It’s become all too typical for teachers to spend the entire year crafting authentic and empowering writing experiences for students, only to have it all come to a screeching halt in April. The novels get put away, the discussions stop, and students spend weeks drilling and writing essays that are totally disconnected from meaningful instruction.
We teach our hearts out all year and see our students craft beautiful pieces of writing, but when annual state standardized testing comes around, we stop doing everything we know to be effective. Then when students face that dreaded test, they freeze; just as we, too, froze our instruction. In many classrooms, those novels that were abandoned never come back out. When it adds up, we’re looking at almost an entire quarter of the school year. Gone.
As a 7th grade English language arts teacher, I made that mistake early in my career, and anyone who has taught in schools knows that this has long been a common pedagogical response to the necessary evil of standardized testing. While this response is understandable, cognitive scientists like Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel, authors of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Brown et al., 2014), would argue this approach does little to help students successfully store and retrieve key knowledge in high-stakes situations. No wonder kids have been falling farther behind each year, with the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress saying that one-third of U.S. 8th graders perform below “basic” in reading (National Center for Education Statistics, 2025).
Why Massed Practice Doesn’t Work
Having students practice the same type of skill in the same way over and over is called “massed practice.” When it comes to writing, an example of massed practice might be pulling all the released writing items from a test and having students practice writing an essay using these prompts every day before the test. This type of cramming feels good because it familiarizes students with the format, but it only leads to short-term gains (Brown et al., 2014). How many times have you crammed for a test and then found that you could not retrieve any of that information after the assessment was over? All that cramming only helped you store the information long enough to take the test.
Additionally, writing practice throughout the year is typically massed because we approach writing genres and instruction by topic. For example, we might teach a unit on narrative writing, then informational, then argumentative. When the test comes around, many students freeze because most writing prompts don’t explicitly tell them what type of writing they need to do and which strategies to apply.
Hopefully, by the time state testing comes around, students have a solid routine for annotating texts, dissecting a prompt, and organizing writing for any task that might appear on the test.
The solution I’ve found is to have students regularly practice determining which strategies to use in response to the writing prompts they may see on tests. Learning to discern what they need to do prevents the freeze response on test day.
In addition, I intentionally connect test prep to the instruction I’ve done all year. This supports the transfer of learned skills and helps students build a schema for thinking about writing that will stick with them long after the test.
Yearlong Preparation
The obvious prerequisite to helping students apply their learning on high-stakes tests is effective instruction throughout the year. In my classroom, students practice different types of writing connected to core instruction all year long. For example, in my first unit of the year, students annotate The Canterbury Tales, and we read, dissect, and answer informational prompts that require them to analyze its narrative elements. They also use writing organizers to draft their own narrative set in the Middle Ages.
Although each unit focuses on a specific type of text, I find opportunities to incorporate different types of writing across units. For instance, when studying narrative texts, students write informational summaries and responses to their reading. When we move on to informational text, they write narratives related to those texts. This practice of returning to previously learned skills, known as interleaving, helps learning stick in long-term memory (Brown et al., 2014). Hopefully, by the time state testing comes around, students have a solid routine for annotating texts, dissecting a prompt, and organizing writing for any task that might appear on the test.
Annotating Texts
In my class, we begin the year with a Notice and Wonder T-chart. In one column, students write down what they notice about the text, and in the other they write down what they’re wondering about. Most students have been using this strategy for years.
As we progress, I increase my expectations for the quality of annotations by having them move from simple notice and wonder charts to writing annotations on sticky notes using specific annotation strategies that I put on a bookmark (see fig. 1). By the end of the year, they are expected to do more high-level annotations related to theme, authors’ craft, tone/mood, and character development.
By changing up the routine and increasing the difficulty, I ensure that students continue to think effortfully about texts. Additionally, by providing variations of this routine throughout the year in different situations, I create varied practice, so students more deeply understand how annotation helps them comprehend a text.
