Hi David,
Your question captures a familiar classroom challenge because writing is extraordinarily demanding. Even when a student practices handwriting with a seemingly simple activity like tracing a letter, the act is not a single skill. It requires shoulder stability, grip strength, hand-eye coordination, and the ability to plan movements in sequence, just to name a few. As soon as you start considering what is required to write a dictated sentence or author a paragraph that shares your ideas- well, it’s no wonder that kids tire quickly.
Writing is hard, and most learners, children and adults alike, are likely to avoid tasks that consistently feel overwhelming. As you’ve already pointed out, engaging students requires more than making writing fun with different tools and activities. Before trying to increase motivation in isolation, I would identify what exactly makes writing difficult for your student. Behavior is a form of communication, so what looks like a lack of motivation may actually be a student signaling that the academic task feels too difficult or that they do not yet have the skills needed to complete it successfully. As educators, we need to determine what knowledge, strategies, and skills students don’t have and then explicitly teach those things to make writing more manageable. This includes developing students’ foundational skills (things like handwriting, spelling, and sentence composition), advanced skills related to text generation (such as developing ideas and building paragraphs), and executive functioning skills (like planning and organizing ideas). There’s simply no way I can tackle how to effectively assess and teach all of these components in one answer. Instead, I’d encourage you to keep building your knowledge of effective writing instruction by filtering AIM Nexus search results by the “Writing” topic to find recent resources to support writing instruction. Since you mentioned that handwriting is a particular struggle for this student, it may also be helpful to consult with your school’s occupational therapist to better understand what may be contributing to that difficulty and whether additional supports could help.
Now, let’s talk about motivation more specifically. Addressing the skills that make writing difficult does not mean we can ignore motivation until writing becomes easier. Students still have to engage in the hard work of learning those skills, so we also need to support their willingness to persist while they do it. One thing we can do for students is to talk openly about how difficult writing is so that when students struggle, they don’t see it as evidence that they’re not capable. We want to send the message to students that writing is challenging, but it is also something we can support them in learning. You might start by considering the language you use when encouraging students. Compare these two compliments:
“Wow, you’re such a good writer!”
“Wow, the details you added to your draft really help me see what you’re writing about and make your piece so strong!”
The first praises what seems to be an innate ability. This may inadvertently give the impression to everyone who hears the compliment that writing well is just something the student was blessed with. Instead, feedback like the second example is informative and helps students build internal dialogue to persist even when the task is challenging. This, coupled with instruction that is broken into manageable steps and the appropriate, targeted support, can help students sustain the attention needed to develop competence.
Tasks are more engaging when we see the value and purpose in them. One thing I’d suggest is to make sure your student understands why they are writing and to model its importance. Creating a writing task for an authentic audience is certainly one way to establish this for students. I don’t think this means that every time you ask a student to write, it must be for a real audience, in part because it’s not always possible! Some tasks, like handwriting practice, are important because they help students build fluency with a skill needed to support more complex writing. In those moments, I think it may be useful to share the purpose honestly by saying something to students like, “We’re practicing writing our letters because writing letters quickly and easily will make it easier to get your ideas onto the page.”
Similarly, it’s important that writing is fun for students. But it’s a tried-and-true trick that I feel gets incorrectly interpreted to mean turning everything into a game. Writing naturally allows for experimentation, and educators should capitalize on this. Humor may be something that is joyful for your students. If this is the case, you might invite students to play with language. During a sentence expansion lesson, for example, students might see how silly they can make a sentence while still adding meaningful details that make the sentence more precise.
Finally, I’d recommend capitalizing on the social aspects of writing. We write because we have something we want to say and share. Therefore, writing instruction should create opportunities for students to see their ideas as worth developing and sharing. One way to do this is by having students collaborate throughout the writing process. Students might talk through ideas before drafting, read one another’s work, ask questions, or give focused feedback during revision and editing. These interactions give students opportunities to learn from one another while also strengthening the oral language that supports writing.
The length of my response is a clear indication that this isn’t a simple question with an easy answer. Still, I hope it gives you some direction on how you can teach the skills necessary for writing in a way that supports both motivation and learning.
