Uncovering substance: Teaching revision in high school classrooms

Early, J.S., & Saidy, C. (2014). Uncovering substance: Teaching revision in high school classrooms. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(3), 209-218.


What is the most difficult piece of the writing process to learn and to teach? I would argue that it is the revision process. We educators struggle with revising our own writing, so it is not surprising that we have difficulty trying to teach our students how to revise. Often when we work with young students on revision, what we are doing is really more like editing and correcting errors in the conventions of Standard English. The authors here characterize that kind of work as making “surface revisions” (p. 209). How do we move beyond that and help students learn to do substantive revisions of their writing?

This article presents a model of a three-day workshop that was designed to help high school students learn to do substantive editing. We are taken on a visit to one high school classroom where this model was implemented. The model employs a direct instruction framework, and includes modeling and think-alouds, examination of mentor texts (in this case, looking at manuscript revisions made by Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright as well as by the classroom teacher herself), plenty of scaffolding, and collaborative peer revising.

Two of the three workshop days were focused on learning to give, receive, and use peer feedback to effectively revise one’s writing. Peer revision is often an element in writing instruction, but it may not always be effective, because students are not really taught how to give and receive feedback on their writing in effective ways. As I thought about this, a theme that has recurred in my musings on teaching and learning re-emerged. Once again, I found myself wondering this: How can teachers help students learn to do this important but complex high level skill if they themselves do not know how to do it?
Direct instruction in a skill requires modeling of that skill, and the person modeling must possess a reasonably high level of proficiency at that skill. The teacher candidates I work with tend to not possess skill in substantive revision. It is a struggle for them. I try to model for them in my courses, but sometimes I am not sure that I myself know how to revise my writing well enough to teach them how to do it.

The three-day workshop model described here appears to have at least been of some help to the teacher of the class we get a look at in this article. The workshop is of too short duration to eliminate all of the struggles these students had in learning how to revise substantively, but the model did provide a structure that the teacher could use to begin developing better instruction about revision.

An important contribution in this article is the authors’ work to define the subskills of substantive revision, based on their coding of the categories they saw in these high school students’ revisions of argumentative essays. Five categories emerged: a) Using Examples from Text, b) Using Personal Opinion, c) Interpreting Text, d) Asking a Question, and e) Extending Main Ideas (p. 214). The authors suggest that future research might involve extending their research to other writing genres. I hope they do pursue that line of work. It might assist teachers in building confidence in their own revision skills so that they can then help their own students do the same.