Scaffold Writing Instruction to Help Students Become Confident Writers
Writing Process and Instruction
The writing process can be difficult for some students. It can seem overwhelming, and students (as well as teachers) can dread writing instruction.
Writing success can be available to all students when students are taught well, have low-risk opportunities to practice writing skills, and when writing tasks are scaffolded. As students gain confidence, teachers can slowly remove scaffolds.
Model Writing
Before students begin writing, they should be taught how to write well. This can be done through modeling.
Students understand what they are expected to do when they are given a few examples of what excellent writing looks like.
Model writing to show students different aspects of a writing rubric, a new writing skill, how to form a paragraph, how to respond to a prompt, and even how to write a five paragraph essay. Whatever expectations you have for your students for a writing assignment, show them what that looks like by modeling.
Even if it's a smaller writing task, it is important for students to see what they are expected to produce through a model.
Mentor Texts
A mentor text can be used to showcase specific writing techniques, such as descriptive language, dialogue, sensory language, or figurative language. Mentor texts can also be used to highlight other writing concepts, such as organization, voice, and word choice. (Read more about 6+1 writing traits to teach your students HERE.)
Mentor texts are usually introduced during a mini-lesson or direct instruction when learning a new skill. Teachers can read aloud a sentence, paragraph, or section of a text that demonstrates the writing skill students need to learn. Then, teachers can ask students what they notice about that text.
It may be necessary to ask leading questions to help students see the writing concept you are teaching. Afterward, the class can analyze and discuss the writing skills that are used within the text so that they can apply them to their own writing.
By analyzing a mentor text, students can better understand elements of writing.
Mentor Sentences
Similarly, a mentor sentence can be used to showcase sentence-level skills, such as capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. Mentor sentences can be altered so that students can practice editing and revising them to make them correct.
Student Engagement & Support
At times, the best way to support students is to let them help each other.
Student learning comes from lectures and direct instruction from the teacher, but when students talk to each other, they learn things that they won't learn from an adult.
Consequently, peer review and peer feedback are a great way to further scaffold writing. This gives struggling writers the opportunity to learn from other students who may explain a concept in a new way.
Another way for students to get support from other students is to participate in collaborative writing opportunities. During shared writing, students learn from each other as they complete the writing process together.
Language Proficiency for English Learners
English learners may need different scaffolds that support their language proficiency first.
One way to do this is to facilitate a class discussion centered around oral language development. By giving students opportunities to practice language skills, teachers can support students as they develop their vocabulary and grammar skills and learn to articulate their ideas in English.
This can be done as a whole class (since all students benefit from language development) or you can facilitate a small group discussion with your English learners.
As teachers help English learners become more confident speaking English, they will become more proficient writers as well.
Low-Stakes Writing Practice
To support students as they write, it is best to take some of the pressure off of the writing opportunities they have. This is where low-stakes writing activities come in. A high-stakes writing assignment might be a final paper or writing project. These types of assignments are heavily weighted in the gradebook.
Low-stakes writing consists of writing opportunities that are not graded or that count as a small portion of the overall writing or ELA grade. This may be viewed as writing-to-learn or learning through writing, rather than learning about writing.
Free Writing
Free writing, or exploratory writing, is a form of independent work where students can unleash their creativity without worrying about grammar or grades. This type of writing encourages expression and the flow of ideas, allowing your students to engage in a spontaneous and uninterrupted writing experience.
No prompts, no expectations, no rubrics, just writing.
Quick Write
A quick write is a short writing prompt where students are asked to respond to a question or statement within a set time limit. This encourages spontaneous writing without the expectation for polished work.
To ensure that students do not feel pressured to perform, do not grade quick writes, but use them as an opportunity to practice and perhaps get peer feedback or even instructor feedback if you have the time.
Writing Journals
Practice, practice, practice!
Weekly or daily writing journals give students the opportunity to practice writing without the risk and pressure of writing an essay.
Give students a prompt to respond to. If you want, encourage or require them to include a skill that you recently learned during writing instruction.
This is a great activity for morning work, whether you do it once or twice a week or even daily.
Consider giving students 2-3 minute to swap journals with their neighbor and get some peer review before moving on.
Rough Draft
A rough draft is a work in progress and is an important step in the writing process. At this stage in the writing process, complete sentences are optional, and bad grades are impossible.
A rough draft is a great way to start getting thoughts on paper before concentrating on making the final draft as good as possible. Final drafts can incite a lot of stress, but emphasizing the low-stakes aspect of a rough draft can make it easier to take steps toward that final draft.
This is true for a final project as well. Have students start with a project proposal and give feedback at each step before asking them to turn in their final draft for a grade.
Prior knowledge
Introducing prior knowledge is an important step of any lesson, but it is especially necessary when students are writing about topics they may not be familiar with. How can kids write about something they know very little about?
To fix this problem, conduct a short lesson on the topic and pre-teach vocabulary.
Take the vocabulary words and put them into a word bank for reference as students write about new concepts.
For example, have students read a short book about animals and point out the vocabulary words like habitat, diet, adaptation, prey, predatory, environment, characteristics, and camouflage. This will get your students ready to write their own essay about an animal species of their choice.
Scaffolding Strategies & Techniques for Writing Assignments
There are so many scaffolding strategies you can use with your students to make the writing process more accessible.
Each scaffolding technique has its own strengths and should be used with different students or in different situations as it makes sense.
