Learning to Write With Interactive Writing Instruction

Background of the Study
Diane, an experienced primary- grade teacher with 
Reading Recover y training, 
taught first grade in an urban 
Appalachian school district 
near the large Midwestern U.S. 
university where I teach; 70% 
of students there received free 
or reduced- price lunch. There 
were 18 students in Diane’s 
class: 16 Caucasians and two 
Afr ican Amer icans. Across 
one academic year, with the 
help of two graduate research 
assistants, I used field notes, 
photographs, and videotapes 
to document the instructional 
content of 44 interactive writ-
ing lessons and the ways students used that in-
struction during journal writing. I also photocopied 
students’ writing at each observation. I analyzed the 
data inductively using constant comparison (Corbin 
& Strauss, 2014). The goal of the analysis was to de-
termine whether and how interactive writing sup-
ported the learning- to- write process.
What “Good Writers” Do
Diane framed interactive writing instruction as the 
thinking and behaviors of a “good writer.” She talk-
ed frequently about what “good writers” do, making 
statements such as these:
■
“Good writers think about the sentence before 
they start writing.”
■
“Good writers do a lot of reading.”
■
“Good writers show how the characters are 
feeling.”
Instead of the minilessons characteristic of 
writers’ workshop, each interactive writing les-
son engaged students in the recursive processes 
of planning, drafting, revising, and editing a group 
text. Each lesson provided students opportunities 
to acquire a range of strategies and to examine the 
nature of English orthography and was character-
ized by explicit instruction, modeling, and guided 
practice (Harris et al., 2013).