Learning to Write With Interactive Writing Instruction

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Learning to Write With Interactive Writing Instruction
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The Reading Teacher · October 2017
DOI: 10.1002/trtr.1643
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Cheri Williams
University of Cincinnati
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523
Learning to Write With Interactive 
Writing Instruction
Cheri Williams
What do you do to help students who say “I don’t know how to write” 
or “I can’t think of anything to write about”?
C
arolyn (all names except Diane are pseud-
onyms), an experienced kindergarten teacher, 
posed this question during a discussion of 
writers’ workshop in a graduate- level course I taught 
several years ago. Writers’ workshop is the most com-
mon approach to writing instruction in the primary 
grades (Graham, Harris, & Mason, 2005; Pritchard & 
Honeycutt, 2006), and the inservice teachers were dis-
cussing their use of this process- oriented approach. 
Carolyn and several other teachers expressed con-
cern about the lack of explicit how- to instruction in 
the workshop approach. Our discussion led us to ex-
plore other process- oriented approaches, specifically 
interactive writing (McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 
2000), which research has found to support early 
literacy development (Craig, 2006; Jones, Reutzel, 
& Fargo, 2010; Roth & Guinee, 2011). Several of the 
teachers decided to try interactive writing in their 
early writing program and document the impact of 
the approach on their students’ learning (Williams, 
2011; Williams & Lundstrom, 2007; Williams, Sherry, 
Robinson, & Hungler, 2012). In this article, I share the 
results of one teacher’s use of interactive writing in 
first grade. Her story highlights the ways in which 
interactive writing can support the learning- to- write 
process, particularly for young students who “don’t 
know how.”