Preservice teacher candidates acquire and develop numerous competencies in their teaching programs, including how to teach writing. Effective writing instruction is critical across all ages and content areas, especially when working with students with and at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders, making it an important aspect of teacher…

Research shows that cognitively demanding text-based writing assignments increase students' reading comprehension skills and analytic writing competencies. In this article, we describe the steps that upper-elementary grade teachers can take to develop cognitively demanding assignments that build these higher-level literacy skills and put students…

Expectations for high-level academic writing, especially in the Common Core era, have never been higher. Middle school and high school students are being asked to do close readings of complex texts and then respond in writing using academic discourse. This is a challenging task for many students, but perhaps none as great as for English language…

Digital tools, such as blogs and wikis, now make it easy for educators to embrace continual learning. Thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs in which they reflect on instruction, challenge assumptions, question policies, offer advice, design solutions, and learn together. All this collective knowledge is readily available for…

Traditionally, assessing student writing ability has often been product-focused. Advocates of child-centered process-oriented classrooms, however, suggest that teachers should also focus on understanding children's writing behaviors in the context of meaningful communicative tasks. In such an approach, writing conferences are one way in which…

This paper describes the multiple choice item development assignment (MCIDA) that was developed to support both content and higher level learning. The MCIDA involves students in higher level learning by requiring them to develop multiple choice items, write justifications for both correct and incorrect answer options and determine the highest…

In an effort to provide students with instruction in academic writing early in their college careers, a project was undertaken to link a developmental composition course to an introductory psychology course at Washington's Bellevue College. The two professors designed a sequence of four papers offering practice in two of the more common academic…