Now let’s get more specific about the eleven research-based instructional practices mentioned in our last blog post. In today’s post, we’ll cover only the first five practices used by our online writing tutors, focusing in on practices six through eleven in later editions. So without further ado, here’s our take on the first five instructional practices identified in the influential 2007 report titled "Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools.”

Practice 1. Writing Strategies:

This practice involves teaching students specific, sequential writing strategies such as planning, organizing, and revising their writing (rather than simply giving students assignments and expecting them to develop their own set of strategies for the writing process). Teaching students “writing strategies” means teaching not only the content that their written assignments will focus on – for example, the causes of World War II, or the literary devices and themes at play in a novel – but also providing guidance on how they should structure the process of researching and writing about said content. When students learn to employ writing strategies effectively, they reliably improve the quality of their written work overall. Kind of a no-brainer, right?

Accordingly, GWG’s writing tutors teach our students a variety of strategies to enhance their composition skills. We guide them in brainstorming ideas, organizing their thoughts, and developing coherent and structured written pieces. Through explicit instruction and modeling, we help our students become increasingly proficient at planning, drafting, revising, and editing their work.

Practice 2. Summarization:

As it turns out, teaching students how to summarize texts helps them develop important cognitive skills, such as the capacity to identify main ideas, condense information, and maintain focus while reading. Summarization supports reading comprehension and improves writing by encouraging students to assimilate key points as they read, enabling them to convey these points concisely after the fact. This skill is closely related to students’ ability to filter out relevant information (in service of a specific goal or knowledge outcome) from all the other content included in a text or media object. Summarization ability is a strong indicator of whether a reader understands the relationship (and can distinguish) between “the forest and the trees,” as it were.

To improve students' summarization skills, our writing tutors engage them in activities that involve repeatedly condensing information, identifying main ideas, and paraphrasing content in written form. Repetition in this area is key. By teaching effective summarization techniques, we enable our students to extract key points from texts and express them with concision and mastery. Because the Gilliam Writers Group also teaches our students how to use AI interfaces like ChatGPT (a crucial skill set in today’s world), and because AI is fairly good at summarizing large quantities of information, we often use AI-generated summaries of longer texts as examples in our lessons.

Practice 3. Collaborative Writing:

This instructional practice involves engaging students in collaborative writing activities wherein they work with others in real-time to plan, draft, revise, and edit their pieces. Research indicates that collaborative writing supports a broad (and often unpredictable) range of learning outcomes, provides vital opportunities for feedback between students and teachers, and enhances students' understanding of the writing process overall. Being forced to involve others in one’s writing process fosters not only cooperation, but critical thinking; it requires that one be able to explain their choices and approaches, as well as tweak them, in real-time.

By the very nature of our work, GWG’s tutors engage students in a lot of collaborative writing; tutoring is, after all, a two-person experience. During lessons our students work closely with their tutors to develop their writing in real-time, sharing ideas and discussing feedback. In this way our students improve their communication skills and learn how to see their work from another’s perspective (in other words, to practice distance and objectivity).

Practice 4. Specific Product Goals:

Setting clear goals for writing assignments helps students focus on specific aspects of their writing. By providing students with explicit (though not micro-managerial) criteria for success, educators can guide them more efficiently toward achieving desired outcomes. This also helps students develop a better understanding of what constitutes quality writing.

At the Gilliam Writers Group, our tutors assist students in setting clear targets for their writing projects – for example, developing a strong thesis statement, incorporating evidence effectively, or improving sentence structure. By working towards specific goals like these, our students learn how to monitor their own progress and strive for continuous improvement.

Practice 5. Word Processing & Technology:

Integrating technology, specifically word processing tools, into the writing process can have many benefits, especially for teaching – though studies also show that typing should not be viewed as an all-encompassing substitute for handwriting when it comes to learning how to write from an early age (no matter how digitized our lives become, humans are still tactile learners, so we always recommend our students keep a notebook and write in it regularly). Nonetheless, working on shared virtual documents allows students and their tutors to easily edit and revise the student’s work together, provides opportunities for collaborative writing, and increases motivation and engagement.

Incorporating technology is crucial in today's digital age. Our writing tutors introduce students to word processing tools and teach them how to leverage these tools to enhance not only the quality of their writing, but also their mastery of the organizational and research techniques that will support their work for years to come, in academia and beyond. Using word processors with guidance from an online tutor fast-tracks the development of children’s digital literacy skills, which are of course essential.