The Highland (Indiana) public schools developed a writing program for elementary school students based on the premise that children learn to use language by actively generating language. The program features language production as the principal student activity in the English class and uses the students' own written work and oral expression as the content for language instruction. Textbooks are not used except as handbooks for directly helping students improve their own writing. During individual writing conferences, teachers provide students with feedback on both the content and the mechanics of their writing and discuss plans for future writing activities. All students are expected to produce two pieces of original writing each week with folders containing samples of children's writing serving as a cumulative record of each child's growth. Evaluations of the program over four years revealed that many students showed a significant increase in the usage of a given skill within their essays. In many cases, the absence of significant improvements was explained by the fact that the students' initial scores were very high or by the fact that a specific skill was not expected to be mastered until a subsequent grade level. The systematic feedback component was considered to be effective to the extent that significant improvements appeared when the feedback was introduced and significant decrements appeared when the feedback was withdrawn. The intensive teacher feedback model implemented in the fourth year of the program indicated that students could achieve substantially higher levels of competency when the feedback was intensified through the addition of outside evaluators reporting both to the administrators and to the teachers. (HOD)