The ability to write is fundamental for learning and achievement across Grades K-12, performance in the workplace, continuing education, college, personal development, and addressing social justice. The majority of our students, however, are not capable writers. We have a body of evidence-based practices (EBPs) and best practices that can make a…

Preschool children hold immense writing potential that is rarely realized in traditional classrooms. This mixed-methods, quasi-experimental study focused on how best to teach these emergent writers. By comparing the effects of interactive writing, writing workshop, and traditional instruction, the study provided a clearer picture of how these…

For over four years, students enrolled in remedial writing classes who attended eight writing center tutorials directly linked to their assignments had an average pass rate of 95.6 percent, whereas students who did not attend any writing center tutorials had an average pass rate of 39.4 percent. These correlations are just that--correlations that…

Transnational students, that is, those who have had one or more years of schooling in the US and are now in school in Mexico, make up a sizeable and growing population. For these students, the language of the home, Spanish, abruptly becomes the language of school and what was the language of school and socialization outside the home, English, is…

This article presents an action research study. Its purpose was to determine the extent to which the Reciprocal Teaching model (RT), proposed by Palincscar and Brown (1984), impacts tenth grader's English writing skills. The research work included: (1) A diagnostic stage to determine the participant's initial difficulties in regards to their…

Increasingly, school leaders recognize the need for writing instruction to become a schoolwide priority. The writers' workshop approach that was popularized 30 years ago is still relevant; it is still important to give students protected time to write, opportunities to address topics and audiences that matter, and timely feedback. Recent research…

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…

With the adoption of the Common Core Standards and a renewed emphasis on critical and higher-order thinking skills, exploring the relationship among writing development, self-efficacy beliefs, perseverance, and effort has become essential. The nature of writing workshop not only lends itself to differentiation among students but also provides…

Preschoolers may be novices in the area of writing but, as this article highlights, they are indeed writers. In a year-long ethnography of preschoolers during structured writing time the teacher/researcher explored how students adapted to a writing workshop format. Students participated in daily journal writing and sharing, and weekly conference…

Standards can aid educators as they work to produce strong student writers who can create meaningful and skillfully crafted authentic pieces of writing. This once-a-month, yearlong professional development program, conducted during the school day, shifted a district's kindergarten writing program to a writing workshop model that enabled the…

Transforming Writing is a two-year action research project which aims to develop a model for the teaching and learning of writing that more fully incorporates a focus on embedded formative assessment. In the first year of the project, the 12 participating schools developed a model of writing underpinned by Talk for Writing, an approach developed…

Adult students are more anxious about writing for school, less familiar with academic conventions, and more likely to drop out than younger students. For students learning to move between personal, work, and academic discourse communities, the ongoing and explicit writing instruction argued for in the research of Sternglass, Herrington and Curtis,…

A study was conducted to make students aware of the issue of self, society, and authority in their writing, and to discover which aspects of the writing workshop method are productive and which are not relative to student perceptions of their authority as writers. A university-required junior level composition course was designed in which students…

Discusses the ways in which a high school basic writing teacher abandoned the advice about her students offered by her colleagues and chose instead to develop a student-centered writing workshop. Demonstrates the potential a workshop model has for creating a community of authors in a high school basic writing class. (RS)

Bringing together information elementary school teachers need to make balanced literacy instruction a reality, this book presents more than 90 short articles designed to be read in a brief period of time and suitable for use in after-school workshops. It presents ideas and instructional approaches teachers have found most valuable and effective in…