Teachers often teach the way they were taught. That’s the obstacle to change in classrooms from kindergarten to the university. With the publication of the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” we have a blueprint on ways writing should be taught. But how do we convince teachers to alter classroom culture to include the habits of mind that foster fine writing: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility and reflection? When I participated in a Summer Institute sponsored by the National Writing Project, I was sure that all English teachers would change the way they ran their classrooms within a few years. I had visions of students who would understand that writing is a process and that grammar taught in isolation has almost no effect on the quality of a student’s writing.

Decades later, there have been some changes in some schools, but most of the entering students in my Oakton High School and George Mason University classes still had memories of grammar lessons and parts-of-speech worksheets.