● express personal voice
● explore and develop ideas
● respond purposefully to real-world issues that matter to students
● practice “Author’s Craft” and other skills
● compose through planning, drafting, revising and editing, and publishing
● engage in research and note-taking
● increase repertoire of writing strategies, genres, and processes
● integrate research findings into their writing
● Establish a purpose for writing and representing
● Find an authentic audience for their writing and representing
● Establish expectations for the writing and representing
● Locate exemplars of a variety of writing forms and mentor texts, including non-Western forms and texts
● Identify where students may benefit from key vocabulary, word banks, sentence stems, etc.
● Facilitating discussion and sharing among peers
● Providing opportunities for students to create text independently
● Modelling writing forms, editing, and revision strategies
● Conferring with students to further develop their writing skills
● Collecting evidence of learning through observation, conversations, and products regarding students’ writing development to inform instruction
● Facilitating small group instruction that focuses on learning targets
● Checking in with students to monitor writing progress
● Working to create texts individually, in pairs, or in small groups
● Generating drafts/works in progress
● Discussing their writing before, during, and after the process
● Conferring with teachers and/or peers about their progress and product
● Making purposeful decisions to create effective texts that achieve their purposes
● Selecting strategies that will most effectively meet their needs and purposes
● Making revisions based on feedback
● After observations and conferring with students, determine next steps for learning. This could focus on developing mini-lessons on different elements of craft or planning further writing experiences
According to the research,
Students experience increased achievement when:
● there is daily independent writing as it improves literal reading comprehension for beginning, low-performing, and at-risk students and improves literal and inferential reading comprehension for normally achieving students
● given reasons to read and write. Reading and writing for authentic purposes and audiences have been shown to predict growth in reading and writing. Authentic purposes give students motivation to read and write. When students cannot envision authentic purposes for writing or are not invited to make choices about their writing, they can become disengaged in school-based writing.
● there is writing in every discipline as it encourages critical thinking and deeper understanding
● teachers understand that the teaching of excellence in writing means adding language to what already exists, not subtracting. Expert writing teachers deliberately teach students to incorporate their heritage and home languages intentionally and strategically in the texts they write; narrow definitions of and attitudes about writing and language too often perpetuate white, Eurocentric ideologies about what it means to write “well” or “effectively” (Chavez, 2021), upholding racist and linguistic barriers and inequities for students whose writing does not easily assimilate to dominant norms.
● teachers demonstrate writing and present opportunities to write for multiple purposes, audiences, and contexts.
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