TDEC
Origin
Story
Me as the Baby Teacher
My journey as a teacher of English Language Arts began in 2000. I was handed senior English that year, and I often jokingly say that it was a hazing. It was the hardest year ever, physically and emotionally. In that first year, I went into every day enthusiastic and scared to death. Good days and bad days were hits and misses and ended with smiles or tears. The days were long, but nights of preparation, grading, and anxiety were longer. An overwhelming sense of being terribly unprepared haunted me. This is no surprise.
Formal education seldom fully prepares us for the realities of the jobs that we are receiving training to do. Only experience can offer that kind of education. However, I did reflect on what could have been done to better prepare me. One conclusion was that all teachers need education classes geared toward the teaching of their specific subject areas. Sure, I had my degree in literature, I had proven myself as one who understands literature and is a decent writer, and I had my education classes and teaching credential. Taken together, one would think I was ready to teach literature and writing.
No. Not at all. I feel that my students suffered as I struggled to learn my craft. Most new teachers feel this way. There is nothing worse than coming into teaching, ready to change the world, caring so much, and feeling like a failure – every day. So, my transition to teaching was jarring. Obviously, this has been a real concern because some teaching programs have begun to address this issue, thankfully. At the same time, post-COVID, there are emergency certification programs that do not adequately prepare new teachers.
When I began teaching, I had the naive outlook of the ten-year-old girl who had played school in my bedroom, holding my siblings and friends captive as my students: make my students read, make my students write, grade the writings by marking every error, pass them back, and repeat. Afterall, that is how I had learned. As a real teacher with my very real students, I did not count on one very important factor at all, ironically - my students and their’ needs, which were to learn and to feel successful. All of my theoretical study about child development and preferred student outcomes became nothing more than airy words as I took the helm of my first classroom.
As my siblings and friends had been in my bedroom-turned-classroom twenty years before, my students were just an audience. With each round of making my students write essay assignments (Literary Analysis – check; Research – check; Definition – check; Cause and Effect – check; Comparison – check), I had students question me about the marks that I made on their essays. They were confused by my comments, which were nothing more than vague remarks meant to elicit a nebulous “more.” They would approach me with their graded essays to ask about the comments, I would offer further nebulous explanations, feeling inadequate, and they would offer a hesitant, “Uh, okay,” and return to their seats with mystified looks.
Another effect of my grading that caught me off guard was that those students who really struggled were hurt by their grades, in addition to being very confused about what was weak in their writing. I started to realize, through their questioning, that they were frustrated and looking for guidance – they had no idea what they were doing. And neither did I. Their writing was not changing, and I was not able to tell them what was wrong with their writing in a way that had any profound effect at all.
When a teacher lacks clarity about what a student should know, understand, and be able to do as a result of a lesson, the learning tasks she creates may or may not be engaging, and we can almost be certain the tasks will not help students to understand essential ideas or principles. A fuzzy sense of essentials results in fuzzy activities, which, in turn, results in fuzzy student understanding. That is a barrier to high-quality teaching and learning. (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 37)
Bingo. When I realized this years ago, I felt like I was play-grading essays, and one day I woke up to the fact that I knew how to write, but I did not know how to teach writing.
I turned to English textbooks. Poured over what little content was offered about how to write. A part of the problem in teaching the Language Arts is that textbooks (and believe me, I have looked inside many) offer a lot on the “how to organize a paper and format it,” but when it comes to offering a useful breakdown of “how to put words together into sentences and sentences into paragraphs,” little is offered.
I turned to my mentor teachers. They spoke in the same terms as what the textbooks offered: “Get them to write an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.” When I would probe deeper, asking, “Well, but what about the writing itself?” Their answer was to “Give lots of feedback.” In other words, let my pen bleed all over their papers? Nope. I had seen the impact of that, and I was done with that practice.
At the end of one very long day, I sat in my chair behind my desk, staring off into space, deep in thought. A question came into my mind: “What makes good writing good writing?” And then I had a thought: “If you learned how to do anything with your literature degree, it was to analyze the crap out of text. That is exactly what you are going to do!”
Yes, I would have to learn to analyze writing in a way that would inform instructive guidance that was meaningful. Important questions emerged: “What defines ‘good’ writing?” and “How do I help my students to achieve ‘good’ writing?”
