The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively," offers educators three specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenges of teaching students in grades 6-12 to write effectively. This summary focuses on the first of the three recommendations: Explicitly teach…

In this article, the authors focus on the decision-making process that goes into professional writing and ways to emphasize ethical decision-making in writing classrooms. Professional writing has at its core an emphasis on action and audience. Certainly teachers want their students to write effectively--to serve their clients, organizations, and…

This revised and updated resource contains a total of 43 essays that serve to initiate graduate students and more experienced teachers into the theories that inform composition studies. Under Section One--The Givens in Our Conversations: The Writing Process--are these essays: "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" (Donald M. Murray);…

Offering a fresh perspective on making writing meaningful in every classroom, this guide seeks to help the teacher and the parent encourage the student writer as a thinker, not merely as a producer of a paragraph. The guide offers guidance as well as many practical activities that will help students to: organize the mind; play with ideas; find…

This book, part of a series which serve as guides for K-12 teachers who are striving to align lively, classroom-tested practices with standards, gathers together brief articles spotlighting suggestions for effective instruction. Beginning with activities that help students think through the audience and purpose for their writing, this book offers…

Developed by classroom teachers during the development phase of Minnesota's Graduation Standards, this performance package is made up of locally designed assignments that, taken together, show whether a student has learned and can apply the knowledge and skills related to writing a short story for a variety of academic and technical purposes,…

Providing a way to organize and document third- through sixth-grade student writing through the use of writing folders and other organizing aids, this book is for educators who believe that writing and word processing strategies and skills are best taught as students do real writing for a variety of readers. The book includes mini-lessons to…

Originally developed as part of a project for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on making writing public is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes an overview of the project; a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a lecture giving an…

This guide is the result of three projects that have been working to address the problem of intergenerational illiteracy in writing. While writing skills are limited among the general population, they are even more limited among limited-English-speaking students (both school-aged and adult learners). The guidebook is a self-help manual for…

A teacher of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to adults in a non-English-speaking country describes use of classroom writing conferences to improve student language use and introduce writing into the communicative syllabus. The approach is based on a conference format and focuses on self-directed inquiry. Students are provided with monolingual…