Action Research
Small Group Writing Support
Since the inception of RTI and even before that, in my experience, schools are largely focused on reading and math, and everything else becomes an afterthought. When writing has been addressed, it seems we just scrape the surface or focus on spelling. Many districts have adopted The Units of Study by Lucy Calkins, which I believe, has brought writing to the back to the forefront of our academic conversations. But recently, when teachers have grown concerned over students’ writing abilities, I have heard this in response, “What are you doing for writing interventions?” This response has been perplexing to me- we don’t have formal writing interventions in place. We don’t have data meetings to discuss student writing progress like we do for math and reading. We have math and reading intervention teachers but none for writing. Do teachers have access to materials to use to run small group writing instruction for struggling writers? And so this line of questioning made me start to wonder…what if we did? What if we had more systems and supports to run small group writing intervention groups? What would that look like? How on earth would we “measure” it?
When I started digging deeper into the research, I couldn’t help but notice that engagement was always at the core or at the very beginning of each of these pieces(Cruz, Graham,and Serravallo). This led me to wonder how we could start building engagement first with struggling writers in small guided writing groups which led me to the following research question: How can we progress monitor a small guided writing group, specifically for engagement as measured by their independence, increasing volume and their own writing identity? Although I do have concerns about how to measure this growth, I feel that starting with engagement is an essential first step.