This questioning steered me to my past and my experiences as a young writer. I stepped into my students’ shoes by reflecting on my own writing journey, wherein I had struggled to learn how to write. Through this reflection, I found that, as a young teacher, I was emulating what I remembered about most of my English teachers.
I figured something else out rather quickly: teaching writing is oxymoronic. Do I teach? Yes. Do I teach my students to write? That is questionable. Why? Because the only way to become a writer is through a learning process and doing it yourself. As a “teacher,” I am just a single stop along a student’s journey to becoming a writer. I cannot control prior learning, and I cannot make my students better writers. The most I can offer is guidance as a coach.
This shift in perspective changed my “teaching” in two ways: 1) I realized that I needed to really revisit how I learned to write to understand the process, and 2) I needed to understand that the process of learning to write is something personal and unique to each of us. It is not just writing.
Digging in the Dirt – Finding the Student Writer in Me
As a student, I remembered being assigned a reading, having to write an essay about it, and receiving it back with lots of red or green marks in the margins. No revision. No conferencing with my teacher. No learning from my mistakes. I remember having no idea what my teachers’ comments meant, if I even read them. The faint embarrassment that I felt each time I got papers back, with the same types of comments on them, again and again and again, turning them face down so that no one could see them, is something that I had forgotten. I was often left feeling discouraged, thinking, “It is never good enough.”
I tried to glean what I could from my graded essays, but I was too shy and ashamed to ask for my teacher’s help. Don’t get me wrong; it was because of two special English teachers that I decided to become an English teacher. They had their strengths, they helped me grow in many ways, and they did the best that they could, given their experiences and education. Even so, the truth is that, for me, learning to write was slow-going. The result was only minor improvements over the years. It was a long road. Granted, learning to write is a long road. However, I have since discovered that there are shortcuts.
Examining the Past – the Old File-Box
In my walk down memory lane, I decided that, when I got home on that one, long day, I would pull out an old file-box full of papers that I had saved from college. I knew which one I was looking for. There was an essay, written in my junior year, that had made me feel like I arrived as a writer, feeling, "I get writing now."
The essay was about Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." On it, my professor had written across the top, “Excellent analysis – articulate and well-detailed. Good job, and one of the best essays on this topic – no, the best.” I remembered how my heart had glowed after I read this comment all those years ago, just as it was now glowing again. It seemed fitting, as a young teacher, that I analyze it as a model for what is right in writing. My deep analysis in search of ‘good writing’ began.
First, I started to connect different types of sentences to the different types of thought that I observed in the essay. A pattern emerged: I would state something as fact, give evidence for it, explain that evidence and how it was used in context, and then give an opinion about it - the insight. In simplest terms, it was what I would come to term “Thesis,” "Detail" and "Elaboration," and "Commentary." While I stumbled upon this pattern on my own, I did not make up these terms. They are common language in the field of writing, and that is a part of their power – but more on that later.
Apparently, I had internalized it by this point in my college career. I could see that this pattern existed throughout the whole essay, usually two or three Details, Elaboration, and Commentary blocks in each paragraph. Common word for a block is “chunk,” however, I like “block” because blocks are stackable, and that’s what happens in a well-written paragraph.
As I further studied my prized essay, I started taking notes about the purposes of each of the sentences in each paragraph beyond the Thesis, Detail, Elaboration, and Commentary. This is when I came up with a list of Sentence Purposes. These included stock ELA terms, such as Topic Sentence, Internal Transition, Paragraph Transition, and so on. These were nothing new as terminology, but they were something that I realized needed to be scaffolded and taught more carefully to my students to help them to see that each of their sentences has a particular function within their writing.
I know that I, as a student, must have been taught these concepts innumerable times, but the concepts did not “stick.” Until something becomes an innate understanding, encountering English jargon does not help students to understand the concepts at work. The challenge: figuring out how to catalyze that “aha” moment when a piece of seemingly alien jargon transmigrates into language that symbolizes genuine understanding of a concept. How did this happen for me? Through meaningful, consistent comments on my page and conferencing with my teacher’s assistant, who would have me rephrase broken thoughts in my writing. In other words, we talked through what my revisions would be.
After this thorough analysis of my essay, I came to an important conclusion: This is simply how we think when we are advocating for ourselves or about something, whether arguing for a later curfew, a raise, or meaning in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.”
