Like sports, school is a type of performance, and the process of learning and demonstrating knowledge requires mental skills that parallel those of an athlete, such as focus, analysis, memory, and confidence. Marisa Sandoval Lamb, an English teacher and competitive runner explains the parallels that exist between academic and athletic performance…

The authors assert that the time that teachers spend providing feedback could better be used to focus on formative assessment systems.

Discusses the research carried out by a classroom teacher which investigated students' composing processes when they are asked to observe their own process of writing. Noted three kinds of reactions--anxiety, euphoria, and normal responses. Found that the research project helped motivate students. (ARH)

Reports how the use of microcomputers in a writing class helped change students' writing behaviors, created a writing community, caused the teacher to learn along with the students, and helped marginal writers improve. (SRT)

Shows how photography and photographic processes can be used as a metaphor for describing writing and writing processes and, thus, can be a useful teaching tool. Discusses subject, focus, arrangement, and style. Describes how a writing teacher can use all this as a means of illustrating various aspects of the writing process. (SR)

Suggests that through commenting on their own papers, students gradually develop a sense of an imagined external audience and of themselves as writer and audience. (MM)

Suggests that students can improve their writing by being instructed on how to write badly. Applies the criteria of testability, tunnel-vision, excessive vagueness, flying in the face of established fact, and hazy authority to tabloid newspaper stories. Discusses how students can write their own "rotten" tabloid stories by taking these…

Describes the techniques developed by one instructor for helping students improve their writing, especially creative writing. Outlines how three central writing prompts can be used to inspire student writing and revision. Develops a computer metaphor as a helpful means by which students can access their own "screens." (HB)

Examines results of a study using the inquiry method in composition instruction. Findings suggest that writing tasks that engage students in specifiable inquiry strategies should be an important part of every writing curriculum. (RAE)

Relates how the author came into a generally contentious classroom of eleventh-grade developmental English students and how it became a place of cooperative reading and writing and critiquing through a democratic approach and a three-week project in which students wrote a fictional story via letter writing. Notes student's involvement and…

Seven secondary school teachers discuss the need for writing centers in secondary schools and identify the services they should provide. Includes descriptions of existing writing centers, and suggestions that writing centers should help students change their perception of writing as well as intervene in stages of the writing process. (JG)

Describes various revising operations that allow students to genuinely re-see their work in order to revise effectively. (CRH)

Describes the behaviors and attitudes 49 high school junior English students demonstrated and the features that existed in their writing when they wrote for natural purposes (such as writing letters, biographies, and pamphlets). (EL)

Describes the steps a writer can go through in producing an article and how a word processor can facilitate the thought and compositional processes. (CRH)

Shares the attempts of one teacher to structure a program that allows students to learn and grow as a community of readers and writers through the use of a response-centered curriculum. (MG)