Developing accomplished writers: Lessons from recent research

Abstract

When we examine the state of writing instruction in many schools and classrooms, we find that few teachers are actually teaching students to become better writers in large part because they are relying on process models that do not accurately reflect the complex task of creating good writing and that are out of step with current research. Merely providing prompts for writing, noting a few comments in the margins of first drafts, awarding a letter grade for the second draft, and then moving on to the next piece of writing does not create an environment wherein students will develop as confident and effective writers. Steven Benjamin and Michael Wagner explain that students will develop as better writers when teachers allocate sufficient time to the endeavor, emphasize the importance of multiple feedback-thinking-revision cycles applied to the current piece of writing, set high expectations for students, and provide opportunities for writing in multiple genres and disciplines.

Building a strong foundation: collaborating to find effective strategies to teach writing in English and social studies

“…This challenge for students can relate to the concept of cognitive load theory and the difficulties students have in transferring skills and content from working memory to long-term memory (Pass & Ayers, 2014). Realistically, the teachers in both departments can require mastery of these skills at different times of the year if they continue to implement certain instructional practices that reduce cognitive load, such as explicit pre-writing activities (Harris & Graham, 2009), and cognitive apprenticeship (Benjamin & Wagner, 2021), which requires teachers to model tasks, explicitly review steps for students, continually repeat the process and provide clear explanation. The need for explicit instructional processes and implementation is essential in this area of teaching writing skills, which requires consistency of expectation within each department.…”