive effect size.
Okay. Meaning that it improved student writing and the sentence combining had. a really strong effect size to where it positively improved the quality of the writing of students. And to teach sentence combining, you have to teach them through specific exercises in which two or more basic sentences are combined into single sentences.
And so that's the piece that we want our students to have this understanding of is how ideas are related to one another, how the, and the relationships. among our ideas, how they can not just be in short, simple sentences, but how they can be combined in a variety of ways. And so we do have a huge chunk of patterns of revision devoted to sentence combining, and it is because of the research that shows this does improve the sophistication of the writing that our students put onto the paper.
Something also to keep in mind is the reason why we have so many lessons around this is one sentence combining is difficult, but two, there are so many different ways to combine our ideas.
And so just a handful of lessons just wasn't going to be enough and to really take students through specific exercises on how to combine.
Travis: Yeah, we wanted to get them more comfortable just with that line [00:04:00] of thinking as they are taking a look at their own writing. And to do that, we wanted to start with some authentic texts and yeah, really to affirm what you just said right there, it takes students some muscle memory and some confidence in thinking, "Okay, here are some ideas. What are the ways that we can combine those to put them together?"
Whitney: And I just found two in the same research report. It does talk about studying models and how that also is one of those strategies that showed a positive effect size and a positive impact on learning.
And so that just goes right along with what we're doing as well. So as we use the models to help us see what authors did to combine their ideas that we could turn around and try to.
Travis: Yeah. And if this piques your interest a little bit, writing next is the research article that we'll put in the show notes.
Whitney: Steve Graham and Dolores Perrin are the ones that wrote this research report and studied the analysis of these these effect sizes.
Travis: So, that really, was some guidance for our work as we thought about creating these lessons.
And then we're going to just take the curtain and pull it open to give you a little behind the scenes here of what we were looking at. So behind the scenes, we were on the lookout for within grade level texts, texts that our students at each grade in each grade band might be reading naturally or would be interested in reading.
We took a look in that specific writing for sophisticated [00:06:00] sentences that lived within there and thought about how we might deconstruct those sentences into a handful, three to six, more basic sentences. So looking at those ideas, and we'll give some examples in just a few moments, but that was really our look for.
Whitney: Yeah, one of the things that I did was in addition to looking at books that students read in grades three through five, the actual writing of the students, what were they doing in their own writing? How sophisticated was their writing? And I'm always looking for what they are doing as opposed to what they're not doing, right?
So, oh, I noticed they're using adjectives, but they're using them in shorts. Short, choppy sentences, or they're using prepositional phrases, but they're only using prepositional phrases at the end. So I was looking here at the student writing and thinking, okay, what are they doing and what could we teach them to really amp up, to elevate their writing?
And then what is, what are examples of that in what they're reading? On the flip side, when looking at the books that they're reading, what sentences in here are really more sophisticated sentences that our students could turn around and write like. So one of the, one of the big ones for me was the idea of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases and where they fall in sentences and how we could Take multiple ideas around describing something. If we're thinking about word choice, especially descriptive words, how could we combine some of those descriptions into one sentence, but not make it go on forever?
So how could we be concise with our description as well? And then, of course, looking at what we're teaching in Patterns of Power. So compound sentences, complex sentences, how could we bring those into revision as well? And in Patterns of Revision, we [00:08:00] do have that chart that has the Patterns of Power connections for each lesson.
So if we are teaching about compound sentences in Patterns of Power, this is a great time to do that. Like during the application part of Patterns of Power, or once we finished that lesson to turn around and do a revision lesson from Patterns of Revision on combining into a compound sentence. So they then get more work with that again, studying a different model and really thinking through behind the scenes, what that might look like.
Oh, it was these multiple ideas that we've combined together into, um, a compound sentence to where they can turn around and do that on their own as well.
Travis: Love that. And just one extra added connection piece, looking at the standards for various states when we take a look at what it is that students are going to be expected to do within the writing process as they're looking at revising and editing their writing.
If they're going to need to have mastery of a specific element of the conventions of language, what might that look like already? And if we can play around with that. So. I think any other kind of added complexity in middle school, we might look at different ways that punctuation might connect ideas together, such as a semicolon versus compound sentences, right, which I think are just as important to third graders as they are to eighth graders, that idea of combining ideas together.
So I think there's some great crossover. We're just trying to build a little bit as we move from elementary to middle school, build on some of the complexity and maybe just elevate more complex texts to do some very some similar things because we know that writing and language that those ideas just spiral back over and over and over that it's not just a one shot.
We do come, create compound sentences once and we have it for the rest of our lives, right?
Whitney: Never do it again. Well, [00:10:00] and also even within like the third grade Patterns of Revision, the very first combining lesson is pretty simple; it's just using the serial comma. It's very simple. But we grow in complexity as they become more accustomed to combining, we add in different complexities.
