Helping Struggling Writers Succeed: A self-regulated strategy instruction program

Lisa Helsel
Daphne Greenberg

Helping Struggling Writers Succeed: A self-regulated strategy instruction program

Summary:
This article is about different ways to help struggling writers come out in their writing and change their bad habits that they have before they reach higher level education. One of the main goals of the article is to get across the point that teaching self-regulated writing strategies to students is the best way for them to improve on their writing. This gives the students the tools to be more independent in their writing and write through using ‘tasks.’ By this the students are working towards a common goal that they can set for themselves and be more independent with their writing. Shying away from always asking questions and wanting the teacher to scaffold their writing. One of the ways that students can self-regulate their writing is through making an outline of what they are to be writing about. This allows them to see their ideas before they are put into sentences and paragraphs to make sure that everything is making sense. I believe that this is very helpful, although in the younger grades it may be more challenging for the students to comprehend that they are making an outline and then writing in paragraph form. The students then take this outline and begin to write a summary from what is in the outline. Lastly a way for struggling writers to be more part of the classroom with their writing, teachers can lower the expectations for these struggling writers to their ability and slowly over time raise these expectations.

Discuss:
These writing strategies would fit into my classroom in our writer’s workshop. At the grade level in which I am currently at (second grade) I believe that the student’s that are struggling writers would need instruction in making outlines and the other strategies to improve their writing. I don’t think that it would be a bad idea for all students in the class to learn how to write outlines and then write summaries from those outlines. I would make sure that writing outlines was practice. I would also want the writers that are struggling in the same areas to be placed into groups with the same students at their level so the students are working together through their writing but also learning how to write independently. During writer’s workshop students would experience this learning and self regulating strategies to improve their writing through instruction and then independent work. This allows students to organize their ideas into categories and then properly put them together into sentences that make sense. Students can get into the habit of doing this and then their writing over time will improve. Once the ideas are organized students can then write more clearly with grammar and spelling. As a professional in order to use this approach for my students I would need to find a way to make sure that all students were understanding what an outline is-of course fitting it to a second grade level. Possibly a concept map or a spider map with very little writing at first to show the students exactly what is expected of them. I will also need to make sure that my students are organized into their right level groups.

After this module I have learned that for my assessments of my unit plan I need to make sure that student’s are understanding what is being taught. I am going to be doing read aloud’s and word work. The type of assessments necessary for my unit would be giving students different word work activities to make sure that they have an understanding of the different word sounds, word recognition and understanding other word sounds. Also students need to have comprehension in order to understand the read aloud’s. I need to plan assessments that will give my students understanding of all of these things. Questions, examples are the best way for these two topics in my opinion for me to assess my students. My students as writers are all across the board in levels. I want to make sure that I am assessing my students at their correct level and pushing those that need it.