This article proposes that students heighten their own social connections and those of seniors by co-creating mini-memoirs with older people. Mini-memoirs are short collections of self-selected memories that the seniors wish to save and to share with others through various modes of communication and in any language. Drawing insights from such…

This article discusses two schemes for teaching writing in schools. One uses analysis of model texts into techniques and devices then application of these by students to their written compositions and one uses a process approach that includes pre-writing and exploring, drafting, sharing and discussing, revising and celebrating to exploit students'…

Austin Film Festival's Digital Storytelling Curriculum examines the art of storytelling as a critical tool for communication. Developed collaboratively with Austin Film Festival and Austin Independent School District secondary English teachers, Digital Storytelling is nine-week, English language arts screenwriting curriculum in which all students…

This paper identifies evidence that significant procedural learning can emerge from process approaches to teaching writing, including from the transition of pupils' writing from draft to revision. It shows how writing schemes that use an underlying process framework to structure learning, give pupils ownership of their own writing and exploit the…

This paper presents a design case that describes the design, development, and user experience testing of a Google Docs revision add-on. The add-on is an instructional, peer review tool intended to help students distinguish surface-level feedback from text-based feedback in order to develop their revision task schema. Eleven secondary teachers…

Little research has been done on key concepts related to peer feedback, including whether learners are able to transfer skills learned to future related tasks or to other classes and content areas, and whether the gains observed through peer feedback are the result of "giving" peer feedback or of "receiving" peer feedback. The…

Helping elementary students with learning disabilities (LD) prepare for the rigor of middle school writing is an instructional priority. Fortunately, several standards-based skills in upper elementary school and middle school overlap. Teachers in upper elementary grades, specifically fourth and fifth grades, have the opportunity to provide…

Research suggests that teachers often do not adequately prepare students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) to utilize organizational structures and basic writing skills that are necessary to produce cohesive essays. Among the challenges of effectively teaching writing to secondary students with EBD is how to deliver culturally…

In this article, we describe the peer-response workshop we conducted in an ethnically and linguistically diverse secondary school classroom in an urban center in the southwest. We show how the three main parts of the workshop combine to help students cultivate writing relationships in which they see writing as social and co-constructed, rather…

The best way to teach students to write well-crafted essays, Gallagher claims, is to consider how people learn to do anything unfamiliar. They carefully examine someone who knows how to do that thing and then emulate that person's actions. Just so, if teachers want students to write persuasive arguments, interesting explanatory pieces, and…

This essay tells the story of a collaboration between an English education professor in a large urban university and a high school English teacher working in a school whose population consists almost entirely of new immigrants. The English education professor serves as a visiting teaching artist, introducing the students to studies of works of…

Revision can be a rather dull part of the academic year, especially if it means the wholesale revisiting of the syllabus using the same old notes. This article presents an attempt at using the "biography" of an element to give an alternative framework for recapping some of the key concepts in a typical A-level chemistry syllabus. It does…

This article presents an authentic writing opportunity to help ninth-grade students use the writing process in a science classroom to write and illustrate picture books for fourth-grade students to demonstrate and share their understanding of a biology unit on cells. By creating a picture book, students experience the writing process, understand…

As a part of language learning at schools and universities, students write a variety of texts, such as essays, short compositions and reports, which are then read by teachers who typically comment on the content and grammar of these texts to help the students improve their skills as writers. Although teachers can simply use pen and paper, or a…

Some scholars writing about improving students' reading and integrating reading and writing instruction suggest using think-aloud techniques to teach students reading comprehension skills. Using think-alouds to teach reading comprehension and then the read-aloud protocol technique (which is based on think-alouds) for peer review has two major…