Teaching Writing as a Spiral Staircase: The Essay Wheel
This article is indebted to Professor Christine Perrin for her Essay Wheel and writing instruction, and to Dr. Zach Manis for his thoughtful curricular work and the “spiral staircase” analogy.
The Problem: Strong, But Disconnected Writing Instruction
Teaching writing across our entire academic program (grades 7–12 on campus and 5–12 on Gravitas) poses two steady challenges. Students arrive with widely different foundations in grammar, language, and critical thinking, and teachers must both shore up basics and add new layers of complexity each year. On top of full course loads, faculty are expected to give deep, useful feedback on many written assignments. That work is made harder by inconsistent language and expectations across subjects. An English teacher may emphasize syntax, a history teacher the use of evidence, and a science teacher a “hypothesis” that a humanities colleague would call a “thesis.” Students quickly see too many different rules, which makes transfer of writing skills slow and confusing.
The Solution: Enter the Essay Wheel
This endless cycle of cascading expectations can frustrate students, teachers, and families. By great providence, SBS invited poet and writing instructor Christine Perrin to campus in 2023 as the Pierson Curtis lecturer. After a wonderful evening of her poetry, Prof. Perrin led an excellent workshop for our faculty on classroom pedagogy and writing instruction. During this session, she shared how she had led a similar institution through a similar challenge to our writing conundrum.
As the Director of Writing at Messiah University, Prof. Perrin spent months traveling to each academic department doing a deep dive into their writing pedagogy. She asked all the probing questions we wrestled with at SBS: How do you teach a claim? How do you structure a paragraph? How do you evaluate voice and perspective? How much do you value grammar and syntax? How do you structure a thesis statement? After gathering all their responses and ruminating deeply on them, Prof. Perrin came up with a genius solution: the Essay Wheel.
The Essay Wheel shows the seven building blocks every analytical essay needs, using language that stays consistent across subjects while letting teachers adjust terms to fit their discipline. Students keep seeing the same core moves in new contexts, getting better at writing with each course and grade level.
The Essay Wheel is a graphic organizer that communicates every set of rhetorical moves that an analytical essay performs – in a compact and helpful fashion. Most critically, the Essay Wheel provides a common language for students and faculty. This shared language is revisited each year, in each class, in each academic discipline. And as students move through our academic program, they encounter newer, more complicated versions of these concepts and in new, more challenging contexts. This creates a “spiral staircase” where students strategically repeat the same core practices each year, incrementally building mastery amidst their complexity.
The Seven Components
As you can see in the attached image, Prof. Perrin synthesized the primary features of an analytical essay. She included:
Thesis — The thesis is the essay’s central, arguable claim: clear, limited, stated early, and governing the whole piece.
Analysis — Analysis interprets evidence and explains why details count as proof for the thesis, not just summary.
Argument — The argument is the chain of connected claims that develops the thesis, including qualifications and responses to objections.
Evidence — Evidence is the concrete facts, quotes, or data you use persuasively and honestly to support the thesis.
Structure — Structure orders sections and turning points so the essay advances logically toward a conclusion rather than merely listing observations.
Motive — Motive tells the reader why the question matters and what gap the essay fills, usually set in the introduction.
Orienting — Orienting supplies the minimal background or definitions a non-expert needs to follow the argument.
Of course, these ideas manifest themselves very differently across academic disciplines. That’s where the true genius of the Essay Wheel comes into play. Prof. Perrin also built in the ability of each academic department or individual to customize the Essay Wheel while keeping the same core components.
“The Essay Wheel gives us a single, teachable grammar of analytical writing: taught as a spiral staircase it lets students revisit the same moves with growing complexity so those moves transfer across courses and years.”
Adapting Across Disciplines & Grade Levels
An English teacher might define a Thesis as “a claim” while a History teacher might encourage “claim plus reason.” In a Chemistry class, this means identifying the “Argument” section of the Essay Wheel as “claim and reasoning based upon the analyzed evidence” using a CER approach; in a Humanities class they might use a “Point-Evidence-Analysis-Link” structure. By customizing the Essay Wheel, however, students see that their teachers are fully aligned in their thinking. They agree on the basic moves of good writing, adapt their language and tasks to each discipline’s demands, and in the process teach coherent, portable skills students will carry into college and their vocations.
As students progress through middle and high school, the Essay Wheel grows with them. A seventh grader might work on identifying a clear thesis and finding supporting evidence, while a ninth grader learns to anticipate counterarguments and refine their analysis. By eleventh grade, students are navigating complex motive statements and sophisticated structures, and seniors apply these moves with discipline-specific precision in their capstone projects. Each year adds new layers of challenge while reinforcing the same core framework, so students aren’t learning new systems—they’re deepening mastery of tools they already know.
The Essay Wheel gives us a single, teachable grammar of analytical writing: taught as a spiral staircase it lets students revisit the same moves with growing complexity so those moves transfer across courses and years, and because departments can adapt wording to their genres the Wheel creates unity without flattening disciplinary difference. In fact, the Essay Wheel now hangs as a poster in every SBS classroom, giving students and teachers a shared visual reference point no matter what subject they’re studying.
The Essay Wheel is the spine of the SBS writing curriculum — a shared grammar that organizes instruction from grade 7 through the senior capstone, gives teachers common criteria, and ensures students revisit the same moves at higher levels of complexity. Taught this way, writing becomes the engine of clear thinking: students graduate as stronger, more adaptable writers and clearer thinkers, ready for college and the vocations they pursue.
Resources
The resources below are based on the Essay Wheel, originally developed by Christine Perrin. SBS uses and adapts the Essay Wheel with her permission, and we are deeply thankful for her willingness to share this transformative framework with our community.
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