We have become accustomed to thinking of educational failure as a function of a teacher's lack of effort, talent, or training. But sometimes the problem lies specifically in what we train teachers to do. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we teach reading and writing to some of our most vulnerable students.

Every day, for two hours a day, I led my young students through Reader's and Writer's Workshop. I was trained not to address my kids as "students" or "class" but as "authors" and "readers." We gathered "seed ideas" in our Writer's Notebooks. We crafted "small moment" stories, personal narratives, and memoirs. We peer edited. We "shared out." Gathered with them on the rug, I explained to my 10-year-olds that "good writers find ideas from things that happened in their lives." That stories have "big ideas." That good writers "add detail," "stretch their words," and "spell the best they can."

Teach grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics? I barely even taught. I "modeled" the habits of good readers and "coached" my students. What I called "teaching," my staff developer from Teacher's College dismissed as merely "giving directions." My job was to demonstrate what good readers and writers do and encourage my students to imitate and adopt those behaviors.

In short, I presided over the reading and writing equivalent of a Cargo Cult.

During World War Two, primitive peoples in the South Pacific, unfamiliar with industrialized societies and technologies, watched airplanes land and disgorge enormous amounts of matériel. The war ended; the planes went away. They wanted to make the planes come back, so the natives formed "cargo cults" to build runways and signal fires. They fashioned crude control towers and decoy planes from bamboo. And why wouldn't they? They were imitating perfectly the behaviors of the soldiers that made the planes land. It had been modeled to them beautifully for years.

"The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land," the great physicist Richard Feynman once wrote of cargo cults. "They're missing something essential."

And so it is, all too often, for struggling writers in low-performing schools. They're missing something essential, because we model and coach and they still can't write. But good writers don't just do stuff. They know stuff. They have knowledge of the world that enlivens their prose and provides the ability to create examples and analogies. They have big vocabularies and solid command of the conventions of language and grammar. And if this is not explicitly taught, it will rarely develop by osmosis among children who do not grow up in language-rich homes.

"When our students resist writing, it is usually because writing has been treated as little more than a place to expose all they do not know about spelling, penmanship and grammar," observes Lucy Calkins, probably the workshop model's premier guru. She is almost certainly correct.