Teachers of young writers often feel pressure to focus on narrow, tested conventions, forms and processes of writing. These pressures can contribute to instruction that does not consider students' interests, experiences, language or cultures, but rather can further deficit views of students whose backgrounds do not closely align with those making…

As writers are increasingly required to leave their ways of knowing, doing and being at the doors of their classrooms, this article explores what happens when teachers of writers open those doors and mobilize the "Writing Realities" framework's interrelated principles of "writer-identity," "critical literacies,"…

Teaching writing is complex, and a number of ideas circulating among schools and teachers often belie the difficulty of how to teach the techniques and processes of writing. I've come to believe that authorship is not a passive undertaking and does not originate in the struggle to put something onto the page. Rather it emerges by living with a…

This research project aims to understand the multimodal composing practices and social relationships within the context of my third-grade writing workshop when an alternate approach to teaching writing is employed. This alternate approach disrupts a traditional workshop as the theory of writing is changed to a theory of making in a multimodal…

In the article "No Need to Reinvent the Wheel: Reading Instruction in a Time of Change" published in "English in Texas" in 2017, the authors, Ann D. David and Katrina Jansky, viewed reading instruction through five touchstones: time, choice, relevance, talk, and routines and rituals. This article expands on those touchstones by…

Despite the fact that creating motivated writers is of great importance, the recent national focus on low writing scores across the nation have caused schools to concentrate on writing achievement rather than taking the time to help students become lifelong writers. As a result, many students have fallen into a fixed mindset and are unable to move…

Despite extensive attention to peer review in composition studies literature, the activity remains challenging to design, in part because there are multiple potential goals for peer review. This article draws on existing literature to describe a variety of peer review goals and then presents interview data to illustrate the perceptions of…

The teaching and learning of writing in the elementary classroom setting is a complex process. As students participate in the classroom community and write, they engage not only in the cognitive task of academic writing, but in various social practices as well-negotiating positionality, developing identities, cultivating understandings of genre,…

The authors discuss a scholarship of teaching and learning project conducted in three first-year writing seminars of different disciplines. The goal was to introduce students to academic inquiry, which they define as the process of critically analyzing class materials, engaging with the larger body of knowledge on a topic, using evidence to…

In attempting to align all that we do as English teachers with current standards, expectations, standardized tests, and other educational stressors, we have overlooked one crucial element: developing our students as writers, not just because it is beneficial, but because it is good for their souls, their confidence, and their overall evaluation of…

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…

This article reports the findings from a year-long study of 6 writing teachers in an urban elementary school who also received intensive professional development in writing instruction from a nonprofit organization. Repeated observations demonstrated that the teachers displayed consistency in their use of the core instructional elements associated…

The notion that "teachers of writing must also write" has been pervasive since the 1970s. But "what" should they write? In the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional network focused on the improvement of writing instruction and featuring summer institutes in which teachers engage in writing of their own as well as demonstrations of…

This article describes an effort to create a teacher learning community in which university and local school teachers worked together to improve the teaching of writing at elementary and secondary levels. I describe how a university's National Writing Project (NWP) engaged in developing a cadre of selected teachers to share understandings about…

This article describes the increasing pressures on those who teach graduate seminars in composition pedagogy to cover a broad range of texts, topics, and techniques. It argues that in response, pedagogy instructors may need to deliberately (re)design their courses in order to continue to help new writing instructors engage in inquiry and…