Weekly Digest #44: Teaching Composition
Teaching students to write well can be extremely difficult. As professors, we’re always looking for good resources and tips for developing our students as writers at the college level. We’ve posted digests with writing resources for teachers and students, resources to assist with grading writing, and resources to help teachers teach about plagiarism, and help students recognize plagiarism. Today’s digest is again about writing. This time, we present evidence-based resources on teaching composition to students of varying ages and abilities.
2) Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers by What Works Clearinghouse, Institute of Education Sciences (IES), @WhatWorksED
This practice guide contains four clear recommendations based on research for helping elementary school children learn to write. You can click to learn more about each of the four recommendations, including reading summaries and watching brief videos for the recommendation of your choice. You can also download the Practice Guide Summary, an 8-page PDF with the essentials, or full Practice Guide, 109 pages of recommendations and science!
Similar to the guide above, this resource contains three evidence-based recommendations for teaching writing to secondary students (grades 6-12). You can learn more about each recommendation, or download the full Practice Guide.
Project WRITE contains information about 6 stages of writing instruction and contains lesson plans. All of the information is based on Self-Regulated Strategies Development (SRSD), an evidence-based approach to teaching writing. This approach has been shown to be effective with a number of different types of students with varying levels of writing ability. Project WRITE describes SRSD, but you can also check out this page to learn more about SRSD.
Written by the author of the first resource, this is a short booklet describing the best ways to create writing assignments as well as using writing to help students learn content. Hesse delineates between learning to write and writing to learn. This booklet further discusses writing assignments in various contexts and helping students learn to write within a discipline. We became aware of this resource because Rhode Island College (Megan's home institution) uses it during Summer Seminars on Teaching Writing, a professional development series.
Every Sunday, we pick a theme and provide a curated list of links. If you have a theme suggestion, please don’t hesitate to contact us! Our 5 most recent digests can be found here: