We explore three primary paradigms that continue to dominate writing instruction in secondary schools. By illustrating these paradigms, exploring their underlying assumptions with two classes of preservice teachers (PSTs) enrolled in a required course on teaching writing and identifying theoretical and pedagogical alternatives, we examine how…

Struck by his students' often hostile and apathetic responses to assignments and instruction and hoping to contribute to the knowledge of motivation, Dan LaSalle began to take an inquiry stance on his own practice. He studied his practice on three fronts with the help of an off-site teacher research group: (1) how his inquiry question changes as a…

The Young Writers Program (YWP) is the latest writing workshop to be developed for the classroom. It challenges students to choose a topic and write a novel-length piece based on that topic, without worrying about spelling or grammar. While the foundation of this philosophy is solid, the support and structure of the Young Writers Program website…

The article examines high school students' writing composition practices in multimodal instructional environments. We use Rosenblatt's transactional theory to look across the findings of 2 studies that blend traditional and digital modes of instruction in order to explore how modal switching can support students' reading and writing. We also…

This yearlong ethnographic case study investigated higher and lower track adolescents' experiences with core content-area (social studies, science, and math) writing in one urban working-class district. Teacher, student, and administrator interviews; field notes; and students' written work comprised the data set. The findings from this…

This article describes an instructional lesson the author developed to help students use parody to read and write original poetry. The author begins this article with an introduction to parody and a rationale for using it as an instructional strategy. Then, he describes materials and procedures he used and he shares samples of student writing. He…

Adolescents with learning disabilities need explicit supports to improve their written expression, but those structures and supports are best utilized in an environment that promotes authentic writing resembling the writing students will produce in adult life and work. Classroom blogs may offer special educators an authentic context for writing…

In teaching a research-writing unit, the author has asked her students to research and write a persuasive speech, a multigenre paper, an I-Search, a historical and comparative connection to literature, a country brochure, and a social criticism essay. While she found benefits and disadvantages in all of these assignments, the author was…