5 Tips to Help Students Write Their College Application Essays

How to Write the Common App Essay

You know that students need more help with their college application essays, or they need some sort of structure to start. Maybe its the end of the year and you want a way to easily set students up for success, while also not having all the prep work and extra instruction on your plate. Maybe it's that students need some extra help over summer and you want to give them a resource to support them while outside the classroom. Or maybe, you want a guideline for how to teach narrative writing by using the real world example of the college application essay.  

Whatever your purpose, I have some tips to support your instruction of the college application essay. 

Students often treat the college application essay as an afterthought, something that is getting in the way of finishing their application. Instead, we need to remind them that the essay is becoming more important as some schools take out standardized testing requirements and/or have more applicants that have similar experiences in their resumes and test scores. The essay is the edge that allows students to showcase who they are outside of those things and how they will be the best fit for the school of their choice. 

Tips for Teaching How to Write Essays: College Application Essay Edition

Below, you will find some tips for helping your students over the hurdle that is the college application essay. 

1. Make the connection clear
• When bringing up the college application essay, many students will cringe or groan. But, if we can make the connection clear and showcase the support that you are offering to get through this section of the application, students are more likely to stay engaged and take draft writing seriously. 
2. Incorporate an interactive lesson on writing to an audience
• I love using a lesson on understanding your audience to start off my writing instruction. This is especially helpful when talking about the college application essay, since they need to understand how to change their language to meet the needs of their audience instead of writing to themselves.
• I use a lesson where I give groups of students a different audience (parent, friend, principal, police, twitter followers, etc.) and then give everyone the same scenario (usually a description of a food fight in the cafeteria). They are then required to use what they know about the scenario and what they know about the audience to craft a response. At the end, the students share and we discuss how this singular scenario was described in so many different ways depending on the audience. 
3. Use workbooks to help your students understand where they are going in bite-sized chunks
• I love using workbooks to help guide both my instruction and my students’ writing. I created a College Application Essay Writing Workbook (coming soon) to walk students through each step of the writing process for this particular genre. Each step has written information, break down of material, and an activity that works toward the full writing of the college essay. 
• You can use it as a stand alone workbook for students to work through individually at the end of the year. You can send it home at the end of the year, so that students have support when writing over summer or into the following school year. You can even use it as a lesson planning guide to work through the workbook as a class through direct instruction. There are so many ways that you can incorporate the workbook into the classroom and help you have less work preparing all the information that students need to succeed when writing this essay. 
4. Use Peer Review and/or models to help students see different perspectives
• I am a huge proponent of peer review. As in, my M.A. research was about how to effectively create peer review so that students actually use the information, while also learning more about group dynamics and instructional effectiveness. 
• College essays take a lot of work, way more than students anticipate. And often, the more they can revise their work, the better the essay becomes. This can be especially true when they can see what they do and don’t like about other students’ drafts. It is far easier for them to pick up information from models or peer papers, than their own. As such, I use models and peer review as a building block for self-reflection. 
5. Incorporate revision stations for extra support in the area of their choice.
• In conjunction with peer review, setting up spaces for revision and choice for students having trouble with certain parts of their paper. These stations can be versatile and you are able to set them up however they work best for you and your students. 
6. Bonus Tip: Print the article linked here (with specific tips on how to write the college essay) to help them stay on track. 

Use these tips individually or holistically to support students in the stressful time that is college application season. We all know that they can do so much, now is the time to offer resources to help them get there. 

College Application Essay Help

Use the College Application Essay Writing Workbook (coming soon) to support your instruction this year. Your students will finish the workbook with a full draft, and even some supplemental essays, complete. The workbook helps students understand how to start common app essay, what the common app essay structure is, and how to deconstruct each prompt to determine which will be best for them to respond to. 

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Thank you for all that you do in the classroom. I know it is trying, yet you still come in every day and try to help your students the best you can. I believe in you! Let me know in the comments if there is anything that you need to support your high school teaching and I will see what I can do to help.