After McKamey finished reading the essay, students discussed what made it work—and which approaches they could employ in their own writing. As the discussion winded down, McKamey passed out a grammar worksheet.

Today, there is a growing consensus that students need strong writing skills to succeed in the workplace and to fully participate in society, but educators passionately disagree on the best ways to teach those skills. Some call for greater focus on the fundamentals of grammar: building vocabulary, identifying parts of speech, and mastering punctuation. Others believe that students need more opportunities to develop their writerly voice through creative expression and work that allows them to make connections between great literature and their personal lives.

Meanwhile, it appears that many of the methods seem to be falling short: Results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress suggest that only one in four 12th- and eighth-graders is meeting grade-level expectations in writing. In both tested grades, Latino and African American students scored lower than their peers in other racial and ethnic subgroups.

[The best writing teachers are writers themselves]

McKamey spent 29 years teaching in majority black and Latino schools. Over the years, she observed that many of her students came into her classroom believing that they “don’t like writing” or are “bad writers.” Since McKamey first started teaching at San Francisco’s Luther Burbank Middle School in 1989, she has been refining her own methods to help dispel these self-perceptions.

In McKamey’s classes, this means that students must feel compelled to write every day. But rather than prioritizing the mechanics of sentence structure or writing rooted in personal experiences, McKamey’s students work on a variety of exercises, including punctuation worksheets, argumentative and narrative essays, poetry, fiction, and long research papers. And while McKamey’s methods have evolved significantly since she first started teaching, her goal has remained the same: help every student develop a portfolio of high-quality work, which will serve as irrefutable evidence that they are capable of writing.

McKamey’s approach to writing instruction was shaped in part by her own experiences as a high-school student. One of just a handful of African American students at a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania, she noticed that most of her teachers would return papers with feedback that focused on what she did wrong. Whenever McKamey’s teachers praised her in the classroom, their feedback usually centered on her personality—rather than her intellectual contributions. Fran Bradley, McKamey’s high-school economics teacher, was an exception. When McKamey asked a question or made a comment, Bradley would engage in an enthusiastic discussion about McKamey’s ideas. He often read passages from her work in front of the class.