Second, I began to wonder when it was that my writing had really shifted in college. I went back to the file box, and I started to look through my other essays, studying my progression as a collegiate writer. I discovered that there was a turning point in my second year of college. What had helped me that year were the comments of a teaching assistant who was assigned to my section of the 500-seat Lyceum for one of my World Literature classes.
After that World Lit class, my writing had changed permanently. As I perused my college essays, reading through them chronologically, I observed the shift in my writing. I was amazed that I had forgotten this momentous shift, if I ever even understood what was happening. It all boiled down to conceptual understanding of the four categories of thought as being central to structure. I clearly got it at the time and began to apply it as a kind of formula in all my writing, internalizing the elements of support until they became a natural part of my writing. As a young, struggling teacher, I realized that what had become second nature to me needed to be communicated as concepts to my students in similar and simple terms.
Anyway, as I studied my essays and had epiphany after epiphany, I had never realized how much I owed to the teaching assistant for guiding me to a tiny seed of understanding that had as its essence the staples of TDEC – Thesis, Detail, Elaboration, and Commentary (capitalized to recognize them as specific thought functions that translate into writing skills), which I have since come to realize are key concepts for students of writing.
He may not have been using Thesis, Detail, Elaboration, and Commentary consistently, but he did use them in turn, in addition to synonyms for them, and when he did not, he asked questions that elicited their essences. Whatever the form, his comments could be analyzed and boiled down to first making a point and then following it up by offering support through three distinct categories of support.
Here, I must pause to emphasize the point that, for my teaching assistant, both conferencing and written comments were central to his teaching, and my learning. I want to drive this point home because some teachers do not write comments because “the students don’t read them. They don’t care. Why should I waste my time?” I have a few of points of rebuttal for these kinds of comments:
Comments written as feedback for students are lost in the muddle if we do not require students to do something with them.
While writing comments is time consuming, the comments are there for us as teachers just as much as they are for the students, many of whom will read them. Comments promote conferencing and serve as “placeholders,” indicating areas for addressing later with the student without the teacher having to reread and attempt to remember, which saves time.
Sometimes, comments justify a grade that is under attack.
An image of Indiana Jones, standing on the edge of a canyon, comes to mind here. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a bridge, camouflaged to look like the facing canyon wall, extends at his very feet. Yet he cannot see it. He can only see what he sees with his eyes. In the end, he must take a step in faith (he is seeking the Holy Grail, of course).
In learning to write, unfortunately, there is no step of faith. We must be able to get kids to see what they could not see before. Transforming what we are in the habit of seeing, or knowing, may be one of the hardest things a human can do because we only know what we know. As a teacher, one of my jobs was to help students to see what they could not see before.
In the end, students suffer as they transition from rote memorization of definitions to internalization of skills and concepts. Through repeated application, I required my students to put their writing through processes, including conferencing and revisions, that helped their awareness to grow, forcing engagement with each thought element of TDEC, learning to harness each based on its function, until they became increasingly internalized.
When I first taught the TDEC concepts in my classroom. It was through a variety of synonyms at first, but I quickly saw, with the help of my students (they started showing clear preference for the TDEC terms over other synonyms for each), that the synonyms got in the way. I realized that I needed to narrow the terminology I was using to create a consistent academic vocabulary. Those terms are Thesis, Detail (evidence in the form of quotes or examples), Elaboration (factual explanation of varying kinds, including background and current context), and Commentary (base being “comment,” meaning opinion or insight). As a result, these terms became the consistent means of communicating about writing as I began communicating about their explicit and differing natures as thought elements with specific functions to my students.
Because a TDEC block exhibits a pattern, it is safe to say that it feels formulaic; however, the possibilities of combinations of the four thought elements, especially those that support the Thesis, are anything but formulaic. The difference between a novice writer and a seasoned one is that the young writer needs to be taught that there is a pattern, and they need to practice and internalize that pattern. The seasoned writer intermingles the thought elements seamlessly, making the pattern their own, innovating with it as his or her writing demands.
So, for young writers, it starts out as a stilted and mechanical exercise but gradually moves toward a coherent, cogent flow of thought on the page. In fact, it is when the writer understands the underlying structure and can begin innovating and breaking the rules that the writer crosses over into the realm of artist, no matter what mode of writing he or she is producing.
