Students in Mr. Bradford’s 5th grade class are creating a digital report about key women in the American Revolution. In this lesson, students will practice drafting possible leads to use in their report on women in the American Revolution.
During the drafting stage, students expand the ideas they generated during prewriting into a working rough copy by organizing their writing. Since the writing process is fluid, students may choose to change earlier decisions about purpose, audience, and genre. Differentiated instruction and use of technology tools are important to address different learning styles.
Best Practices with Technology
Step 1: Provide Direct Instruction
- By modeling and thinking aloud on your interactive whiteboard, show students how to use tools such as Google Docs or Zoho Writer to create, revise, and store their drafts in a digital writing portfolio.
- Focus explicit instruction on how to translate ideas and notes into strong sentences.
Ways to help students generate sentences
- On your whiteboard, color code sample words and phrases that can be combined into sentences.
- Model sentence combining by starting with a simple example: “The cat was gray” and “The cat was soft” can be combined to create “The cat was gray and soft.” As students gain confidence, move to more complex examples.
- When you teach students about using transition words to develop different sentence structures, use Wordle to create colorful word clouds that contain various groups of transition words that can be used to compare/contrast and summarize.
- Provide direct instruction on drafting sentences for different purposes. Use an online collaborative workspace to share examples of introductory paragraphs, body paragraphs, conclusions, and argumentation.
View evidence behind this recommendation
IES Recommendations
Teach students to become fluent with handwriting, spelling, sentence construction, typing, and word processing.
Evidence:
Moderate
Source: IES Practice Guide: Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers
Step 2: Help Students Write for a Variety of Purposes
- Use a classroom blog to post examples of the different types of leads that students could use as models for writing opening sentences. Depending on the genre, purpose, and audience, have students practice writing their opening sentence, or lead, using the blog.
- To differentiate instruction, use a variety of technology tools to teach students how to draft paragraphs that include a topic sentence, supporting details, and a concluding statement.
Strategies for teaching paragraphing
- Create a podcast that identifies the steps students can follow to create a well-written paragraph and post it on your class website.
- Post strategies and lessons on Kidblog and communicate back and forth with your students to model paragraph writing.
- Depending on the purpose and genre of the writing, provide students with sentence frames—ranging from simple to complex—to guide their writing (e.g., My favorite ____ is ____; The purpose of the experiment was to ______________ by _____________).
- Show students a video from Teachertube to give them more practice with sentences frames.
- Make sure students understand the different ways text is crafted based on purpose and audience (for genres such as narrative, descriptive, informative, and persuasive) to guide their thinking when developing their first draft. (See UDL Checkpoint 8.1: Heighten salience of goals).
View evidence behind this recommendation
IES Recommendations
Teach students to use the writing process for a variety of purposes.
Evidence:
Moderate
Source: IES Practice Guide: Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers
Step 3: Engage Students in Ongoing Assessment
- Students learn in different ways, so provide them with a variety of opportunities to reflect on their first drafts. Model reflecting on a piece of your own writing; videotape yourself using a list of guiding questions to compare your prewriting techniques and your first draft and then share the video with students on the interactive whiteboard. (See UDL Checkpoint 9.3: Develop self-assessment and reflection).
Possible technology tools to support reflection
- Add prompting questions to classroom blogs
- Have students record their reflections
- Provide online assessment checklists for writing portfolios
- Use online graphic organizers
- Ask students to fill out an “Exit Card” containing a set of reflective questions
- Establish the criteria for the completion of student drafts by creating your own rubric (or modifying or using published rubrics) that includes the criteria you want to assess, and then model how to use the rubric.
- When students post drafts to their digital writing portfolios, you and your students can compare their drafts to their original prewriting plans to check if everything is included, if it makes sense, and if changes are needed.
Discover Lessons in Action:
Watch Our Quick View Technology Videos:
Quick View: Blogs and Wikis
(Get More Info)
Resource Type: Quick View
Writing online, through blogs, wikis, or discussion forums, can boost student motivation for writing and help students learn to adapt writing for different audiences, tasks, purposes, and disciplines. Watch this short video to learn how you can use...
Quick View: Teaching Students to Make Presentations
(Get More Info)
(Watch the Video)
Resource Type: Quick View
Classroom presentations encourage purposeful speaking and engaged listening. When students give a presentation, they not only demonstrate content knowledge but also exercise skills in writing with purpose and for an audience—skills that are useful...
Review the Research:
Direct teaching, strategy instruction, and strategy instruction with explicit self-regulation: Effects on the composition skills and self- efficacy of students with learning disabilities
Resource Type: Research
This study assesses the impact of self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) on students identified as learning disabled (LD). Students were assigned to one of four conditions: full SRSD, SRSD without explicit self-regulation instruction, direct...
Integrating Technology with Student-Centered Learning
Resource Type: Research
This report describes a study of indicating that teachers are not sufficiently integrating technology into student-centered learning discusses the potential for doing so.
Research on Writing Practices
Resource Type: Bibliography
The PowerUp WHAT WORKS Team at the Center for Technology Implementation, has conducted extensive reviews of the literature on the writing process. View our bibliography for a collection of references on evidence-based writing practices.
Self-regulated strategy development instruction for writing an opinion essay: Effects for six students with emotional/behavior disorders
Resource Type: Research
The purpose of the study was to examine the impact of self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) to support POW (Pick my idea, Organize my notes, Write and say more) and TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons, Ending, Examine) on elementary-age students with...
Teaching expressive writing to students with learning disabilities: A meta-analysis.
Resource Type: Research
The purpose of this meta-analysis was to summarize the impact of process-writing interventions (i.e., writing, editing, and reviewing) on students with learning disabilities (LD). The interventions also emphasized expressive writing, defined as...
Technology and Student Learning: Toward a Learner-Centered Teaching Model
Resource Type: Research
This article ways teachers can differentiate instruction and meet learner needs to (a) emphasize a student’s specific abilities and needs; (b) provide active learning environments; and (c) integrate technology into classroom instruction.
Technology Tools to Support Writing
Resource Type: Bibliography
The PowerUp WHAT WORKS Team at the Center for Technology Implementation has conducted extensive reviews of the literature on the use of technology tools to support writing. View our bibliography for a collection of references on evidence-based...
The effectiveness of a highly explicit, teacher-directed strategy instruction routine: Changing the writing performance of students with learning disabilities
Resource Type: Research
Using a highly explicit and teacher-directed instructional strategy, this study examined the impact of three planning strategies (goal setting, brainstorming, and organizing) on writing outcomes for students with learning disabilities (LD). The...
The learning-to-learn strategies of adolescent students with disabilities: Highlighting, notetaking, planning, and writing expository texts
Resource Type: Research
The study examined the learning-to-learn strategies of students with and without disabilities as they highlighted, took notes, planned, and wrote expository texts in social studies and science. Learning-to-learn skills are important to student...
The New 3 E’s of Education: Enabled, Engaged, Empowered: How Today’s Students are Leveraging Emerging Technologies for Learning
Resource Type: Research
This report focuses on three current educational technology trends mobile learning, online and blended learning and e-textbooks. It discusses the potential of these trends to enable, engage, and empower teachers and students.