15 Practices Proven Effective for Teaching Writing

What works when you teach students, at any grade, to write?

While every student and every teacher are different, these 15 practices are shown to be effective by research and by the experience of your colleagues. They also carry over into the content areas where you are asked to help students write like scientists or historians, perhaps even like mathematicians.

1. All students can and should write: Just like with reading, the more students write the better they get…oh, and the more they write, the better they read.

2. Help students find real purposes to write and real audiences to reach: Purpose and audience are the oxygen and water of blooming engagement.

3. Help students exercise choice, take ownership, and assume responsibility: It’s simple — the more choices you make for writers, the less they learn about writing.

4. Provide opportunities for students to experience the complete writing process: Writing isn’t a black box. When kids learn that writing has stages (topic selection, prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing) the process is demystified and simplified.

5. Help students get started: Many kids struggle with topic selection, show them prewriting techniques that unleash their thinking.

6. Guide students as they draft and revise: Play the long game! Telling students what to fix today may result in a better piece of tomorrow. Modeling how to fix things today helps them write well forever.

7. Model for kids how you write a text: Kids want to know what adult writers think and do. You are an important mentor for them, so write in front of them and think aloud as you do.

8. Lead students to learn the craft of writing: Introduce the key moves writers make, then gradually release responsibility to your writers for using those moves.

9. Confer with individual students on their writing: This is your golden differentiation opportunity — brief 1:1 moments that are goal-oriented and richly instructional.

10. Teach grammar and mechanics in the context of actual writing: Don’t bother with isolated skill-and-drill grammar — research shows it doesn’t work. What does work is teaching grammar and style when kids are revising and editing work written for authentic audiences and purposes. That’s when they are keenly motivated to work on conventions.

11. Provide a classroom context of shared learning: Peer collaboration, not peer critique! Students need a safe, not critical, place to take risks and try things that drive their growth as writers.

12. Support growth in writing for English learners: Few actions grow proficiency in a new language than using it to express one’s thoughts with care and deliberation.

13. Use writing to support learning throughout the curriculum: For self-contained classrooms, this doubles up the power of your teaching time. Content-area teachers, you can use brief, ungraded writing-to-learn activities to deepen comprehension, improve class discussion, elicit questions, and reflect on what’s been learned.

14. Use evaluation constructively and efficiently: Research shows that red marks discourage growth in writing. Praise and thoughtful questions generate growth, not just “correcting.”

15. Expose kids to a wide array of great fiction and nonfiction writing: Kids need to be introduced to and surrounded by great writing to learn from accomplished mentors.

Details on these powerful practices can be found in: Best Practice, Fourth Edition by Steven Zemelman, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels, and Arthur Hyde (Heinemann, 2012)