Dissecting a Writing Prompt
Throughout the year, students also practice responding to writing prompts. To dissect a prompt, students use a strategy I learned from the PD group Releasing Writers called the Do-What chart (see also Graham et al., 2016). In the Do column, they write out the verbs in the prompt, and in the What column, they write out the phrases that are the object of the verb (see fig. 2). The result is a simple checklist for success.
Picking a Writing Organizer
Another strategy from Releasing Writers is to teach specific writing mnemonics throughout the year so that students have a base organizer for each type of writing: argument, narrative, and informational:
- Argument: CREE-AC (Claim, Reasoning, Evidence, Elaboration, Alternate Claim, Conclusion)
- Narrative: ESCAPE (Establish, Setting, Character, Action, Problem, Ending)
- Informational: ToSEEC (Topic Sentence, Evidence, Elaboration, Conclusion)
We practice using these organizers to write responses of varying lengths, from single paragraphs to essays. As the length of a piece of writing expands, so does the mnemonic. For example, when writing an informational essay, we add the mnemonic HIT for Hook, Intro, Thesis (thesis for info, claim for argument) to organize an introductory paragraph.
Furthermore, students learn that they can break those mnemonic molds to fit the needs of the prompt. So, for instance, if students are used to writing ToSEEC for informational body paragraphs, but the prompt asks for multiple pieces of evidence from different sources, they learn to pivot and adjust their organizer to ToSEE-EEC.
By applying this routine to various situations, students learn more about the relationships between the needs of the audience (as expressed in the prompt), how to organize their writing, and the purposes of each component of their writing.
Short Rehearsals Before the Test
When the time for focused test prep arrives, students have already gone through multiple cycles of the writing process throughout the year; therefore, I don’t feel compelled to have them complete entire essays leading up to state testing. The core of my test prep comes down to providing students an opportunity to mentally rehearse for test day. Since I don’t want them to freeze when they see a prompt, I model that experience, think it aloud, and allow students to practice retrieving and applying the skills they’ve already learned.
I begin by modeling how to set up the scrap paper they’ll use during the test. One side of the paper contains their organizer for annotations and notes, the other side contains a small Do-What chart to analyze the prompt, followed by their writing organizer. Students have created these throughout the year, so the process is familiar.
Then we practice. I put up a writing prompt, students complete the Do-What chart in less than two minutes, then we share out and discuss, noting key words that clued them in to what type of writing they need to complete. (See my demonstration on TikTok.) Then, based on that Do-What chart, students write out an organizer in less than two minutes, and again we discuss. Why did they choose that organizer? What type of writing is it for? Is it for an essay or a short response?
Asking students to rehearse exactly how they will approach writing prompts on test day gives students a clear plan of action, without any stress over how to start.
I try to allow students lots of opportunities to talk through the prompts as a class and in small groups. My favorite approach after initial modeling and practice is to have students do this activity on mini-whiteboards, give them time to discuss and compare answers with a partner, then pull student examples to discuss with the whole class.
The purpose of this exercise is to prevent students from freezing on test day, so during focused test prep, we don’t read the provided text. We don’t even write the essay, we just practice setting up the scrap paper students will use to guide them in writing their response. Because students have spent the entire year practicing the routines of good readers and writers, all we need are two 20-minute sessions the week before the standardized test to rehearse how to apply what they already know. There’s no need to bring regular learning to a halt to cram for the test.
Using What They Already Know
Last year was my first year using this approach, so I haven’t yet seen whether it affects test scores, but I do know my students went into testing with a clear understanding of what was expected. When I led a group of students from multiple classes in a 45-minute practice test session, my students showed more confidence and less confusion than students from other classes that hadn’t used this approach. Other teachers who proctored the test noted afterward that anyone who had my class took their time, used their scrap paper, and so on.
Asking students to rehearse exactly how they will approach writing prompts on test day gives them a clear plan of action, without any stress over how to start. When students come up against a behemoth like the writing portion of a standardized test, we don’t want them to freeze. We want them to feel empowered and confident in using strategies we have been teaching them all year. The answer is to make your instruction stickier using varied retrieval all year long, with short mental rehearsal under test conditions as test-day approaches. This way, you won’t have to abandon real learning for test prep, because students have been preparing all along.
