Helping Struggling Writers Succeed by: Helsel & Greenberg (Alison DiStefano)

Summary:
This article focused on a key writing strategy called Self Regulating Strategy Development (SRSD) which is composed of 6 stages or steps that a teacher can use to help a struggling writer. Self regulating is so important for students to learn. Some examples are self regulating are outlining, setting goals when writing, mimicking other author's writing styles, etc... Struggling writers don't use strategies. They do little revisions without teacher/peer support. What teachers need to do is introduce and model how to write a summary. The student would then use the observed strategy to write their own. Then they use their own knowledge to self monitor and make their own strategy (rather than relying on peer or teacher feedback). Summary writing is enhanced 3 ways: indirectly through experience, directly through instruction, and elicited through practice. Here are the stages involved in SRSD:
Stage 1: Background knowledge
Stage 2: Strategy is described & discussed
Stage 3: Model strategy
Stage 4: Memorize it
Stage 5: Support it. Teacher scaffolds while students write
Stage 6: Independent performance
Helsel was impressed with the changes she saw in her struggling writers (6th grade) after 5 sessions of using SRSD. She recommends using SRSD with upper elementary or middle school students. It is however, very time consuming with a limited amount of time to work individually with students.

This would be a hard approach to use with my 3rd graders. Especially because the author recommends only using this approach with upper elementary. My students have enough trouble working independently I don't see them being able to self monitor without looking for teacher feedback. However, this would be an interesting experiment. Perhaps I could introduce this activity during my literacy unit in order to teach students to be more independent writers. Self monitoring/regulation is very important when writing and they are learning right now how to write summaries. This could be a great time to introduce how to write a summary and expand on that using SRSD.

As a professional, I would need to first learn how my students learn. I need to see who struggles with writing and WHY. How do they learn? What strategies do I need to teach them in order for them to not only grasp them but be able to use them on their own. I need to also learn more about this SRSD model in order to teach it and encourage the students to use it.

I struggle a lot with figuring out how to assess students based on their writing. It is so easy to assess students in other areas such as math and science because there is (usually) one write answer and they either get it right or wrong. With writing, how do you successfully assess a student and how do you keep that assessment consistent across the entire class? What might be C work for one student is A work for another. I think for my unit it will be assessing students on whether or not they grasp the instructional focus for that week. Can they explain what the focus is and how it helps us with reading/writing. I also will assess them on how much they write. Can they expand on certain parts to make the reader to not only remain interested and focused on their writing but engaged and feel a part of that story? The videos in task one helped me see a teacher help students 'stretch' out and expand their writing to make it more interesting to read and more detailed.