The "college readiness" movement of the past decade coupled with the widespread adoption of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has generated pressure on content area teachers to develop disciplinary thinking skills while also providing more opportunities for student writing. The purpose of this three-article dissertation is to understand the ways in which secondary social studies teachers conceptualize the notion of disciplinary writing and the impact of teachers' stances toward discipline-specific writing on their instructional choices. Specifically, this research seeks to identify where social studies teachers see the connections between disciplinary thinking and writing processes and what pedagogical strategies and cognitive tools teachers use to make these connections apparent to their students. The first research article presents the results of a design-based, mixed-methods case study of two groups of social studies teachers from different mixed-income suburban schools as they designed and implemented similar frameworks for writing instruction using cognitive scaffolds. In both cases, the teachers' work reflected the dual pressures of CCSS and the teachers' own beliefs about effective teaching in social studies. While both collaborative groups identified a similar set of necessary argumentative writing skills, each group utilized a variety of scaffolding tools and visible thinking strategies that reflected an emphasis on content area writing strategies rather than a disciplinary literacy approach. The second article describes a semester-long, design-based case study, in which four ninth-grade world studies teachers developed a framework for writing based on five key components and implemented a set of cognitive scaffolding tools for writing and thinking in their mixed-ability, pre-AP history courses. The teachers believed they improved their writing instruction by teaching each key component separately and repeatedly using cognitive tools, but there were fewer changes to teachers' instruction of historical thinking skills. The third article utilized an embedded case study approach to examine how these same four teachers' conceptualizations of disciplinary thinking surrounding controversial issues affected the choices they made with regards to writing instruction. The case study involved detailed analysis of a single instructional unit on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including teacher interviews, group planning sessions, classroom observations, and collection of instructional artifacts. Results of the study indicate that instruction on controversial issues can be used to make connections between disciplinary thinking strategies and literacy strategies in social studies and that explicit instruction using cognitive scaffolding tools can promote evidence collection and perspective-taking skills. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]