
WRITING:
OCTOBER
Effective Elements in
Writing Instruction

2010
MATH:
Number Sense
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BEHAVIOR:
Frequent Flyers
Intervention
Insider
Helping students through the Pyramid of Intervention:
Tips from your School Psychologists
Effective Elements to Improve
Writing Instruction in
Grades 4 - 12
A Carnegie Corporation Report (Writing Next, 2007)
identifies eleven elements that are effective for helping
adolescent students learn to write well and use writing as a
tool for learning. These eleven elements are as follows:
1. Writing Strategies, which involves teaching students
strategies for planning, revising, and editing their
compositions.
2. Summarization, which involves explicitly and
systematically teaching students how to summarize texts.
3. Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional
arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan,
draft, revise, and edit their compositions.
4. Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific,
reachable goals for the writing they are to complete.
5. Word Processing, which uses computers and word
processors as instructional supports for writing
assignments.
6. Sentence Combining, which involves teaching students
to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences.
7. Prewriting, which engages students in activities designed
to help them generate or organize ideas for their
composition.
8. Inquiry Activities, which engages students in analyzing
immediate, concrete data to help them develop ideas and
content for a particular writing task
Critical early mathematical skills may be centered
around the concept of number sense. Number sense is
defined by Gersten & Chard (1999) as “a child’s fluidity
and flexibility with numbers, the sense of what numbers
mean, and an ability to form mental mathematics and to
look at the world and make comparisons.” Case (1998)
describes number sense as a concept that includes: 1)
fluent, accurate estimation and judgment of magnitude
comparisons, 2) flexibility when mentally computing, 3)
ability to recognize unreasonable results, and 4) ability to
move among different representations and to use the most
appropriate representation.
Numerical proficiency skills that might be screened in
young children include: strategic counting, magnitude
comparisons, number combinations, word problems,
number identification (gateway skill), and sequence
counting (gateway skill) (Clark & Gersten, Early
Mathematics Assessment, 2006). Number Fly, which is an
application to create easy CBM early math fluency probes
on line, offers number identification, missing number
(strategic counting), and number discrimination (magnitude
comparisons) probes that might be used to screen and
progress monitor students for this development of number
sense.
Number Sense:
Assessing Early Mathematics
RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT
Free products that can help to fill gaps in schools’ academic intervention, behavioral
intervention, and progress-monitoring capacity in their RTI plan:
ACADEMIC: HELPS Evidence-Based Reading Fluency Program Package
BEHAVIORAL: The Great Behavior Game: A Classwide Management Program
PROGRESS-MONITORING: GRAPS: RTI Graphing (Progress-Monitoring) Software, a
free Excel-based program available at http://www.rtigraphs.com,
Effective Elements to Improve Writing Instruction in
Grades 4 - 12
(continued from page 1)
9. Process Writing Approach, which interweaves a number of writing instructional
activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities, writing
for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing
10. Study of Models, which provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and
emulate models of good writing
11. Writing for Content Learning, which uses writing as a tool for learning content
material
The Writing Next elements do not constitute a full writing curriculum; however, all of
the Writing Next instructional elements have shown clear results for improving students’
writing and literacy development. Some of these elements are closely aligned with
Assessment for Learning strategies. We’ll expand on some of these over the next few
months in the Intervention Insider.
Frequent Flyers
Ross Greene had an article in the October issue of Educational Leadership that described
“frequent flyers” as those students that don’t respond to all the referrals, detentions, and
suspensions we hand them. They are the ones that don’t benefit from our traditional school
discipline program and they are often the kids we lose. Over the past 30 years, research has told us
that challenging kids are challenging because they lack the skills not to be challenging…skills like
flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. As adults, we often tend to
focus on what a student did when he or she was “looking bad.” It may be more effective to look at
the why and when they did it. It is easy to be overwhelmed with all the available information on
these behaviorally challenging students…they tend to accumulate thick files. As a result, the
discussions that often take place focus on the bad things that have happened in the student’s
history…for example, bad neighborhoods, family stress, adoption, incarcerated parents, poverty,
etc. As Greene points out, these factors are not completely irrelevant, but usually just bring us to the
conclusion that we can do nothing to help the student. However, if we focus on the student’s skill
deficits, we can emerge with a clear sense of the problems that need to be solved to reduce their
challenging behavior. So what can we do differently? Greene suggests collaborative problem
solving. This process involves empathy, problem definition, and an invitation to brainstorm
solutions together. “Transforming school discipline is a team effort that must be led by
administrators with vision, energy, focus, perseverance, willingness to self-reflect, and an ability to
bring people together.” Greene included in his article a scale called the ALSUP (Assessment of
Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems). This can be used by educators to identify lagging skills
that set the stage for challenging behaviors and the specific unsolved problems that are setting these
behaviors in motion. It offers a discussion guide that can give us direction in what to do next for
these students.
Contact Information
Patty Adkins
Lead School Psychologist
706-384-4554 ext. 11336
[email protected]
Lindsay Masland
School Psychology Intern
[email protected]
Wendy Thrift
School Psychologist
706-384-4554-11329
[email protected]
DID YOU
KNOW?
Interesting
Research Fact
Very young children living in
poverty are much less likely
than non-poor children to be
able to recognize the letters
of the alphabet, count to 20
or higher, or write their
names. These are among the
skills important to early
school success. School
readiness, a multidimensional
concept, conveys important
advantages. Children who
enter school with early skills,
such as a basic knowledge of
math and reading, are more
likely than their peers to
experience later academic
success, attain higher levels
of education, and secure
employment. Absence of
these and other skills may
contribute to even greater
disparities down the road.
For example, one study found
that gaps in math, reading,
and vocabulary skills evident
at elementary school entry
explained at least half of the
racial gap in high school
achievement scores. As
conceptualized by the
National Education Goals
Panel, school readiness
encompasses five
dimensions: (1) physical
well-being and motor
development; (2) social and
emotional development; (3)
approaches to learning; (4)
language development
(including early literacy); and
(5) cognition and general
knowledge.
(childtrendsdatabank.org)