On "A Short History of Writing Instruction" - 1975-1985

The political climate in the late seventies and early eighties is described as conservative. People were responding to the Nixon administration's downfalls by calling for more accountability. In the schools, this meant systems of measuring what students were learning had to be introduced and monitored. As Berlin writes, "Schools everywhere were charged with being 'accountable' for the 'products' they were producing. Students were now considered a commodity to be weighed and measured," (212). Teachers began to focus their curriculum around what students needed to know for the tests, known as "teaching to the test". For writing, however, there was no system in place for measuring it, so there was no reason for it to be taught.
In addition to this new testing phenomena that decreased the classroom time given to writing instruction, Berlin says those responsible for guiding the school curricula may have made matters worse. "Those who did not know how to teach writing were responsible for guiding those who did not know how to teach writing," (213) Berlin writes. College English teachers were charged with this duty, and their expertise was in literary text - not writing.
However, following national attention to the schools' downfalls in writing instruction, such as Arthur Applebee's Writing in the Schools in the Content Areas, published in 1981, changes began to occur. In particular, three national education efforts began, the National Writing Project (NWP), the teacher-as-researcher phenomenon, and the whole language movement.
According to Berlin, the NWP established teacher-training centers designed to improve how writing was taught in almost every state. In this program, teachers who have been successful at writing themselves design instructional materials and share them with other teachers through inservice workshops. The teacher-as-researcher phenomenon focused on returning classroom control to the teacher. "Partly an attempt to resist narrow state and district-mandated curricula, this approach to pedagogy encouranges teachers to study the unique features of their students in order to design the learning and teaching strategies best suited to their students' situations," (215) Berlin describes. Finally, the whole language approach, while closely related to the teacher-as-researcher phenomenon, teachers in this approach were characterized as more interested in the social nature of learning. "They also insist on the integrated nature of reading, writing, speaking ans listening in all experience and argue for the need to create learning activities that bring them together in social environment," (216). This method is one that took hold internationally, Berlin writes, and is more of a collaboration among the disciplines than narrowly focused.
In short, the political climate from 1975 to 1985 followed a call to make schools accountable, the coporate world wanted to be sure students with a degree had actually learned something in school. With a lack of testing methods for writing comprehension, however, instruction of writing saw a turn for the worst. However, three major groups of thought and instruction formed which gave teachers better tools for teaching writing.