Thinking is the Goal
Thinking about thinking; thinking about writing. In that first year of teaching, I realized that I had to break it all down – the way we think and the way we structure ideas – so that my students could understand that they were thinking in written form. As it turned out, I was not as much in the teaching of writing business as in the teaching of thinking-structure business. We are caught in a flowing river of thought.
Even though what we experience usually appears to be clear to us, how accurate is our perception of the experience? How many thoughts, observations, and impulses just flow past us without our awareness of them? We need greater awareness when we are thinking, arguing, analyzing, and writing. I needed a way to be able to get my students to be able to observe their thoughts, evaluate them, and decide what was relevant and worthy to keep and what could be thrown out. We needed a structured way to do this.
In addition, in teaching writing in that first year, I had not only been assigning writing after writing without offering opportunities to learn from mistakes, but I had also been writing a hodgepodge of comments on my students' papers, all without instructing about the comments' meanings. I had not been clear about what it was that I was trying to get my students to do. Now I could see it.
As I analyzed my essays, my discoveries made sense to me, but I recognized that I needed to test my theory by applying my new-found theory of pattern to writing other than my own. I pulled out a Smithsonian Magazine that happened to be on my shelf to serve as an example of “professional” writing. It was all there: the sentence purposes, the TDEC pattern, as well as the innovation and deviation from the thought pattern.
The very next day, I pulled an article from the same Smithsonian Magazine and made copies of it for my students. After teaching each TDEC element, I had my students hunt for and highlight them a different color. When we were done, I asked them to pull out that last graded essay that had caused me to decide to go on my search for “good writing,” and I had them highlight it for TDEC. Lightbulbs went off, questions erupted, and we began to have real conversations about the writing, what was missing, and what could be improved and how. Things began to change on that day, and I left the building feeling like I had finally done something worthwhile with writing instruction.
Mission: Student Success in Writing
Since then, it has been my goal to come up with meaningful learning opportunities for students. This has led me down a winding path in my mission to help distill the abstract world of thought in written form for students. What I have come to realize is that keeping it simple, with a handful of repeated terms (consistent academic vocabulary) and learning activities-turned-protocols, has been the most effective way to help students to improve their writing. This becomes a constant curriculum, one that is finite and clear.
Perhaps many of you were luckier in your education than I was, learning all of this by osmosis, intuition, inherent brilliance, or through a bright teacher. For those who have not been so fortunate, maybe my learning can benefit you and, therefore, your students. I grew into a writer through very traditional essay “teaching”: write an introduction, add three body paragraphs, and then write a conclusion (I was a part of the TAAS Test generation in Texas). While, yes, I had been “instructed” in high school to write a Thesis, Topic Sentences, Paragraphs, and so on, I struggled to figure out what went into those essay components on my own. I might as well have been detangling a ball of yarn.
I was able to achieve some success, but it was all a nebulous and frustrating practice for me. I lacked confidence and agency. I never knew if a piece of my writing was good or not until I got a grade on it because I did not understand that how I was writing was different than what I was writing. Extended beyond this lack of understanding would be that I did not understand the components that go into the writing itself. When students come to understand what is essential in the writing itself, they can discern whether writing is good or not, whether it be someone else’s or theirs. It became my mission, as a teacher, to break down the foundational structure of clear writing and thinking for students. I had had enough of reading bad essays.
I had had enough of listening to fellow teachers complain about how terribly their students write. The answer is simple: focus on the components of thought in writing. More clumsy writing should not be encouraged. Stop assigning essays if students do not understand what it means to communicate through writing. Stop assigning a variety of essays if students do not understand the fundamentals of writing to begin with.
Again, traditionalists, including many policy makers, are married to the traditional because, hey, it worked for them, and it is all they know. But what if it could have been easier and more effective for them? If we change how we approach the teaching of writing on a wide scale, it will change students’ writing for the better, building confidence instead of dread and shame.
About Finite Writing, as a Program for Success in Teacher Writing
Before I say goodbye, I must emphasize that TDEC as a writing acronym is an essential PIECE of Finite Writing - a clear way to teach the whole writing process. Revisions are essential. Through a series of protocols (like academic common vocabulary, learned once and applied every time a student writes an academic piece), Finite Writing offers a writing program that helps students to get traction and experience growth in their writing that surprises even them (and builds their confidence =).