This discussion article presents practices for designing more supportive and individualized writing tasks for adolescent and young adult students. The practices emerged from a synthesis of findings from a prior study in which we asked 79 undergraduates to talk about moments from their writing histories that made them feel proud of their writing.

This article outlines a structured writing community activity originally created to assist communication majors complete their capstone projects. This activity draws upon the Writing Accountability Group (WAG) strategy that has been utilized to facilitate graduate student and early career faculty writing. The current article provides an overview…

In this article, the authors share an account of an eighth-grade personal narrative unit designed to support students in composing accounts of life during the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The article provides an overview of the four phases that comprised this nine-lesson unit and the materials and resources used. Students' voices, perspectives,…

This activity offers students a way to engage in cover letter writing, familiarizing themselves with the style and content of these documents in a creative, fictional scenario. Students will both prepare letters and evaluate them, with options to vary the gamification of the activity included. During the debrief, students assess their experience…

This article focuses on listening not as cognition and comprehension but as a way of being attuned to self and others. The author follows Patrick Sullivan's (2014) pedagogy of listening, which establishes "listening, empathy, and reflection as the primary values in the classroom" (p. 7). These values promote "embracing respect for…

The first part of this article considers the challenge of supporting pupils to write creatively about the natural world. It examines a text by a gifted young writer: "Diary of a Young Naturalist" by Dara McAnulty. It asks what the challenges might be for pupils who may be motivated to model their writing on McAnulty's, but have limited…

Given the importance of early writing experiences, a key question is how educators can increase the amount and quality of writing in early childhood settings. Expert early writing teachers were observed to identify the types of activities and interactions they used to engage 4- and 5-year-olds as writers. Writing instruction occurred as part of…

Writing can improve children's speaking, boost their reading comprehension, build their knowledge, and elevate their thinking. However a reason it may be hard to learn is that without explicit writing instruction, children often write the way they speak. From elementary through high school, many children answer questions with little elaboration.…

In the English classroom, narrative writing is often separated from the work of reading literature or used merely to coax reluctant students into discussing textually relevant topics. This article discusses a close writing activity, Image Explosion, that engages students in narrative writing that brings attention to the smallest details of…

This book explains seven critical steps to improve children's writing. Though seemingly 'natural', writing proves devilishly difficult for far too many school pupils and closing this gap can have a lasting impact on their academic and life success. With the goal of giving every teacher the knowledge and skill to teach writing with confidence, it…

This article emphasizes the power of the words we use as educators by shining a light on the work of Peter H. Johnston. The author offers timely and pertinent ways to engage students in effective and respectful academic discourse and writing. She also stresses the importance of modeling for students and letting them see our struggle with writing.…

Writing gives children a way to share their voices and ideas with the world. Even in early childhood, the purpose of writing is to communicate. All young children have messages to share, and writing is one tool they can use to communicate those messages. For young children, it is quite challenging to form and remember messages while also figuring…

Even in online and distance formats, multimodal composition can be a means of sustaining culture and engaging children. The Teach Us project combines multimodal composition, family cultural resources, and student voice.

Teaching writing is complex, and a number of ideas circulating among schools and teachers often belie the difficulty of how to teach the techniques and processes of writing. I've come to believe that authorship is not a passive undertaking and does not originate in the struggle to put something onto the page. Rather it emerges by living with a…

There is no clear-cut division between orality and literacy (Street, 1993). This idea is central to literacy development in the Spanish heritage language (SHL) context because the opportunities to use heritage language (HL) skills are often oral, not written. Furthermore, the cultural situations that speakers find for their language are less…