By Christine Teahan and Dr. Kristin Simmers

Teachers, do you assign writing or teach it? Let’s say you assign the following prompt:

Write a paragraph explaining why the colonists objected to the Stamp Act. Use two details from the reading.

Do any of these descriptions sound like students you have had in your classroom when given such an assignment?

• They explain an idea clearly in conversation but write only a few sentences.
• They begin a sentence, pause for a long time at one word, then lose the rest of the thought.
• They create a useful outline but stop referring to it once drafting begins.
• They spend so much time correcting words while drafting that it loses direction.
• They avoid starting.
• They read a draft only for spelling errors and make no changes to its meaning or organization.

These behaviors may reflect difficulties with the same underlying mental skills. Executive function is the term researchers use for the system that runs a task from start to finish: setting a goal, making a plan, getting started, holding attention on the work, keeping track of where you are, switching between the big idea and the next small details, and checking whether what you produced matches what you meant. It is separate from both intelligence and content knowledge, which is why a student can reason well, know a great deal about the Stamp Act, and still be unable to hold a plan in mind while spelling the word representation.

Executive function develops over the first 20+ years of life, and it develops unevenly. From the outside, challenges with executive function can look like not caring, which is rarely the case.

Consider this alternate version of the same assignment:

1. Read the assigned section and note reasons the colonists objected to the Stamp Act.
2. Record the relevant details in notes.
3. Choose the two details that best support your answer.
4. Complete an outline with a claim, two supporting details, and an explanation of each detail.
5. Draft the paragraph.
6. Revise the paragraph for meaning and organization.
7. Edit for spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

The academic goal has not changed. Both assignments ask students to explain an idea and support it with evidence. The first version, however, names only the final product. The second makes the process visible. That distinction matters for all developing writers, but it can be especially important for students with dyslexia. Writing requires students to manage content, language, spelling, handwriting or keyboarding, organization, and self-monitoring at the same time. If several of those processes are not yet fluent, a short prompt can create more demand than a student’s working memory can manage.

We know from research that practicing working-memory games or other executive function exercises in isolation won’t lead to better essays. But, explicitly teaching the writing skills that place demands on working memory can. That means developing greater fluency in spelling and transcription, explicitly teaching sentence construction, planning, and revision, and giving students a visible process to follow while those skills develop.

Dyslexia is correlated with challenges in working-memory, meaning the two often (but not always) occur together (Gray et al., 2019). And no two students with dyslexia have the exact same writing profile. The key issue is: when foundational writing skills like spelling or transcription require sustained conscious attention, less working memory is available for higher-level composing skills.

Writing researchers often organize the task of writing into three broad areas:

• Transcription: spelling and handwriting/keyboarding
• Text generation: turning ideas into words, sentences, and connected text
• Executive function and self-regulation: setting a goal, planning, starting, maintaining attention, moving between the main ideas and the current sentence, and checking the result

These areas interact. A student does not finish thinking and then begin spelling. The student must keep an idea active while selecting words, constructing a sentence, spelling, forming letters, and deciding what should come next.

Think of working memory as a single desk. Everything the writer is actively using has to fit on it: the idea, the sentence in progress, the relationship between its parts, the plan for the paragraph, the vocabulary, and the spelling of the word currently being written. For a fluent writer, common spellings and letter formation require little conscious attention. For a student with dyslexia, spelling one word may take up much more of the available space. By the time the word is on the page, part of the sentence or the next idea may no longer be accessible.

This is one reason a student’s oral explanation can be much stronger than the word on the page. The gap may reflect difficulty managing transcription demands rather than a lack of knowledge.

Suppose a student wants to write this sentence:

Although Parliament needed money, many colonists opposed the Stamp Act because they had no representative in Parliament.

To produce it, the student must:

• recall the relevant historical information;
• decide that the main point is many colonists opposed the Stamp Act;
• add context with the introductory clause;
• add a reason with the because clause;
• understand the use of the subordinating conjunction although;
• keep the subjects and verbs clear across three clauses;
• remember the comma after the introductory clause;
• spell words such as Parliament, colonists, opposed, and representatives; and
• form the letters or locate the keys.

An experienced writer handles many of these actions with little conscious effort. A student who is still learning the sentence structure and working through several difficult spellings has to direct attention to each one. Simply telling a student to “write a strong sentence” does not reduce the number of decisions involved.

So what can teachers do? We’ll explore how to explicitly teach the writing process in Part 2 of this series.

Christine Teahan is the founder and director of CGT Learning Throughline. Formerly, she was a middle school teacher of students with language-based learning differences, after which she spent 6 years leading professional development for The Writing Revolution. She holds a BS and MEd in Special Education

Kristin Simmers is a teacher and researcher, currently serving as Director of Cognition & Learning at Forman School. She holds a PhD in Learning Science, as well as an MEd and MS, with a graduate certificate in Special Education.

The Forman School is a college preparatory school specializing in teaching students with ADHD and Dyslexia. To learn more, visit their website here.