Reflection can play a critical role in an educational leader's capacity to sustain and improve their leadership practices. Reflection in the form of writing allows leaders to slow down and carefully attend to their own thinking before facilitating collective thinking and decision-making in those they lead. Though educational leaders are often…

To motivate learners to engage in writing courses and help to improve their writing performance, a mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting approach was proposed in this study. A quasi-experiment was implemented by recruiting two classes of non-English major students from a university in northeastern China. Class 1 learned to write under the…

In writing instruction, teachers often struggle with developing engaging and interactive activities given constraints such as large classes and packed teaching schedules. A purposeful and appealing pre-task can energize the writing process and set the context for the subsequent writing task. With this purpose in mind, the author designed the…

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field.…

This article argues that the goal of an educator is to help students realize they can be effective writers by giving them the ability to demonstrate their skills. Scene writing can make writing seem less like a chore and more like an opportunity to express ideas. As students write scenes that include both dialogue and action, they gain a deeper…

This paper studies and suggests the need for writing instruction by which students can experience writing as a creative process in exploring and communicating meaning. The prewriting activities generate ideas which can encourage a free flow of thoughts and help students discover both what they want to say and how to say it on paper. Through the…

The use of multimedia graphic organizer software and how it influenced the prewriting process for primary school children were evaluated. An analysis of writing samples generated by second-grade students with diverse writing abilities was carried out. Students were given two opportunities to participate in prewriting activities--one without and…

The authors investigated whether a series of mini prewriting assignments linked to a formal paper describing an original research project would improve preservice elementary teachers' writing abilities in a science context. They compared 38 final reports from students who completed the prewriting assignments with 38 reports randomly selected from…

This study investigated the relationship between components of working memory (WM) and the macrostructure (e.g., planning, writing, and revision) and microstructure (e.g., grammar, punctuation) of writing. A battery of WM and writing measures were administered to 160 high-school students. Overall, hierarchical regression analyses showed that the…

Describes the variety of literacies demonstrated among a group of "thru-hikers" walking the length of the Appalachian Trail. Explains ethnographic field notes, archival data, and interviews showed the presence of multiliteracies and the use of "ecological literacy," the ability to interpret the natural surroundings. Provides suggestions for…

Discusses problems experienced during the prewriting phase of a sixth grade writing lesson, observations of the lesson, and advice from leading educators on how to initiate an effective writing lesson. Presents an account of one writing lesson that typifies writing lessons that the author has observed during the evaluation of student teachers. (SG)

The narrative concepts of the implied author and implied reader elucidate how business texts represent writers and readers. It is important, though, to distinguish carefully between writers' "implications" and readers' "inferences." Instructors should contrast implied versus inferred writers and readers, provide multiple ways to comprehend these…

There is considerable concern that the majority of adolescents do not develop the competence in writing they need to be successful in school, the workplace, or their personal lives. A common explanation for why youngsters do not write well is that schools do not do a good job of teaching this complex skill. In an effort to identify effective…

Controversy and debate can be effectively employed as the central pre-writing activity in the composition classroom. The current model of prewriting in the composition classroom is the reflective model, which involves relatively private exploration of issues and ideas leading to paper topics. Although in the short run it is easier for both student…

Urges that teachers consider a broader view of the writing process and experiment with the notion of children applying the skills of process writing to their writing in the content areas. Outlines the major phases of process writing and discusses their application to writing in content areas. (MM)