And I know that every grade level. We have that piece as well, but we just become more and more complex. And by complex, I'm not talking just about a complex sentence, but the actual, like, sophistication of writing, where it becomes more sophisticated, it becomes more, Crafty, I guess would be the word. Not crappy, but crafty. With an F T, not a P P. And we know, um, when they are tested in writing, they are going to get a higher score. Every time they use more craft when they take their mood, their writing and make it more crafty if they can do it accurately and to where it makes sense. So we want to be able to raise their writing as a writer, but then also as Writing for test taking purposes. We will raise their scores in that way as well.
Travis: And before we get into giving examples of lessons from each of the resources and talking through the process, what it would look like to teach a Combine lesson, We just want to share a recommendation for you that before you get into the combining lessons that you ensure that you've taken a look at and done some work with the previous chapters.
So deleting, rearranging, adding at the middle school level, forming new verbs as well. Because those conversations at the paragraph level that we're going to be having some of the same look-fors as we get down into this micro level into this sentence level. So where do we see repetition for ideas that would make sense for us to focus in [00:12:00] on to delete?
If we've already had practice with a delete lesson from that chapter, that's going to serve our students well in having confidence, understanding shared vocabulary to be able to move into this sentence level work.
Whitney: That's a great point. And so when we do combine, we use all of those strategies together in that acronym DRAFT, D-R-A-F-T. So now instead of at the paragraph level, we're now at the sentence level. So we're looking for words that are repetitive to delete among multiple sentences. And then we're going to take what we have left over and rearrange them. And at the same time, think about what words or punctuation we could add to the sentence to make it make sense.
We need to form new verbs. If we want to take a look at the verbs and think about other ways to form those verbs, we can, and all the time we're talking it out. So that's where DRAFT comes in, in totality for us during these Combine lessons. And one other thing before we really get into this is something that I want teachers to really keep in mind is in these lessons, the students will come up with a variety of ways to combine.
And remember, we want them to come up with their own. We don't want them to necessarily match what the author does every time. And with these Combine lessons, it is not very often that they match exactly what the author says. They might have pieces that match, but overall they don't. And that's intentional.
We want them to see. That writers have options, right? And so we can go ahead and take a look at multiple ways to combine and then take a look at what the author did to combine those and have those compare contrast conversations as well to discover even more deeper moves that we can learn from.
Travis: Great point, Whitney.
Whitney: So just before we get into an actual lesson, I think we should talk about behind the [00:14:00] scenes. How do we prepare for a lesson? So you're making your own lesson. This is something that you need to keep in mind. Um, like Travis and I said, we would look in books and we would look for specific sentence structures. We would look for these parts of speech. Speech and being used in different ways and thinking about some sentences that we would write, like to see our students write and so with that, we find a sentence and then we deconstruct it into multiple shorter sentences.
So there is repetition, there is a need for rearranging and for adding punctuation and connector conjunctions or other words as well. And in, So with that, that's what we've done behind the scenes. And of course, in our lessons, we do that for you. And then if you're looking to do your own, that's something to keep in mind of what you'll do.
Travis: If that's something that you're interested as well, the more of these lessons that you experience and work with your students on, and the more you read the modeling, our teacher talk to you of our explanation of the structure and the flow that we might use as we're facilitating the learning around this lesson, you're going to find that at a certain point things are just going to click for you where you're going to see, oh, okay, this sentence structure, I could see how you pulled this apart and deconstructed it. And then just practicing on your own a little bit as you're interacting with texts, you're going to find that this skillset exists in you and that you're going to have some success with it.
It's not as much as we like to think it's the magical work of Jeff and Whitney and Travis, this is also something that is definitely well within your skillset to be able to deconstruct and help students put back together. In various ways.
Whitney: Yeah. So if you are using a scripted program through your school and you have a certain something that your students have to read, keep in mind that might [00:16:00] not be like the best writing, but there are going to be some sentences in there that you really could use as models.
So once you know how to do that, if you're using ours to get started, that's something that you can then go in and look at, to where they have context around those sentences as well.
Travis: Okay, to recap the main points in this episode, we are talking here about the revision strategy of sentence combining. When we look at the Writing Next research from Graham and Perrin, we see from their work that sentence combining is one of their 11 key recommendations for enhancing writing.
We do this by looking at authentic grade level texts that our students are already reading. We are finding those well crafted sentences within those texts, deconstructing them into their basic parts. Then we invite students to play around with different ways to put these ideas back together.
We want students to use the skills they've already practiced in deleting, rearranging, adding content and connectors, and possibly even forming new verbs when they do this work at the sentence level of combining ideas together.
So in part two of this episode on sentence combining, we are going to take a look at an elementary and a middle school example and talk through the process of combining at both levels. The similarities that we follow in this predictable protocol and how we have some flexibility within both versions of the lessons that we're going to talk about. So we really look forward to learning again together soon. Hope you're well, happy new year.
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