Steve Graham is a professor of literacy and Currey Ingram chair of special education in the College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.

His research interests include writing instruction and writing development, learning disabilities, and the development of self-regulation.

Graham is the editor of Exceptional Children and the former editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology. He is the co-author of the Handbook of Writing Research, Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Writing Better, and Making the Writing Process Work.

We spoke with Professor Graham about best practices in writing to hopefully gain some insight for you to incorporate in your teaching of writing. Please let us know if this information is helpful and what else you might like to learn from Professor Graham.

Steve, can you give us some examples of best practices in the teaching of writing?

Yes, there are actually six best practices I would like to share with you that have moderate to large effects on improving the quality of students’ writing. These practices have all been tested under controlled conditions multiple times and have been scientifically proven to improve students’ writing skills:

1. Teach writing processes

2. Have students work together

3. Create clear expectations

4. Use word processors

5. Teach complex sentences

6. Establish a writing workshop

The first and most effective practice is to explicitly and systematically teach kids strategies for planning, drafting, editing, revising, and regulating the writing process. Every study in which such instruction was tested validated this practice. This involves making writing processes concrete and visible by showing students how to do them, and then helping students apply these processes until they can do them independently and correctly. For example, the 6 + 1 Writing Traits Model makes students aware of the characteristics of writing that are important: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation. These are all important parts in producing a good product. Students can be taught specific strategies for any of these elements. For ideas, this can involve teaching them a strategy such as brainstorming, while a helpful strategy for organization is to create a web that shows how writing ideas are related to each other.

Strategies can also be designed to be both broader and more specific to a genre. A technique that helps to teach the process of planning and drafting persuasive writing is called STOP: Suspend your judgment and generate as many ideas on each side of the argument as you can; Take a side; Organize your notes and decide which ideas you are going to use to support your side and which ideas you are going to refute in your paper; and keep Planning as you write. With this last step, writers continue to add, change, and even delete ideas from the initial plan while writing their persuasive papers. This strategy can be taught to the whole class, small groups of students, or even an individual youngster. In any event, it is important to first describe the strategy, including how and why it works. Students also need to see how it is applied and practice using it, with the teacher’s help, until they make it their own.

The process of teaching strategies like this is powerful and the most scientifically proven method in teaching writing. It is not much used in the classroom, however. We have found that only 10-15% of writing instruction time is spent on this process in elementary classrooms, while 50% is spent on grammar and other basic writing skills like spelling and handwriting, and just 20% on writing.

Another best practice is to have students work together around the processes of writing: planning, drafting, revising, editing. Having students work together around those processes has a very powerful effect on their writing. It must be structured, not just telling the students to get together and write. An example would be to ask one student to read his or her paper to another. The first job of the peer is to say at least three things they like so you have a positive start. Next, the peer gives helpful feedback on two or three things. You might have the peer note places where more detail would be helpful or ask for clarification on an unclear sentence. The peer could say ‘can you tell me more about this?’ or ‘I didn’t understand?’ When students engage collaboratively, there is a very positive effect.

A third best practice is very simple--create clear expectations for what your students need to write. When you tell people what you want, you are more likely to get it. It can be about process (e.g., make at least three revisions where you add new ideas) or about product (e.g., use transition phrases). I find it rather surprising that this practice is not used much.

I consider this next best practice both bad news and good news rolled into one. Evidence to date shows that having students write on a word processor has a positive effect. This seems fairly logical as it is easy to make changes, and if your typing is good, you can get text down quickly. But, you need to know how to use the computer, and it really helps to have good typing skills. The bad news is that we don’t see a lot of computer use in the classroom. In a typical classroom, we see only one to three computers. Plus, computers are the least used instructional tool teachers use in the classroom. The good news is that computers can make a substantial difference in writing. This effect is true from second grade forward.

Teaching students how to write more complex sentences is another best practice. This is the first I’ve mentioned about teaching specific writing skills. The procedure that I would most recommend is sentence combining. This involves modeling how to combine simple sentences: ‘The dog is big. The dog is black. The dog is my friend.’ to something like ‘My friend, the dog, is big and black.’ With this method, first show students how to combine the sentences; next, do it with them; then, have them do it with a peer or alone; and finally, have the students do it with something they have already written. Too often, students are taught a skill, but they never actually apply it. If a skill is not used, teaching it has a very limited effect.

My final best practice is writers’ workshop, where students are expected to write and write often. In writers’ workshop, a supportive environment is created where students share their writing and help each other at different stages of the writing process. They are also encouraged to engage in cycles of planning, drafting, reviewing, and revising as they write papers. This shapes the writing act so that the processes we are talking about happen on a regular basis.

If you went back 20 years, writing classes involved teaching handwriting, spelling, and grammar, and this was not always enjoyable. While skills are important, you also need to write and learn how to carry out the planning, revising, and other processes critical to becoming a skilled writer.

I have not said anything so far about teaching handwriting and spelling. It is important to teach both (as part of a balanced writing program that emphasizes writing, process, and skills). It is especially important, however, to provide extra instruction in these skills for students who struggle mastering them.

So then, what are some of the things that you’ve seen teachers do often, which you would counsel teachers not to do if they want to make good writers out of their students?

Traditional grammar instruction, including teaching parts of speech, sentence diagramming, and making students pick out the right tense of the verb; these practices do not improve grammar skills, syntax, or the ability to write. This may work with a few specific students, but it is ineffective with children in general. One reason why this instruction is not generally effective is that instruction rarely involves the students using what they are learning within the context of their writing. A good substitute for such instruction is the sentence-combining exercise I described above.

Giving too much negative feedback: In its worst form, the students' papers are red-inked to death, and  they will ignore it; they cannot deal with that much feedback at once. Find ways to provide positive feedback, telling students what you like about their writing; positive feedback has been found to be effective. This does not mean I am recommending that you not give corrective feedback. Rather, provide corrective feedback on one to two things, and follow through on the same feedback items in the next paper if needed. Keep working on those attributes targeted in your feedback until you can move on to something else. You will get a lot more growth and student attention with targeted feedback.

We’re at the beginning of the school year now. Are there specific things you would recommend that teachers implement in the first quarter?

For beginning teachers, I would say they first need to set up a supportive writing environment, where students are expected to write daily, as they plan, draft, edit, revise, and share their writing with peers and others. Focus on one writing genre at a time, like stories or a personal narrative. Use reading as a starting point for each type of writing. For example, read some personal narratives, with the goal to have students incorporate some of the ideas from this reading into their own personal narratives. Then, change the focus to different genres throughout the year. An ambitious teacher could add a graphic organizer for structure and integrate one or two of the teaching strategies about planning and revising that we discussed earlier. With younger students, a teacher should include spelling, grammar, and handwriting instruction, but it should not be at the expense of writing.

Experienced teachers are probably doing a lot of these things already, but they could consider incorporating one new idea every month or so, in order to continually upgrade their teaching skills.

Finally, the best way to improve all students’ writing is to make it a school effort, so what you are doing is coordinated between teachers and between grades. For example: If an English teacher is teaching persuasive writing, it would be great if that could be coordinated with the social studies and science teachers also assigning persuasive-writing exercises, and then the different styles for the different disciplines or contexts could be compared and contrasted. The key is collaboration.

Thank you, Professor Graham, for your time. We have certainly learned a lot today and we are looking forward to future interviews with you during the course of the year.