A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Writers: How to Provide Differentiated Support and Ongoing Assessment

Creating inclusive classrooms considerate of the needs of ALL children requires that teachers design structures that enable them to provide struggling learners with frequent, intensive, explicit, and individualized support and direction.

What do struggling writers really need? The research says they need more of what every student needs: access to high-quality writing instruction. A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Writers shares a framework for teaching every child that helps you give frequent, intensive, explicit, and differentiated support to students who struggle.

Curt Dudley-Marling and Patricia Paugh (coauthors of A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Readers) draw on a deep, thirty-year research base as well as classroom knowhow. Through observations of master teachers they show how the writing workshop gives you the instructional space to:

• motivate reluctant writers through genre, topic choice, and collaboration
• determine exactly where writers struggle through ongoing assessment
• use assessment to target student needs in your minilessons
• provide crucial one-on-one support during writing time and individual conferences
• encourage growth in skills and craft simultaneously.

Best of all, A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Writers illustrates how writing workshop can increase your instructional flexibility. You'll find information to help you guide struggling writers in grades 2 through 6 in areas where they commonly need support, such as planning, fluency, audience, organization, genre, word choice, mechanics, and revision.

What do your struggling readers need? Instruction that provides the support to gain independence-the kind of effective, efficient, flexible teaching you'll read about in A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Writers.