Learning to Write With Interactive Writing Instruction

PAUSE AND PONDER
■
When students are unsure about 
how to get started during writers’ 
workshop, what how-to strategies 
can you recommend?
■
How can you help students identify 
meaningful writing topics within your 
curriculum?
■
How can you integrate explicit 
spelling instruction into group 
writing activities?

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FEATURE ARTICLE
The Reading Teacher Vol. 71 No. 5 March/April 2018 literacyworldwide.org
The content of Diane’s lessons reflected six 
themes that supported the learning- to- write pro-
cess and students’ growth as writers: resources for 
topics, characteristics of genre, monitoring mean-
ing and sustaining composing, understanding the 
orthography, word solving, and linking instruction 
to independent writing. I discuss each theme in the 
following sections.
Resources for Topics
Diane positioned books as a primary resource for 
identifying writing topics, explaining that “good 
writers write about the things they’ve read about.” To 
model this strategy, one third of the group texts that 
she and the students composed during interactive 
writing lessons grew out of a book that she had read 
aloud or a Big Book that they had read chorally. When 
a student said, “I don’t know what to write,” Diane 
responded, “What books have you been reading?”
Students’ knowledge and experiences (e.g., 
birthday parties, sports) were also legitimate writ-
ing topics. Diane modeled this strategy by using 
interactive writing to capture the highlights of a 
field trip: “We can write about what we saw and 
learned.” Later, they used interactive writing to 
create an extended list of “all the things we know 
a lot about,” and Diane encouraged the students 
to write about those topics during journal writing. 
She explained, “Good writers write about things 
they know about.”
Diane also positioned storytelling as an appro-
priate resource for writing. To model this strategy, 
the group used interactive writing across an entire 
week to compose an elaborate fantasy, which be-
came one of their favorite stories to reread.