Why Parents Make Great Writing Coaches

I’ve created a selection of online writing courses for homeschoolers in high school. The courses handle the instruction, but parents still have an important role to play!

Online Writing Courses

Across the Page Courses are asynchronous and offer the instructional building blocks for students to work through independently:

• Sequenced lessons
• Video instruction
• Readings
• Moderated written discussion
• Supporting handouts and practice exercises

Each course is structured on the writing process, which lowers the stress students might feel if they expect to transfer a finished essay from their minds to the blank page in one fell swoop! Confidence grows as they get acclimated to this stable system for developing their ideas. The writing process gives them time for everything they need to do over the course of a writing project.

Where do parents come in?

Parents provide the one thing every writer needs: a reader! They do this at two points in the process:

• Offering feedback on a first draft
• Grading a final draft

Initially, parents may feel uncertain about how to fill this role. After all, grading writing is different than grading an assignment based on right/wrong distinctions that are clear cut and easy to calculate. Evaluating writing involves making subjective judgments and weighing different strengths and weaknesses. But keeping this goal in mind helps to lower the stress level: building writing confidence to help keep students writing.

We learn to write by writing. The ones who stop developing are the ones who give up, believing they can’t ever “get it.”

Providing Feedback

Responding to a student’s draft gives them the chance to see how their writing comes across to someone else. There may be differences between what they meant, and what came across to a reader. This is valuable information that helps them see new possibilities in what they’ve said.

The goal of a draft is to get one’s thoughts down on paper in a single, continuous thread. It’s not supposed to be perfect — it’s a diamond in the rough that will need more work! The question for the writer is how to apply the chisel. That’s where an honest, caring reader can be a huge help.

Across the Page Courses offer a reviewer guide for every essay, but for parents working on their own, here is the main thing to remember:

Your job as the reader is to get the student to the next draft. This means:

• Pointing out a strength or two. What do you like about the draft? Where does the student’s voice shine through? Where do you gain a new insight? Where does the student make a compelling point?
• Working from large issues (the thesis) to small ones (transitions between paragraphs), make 2 or 3 (at most) suggestions. Were you unsure of the essay’s main purpose? Did you feel lost anywhere, wondering how what was said related to the rest of the essay? Did the tone strike a wrong note? Indicate (specifically) where it happened, and make a suggestion for how to improve on that point.

Be encouraging and specific. Don’t write about everything you think should be done. No one can fix more than three things at once; generally two is enough. If there are many issues that need attention, take them a few at a time over multiple drafts.

Grading the Final Essay

If the goal in providing feedback is to get students to the next draft, the goal in grading is to get them to the next writing project with a sense of finishing well after improving the current project through stages. If an essay has been revised and is still suffering from a number of issues, consider either

• Grading it honestly and constructively, highlighting the improvements that have been made as a foundation to build on in future writing, or
• Discussing the project, then extending an option to make additional revisions in another draft before grading.

Across the Page writing courses offer rubrics for parents to choose from. To take a deeper dive into grading and rubrics, check out this post.

Benefits

If you’re like me, you started homeschooling because you wanted your student to have a good education, but you wanted to have a part in their learning. Sure, there were days when I felt sure my kids would be better off in the hands of “experts”! We didn’t go that route, and we didn’t have the means in those years to hire expensive tutors. We chose the best curricula we could, found support when we needed it, and I stayed involved in their learning.

The most significant insight I gained during our homeschooling endeavor is that the teacher’s knowledge is not the most important factor in a student’s learning. My role was not to be an expert in everything. It was to establish an atmosphere of love for learning, to institute a structure to our days in which learning could happen, and to enforce it with love. Even in areas that were not my strength (physics, for example), I chose good materials, and my daughters ran with them. They learned how to learn.

Staying involved as your high schooler’s writing coach can improve their learning, even if you don’t feel like an expert. It can deepen your relationships, because you get to read what they’re thinking about, caring about, working out about their lives. You get to see them developing a unique voice to speak into the world. You get to encourage their skill and confidence to participate in the important conversations that are going on all the time around us.

Other teachers, other influences, other levels of expertise will come. But for now, in these foundational years, you can be a great writing coach for your high schooler.