If scaffolding writing seems overwhelming to you, start by introducing scaffolds for smaller assignments first.
Check out other differentiation strategies HERE.
Graphic Organizers
A graphic organizer is a great way to scaffold the writing process for students.
In my own classroom, I saw a huge difference between the quality of writing I saw from my students when I gave them a graphic organizer to plan out their writing compared to when they were expected to use a blank piece of paper to do their own planning. This was especially true for those students who struggled with the writing process to begin with.
There are many different graphic organizers that you can use to scaffold the writing process. These are especially helpful during the planning stage, before students write their rough draft.
Consider the following graphic organizers:
Venn Diagram (Compare & Contrast Essay)
T-Chart (Comparisons, Pros & Cons, Cause & Effect)
Mind Map (Brainstorm, Organize Around Central Topic)
Timeline (Narratives, Biographies)
Storyboard (Narratives)
Fishbone Diagram (Cause & Effect)
Main Idea & Supporting Details
Persuasion Map (Persuasive Essay)
Tree Diagram (5 Paragraph Essay)
Web Diagram (Brainstorming)
Check out THIS RESOURCE with each of these graphic organizers included (as well as others), ready to use in your classroom.
Sentence Stems & Sentence Frames
Sentence stems (also called sentence starters) are the beginning of a sentence that students can add to. Sentence frames are similar, but include the middle or ending of a sentence as well. Not all educators make this distinction and will often use the terms interchangeably.
Sentence starters and sentence frames can help beginning writers form complete sentences.
For example, you can have students complete the sentence, "My favorite part of the story was when __________" to make sure they do not respond with a sentence fragment.
Sentence stems can also be used to guide students through the writing process and keep them on task as they respond to a prompt. When asking, "What did you learn about whales?" you might give students the sentence frame, "One thing I learned about whales is __________"
Sentence stems are a great way to support students as they begin to restate the question. (Learn more about teaching students to restate the question HERE.) They can also help students learn the RACE strategy. (Check out FREE RACE strategy resources HERE.)
Sentence frames are great scaffolding technique used to support students as they write a topic sentence or thesis statement.
Consider the following sentence frames:
"I like __________ best because __________."
"In my opinion, __________ because __________, __________, and __________."
"__________ make better pets because __________."
"While many people feel [counterview], I think [view] because [reason 1], [reason 2], and [reason 3]."
"__________ and __________ are similar in that __________, but they differ in __________."
Paragraph Frames
While sentence frames help students zoom in and create a sentence, paragraph frames zoom out and help students put together a paragraph.
Sentence frames are particularly helpful for students who struggle to take the information from a graphic organizer to create their rough draft. Sometimes a paragraph frame can help bridge that gap.
A paragraph frame may look like this:
I think __________ are better than __________.
First of all, the text tells us __________.
Additionally, __________.
Finally, the author says that __________.
This evidence shows __________.
Rubric
Students can benefit from using a rubric when writing, especially one in student-friendly language.
Rubrics serve as a reminder of what students need to include as they write.
If you'd like more information on rubrics, CLICK HERE.
Writing Checklists
Writing checklists can be used in a variety of ways, depending on the skill that is being introduced or the concept a student or a group of students are struggling with. It's also a helpful way to encourage students to take ownership and responsibility.
For example, you could create a checklist based on the rubric that you will be using to assess students' writing. You could also create a writing checklist for conventions, such as grammar concepts, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. You might also create a student checklist for what you want included in an essay. (See below.)
Introduction Paragraph
Hook
Background Knowledge
Thesis Statement
Body Paragraph(s)
Topic sentence
Detail 1
Detail 2
Conclusion Sentence
Conclusion Paragraph
Restated Thesis
Takeaway
All of these checklists can support students as they keep track of what they have already included in their writing and what they still need to add.
Sentence Expansion
An easy way to get students to write better sentences is to practice sentence expansion.
Give students a simple sentence and have them expand it to include the writing skill you want them to learn.
Use sentence expansion to help students add adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases to their sentences.
For example, when working on using adverbs, you could have students add an adverb to sentences like,
I walked to class.
She ate her sandwich.
He opened the door.
to create these sentences:
I walked quickly to class.
She ate her sandwich slowly.
He barely opened the door.
Stretch a Sentence
There is a specific version of sentence expansion called "Stretch a Sentence".
For this exercise, students answer 5 questions to make sure their sentence has adequate information. These questions are: who? doing what? when? where? and why?
Using this technique, students can take a boring sentence and make it more engaging.
"A turtle walked."
becomes
"This morning, a turtle walked across the driveway to get to the river."
It can also help students create a sentence from scratch:
Who? A turtle
Doing what? A turtle walked.
When? This morning, a turtle walked.
Where? This morning, a turtle walked across the driveway.
Why? This morning, a turtle walked across the driveway to get to the river.
Check out THIS RESOURCE to help your students learn this trick to expanding their sentences!
Anchor Chart
Anchor charts can be created for a variety of things and allows students to reference information instead of having to memorize it.
Anchor charts take some of the mental load off of students as they read the information as needed, instead of having to remember and apply the information as they write.
Use anchor chart paper or set aside a part of your whiteboard for these references.
Anchor charts can be created for things like:
capitalization rules
grammar rules
punctuation rules
word banks
sentence structure
paragraph structure
essay structure
graphic organizers
writing checklists
rubric information
Think-Pair-Share
Think-Pair-Share helps students process their own thoughts about a new skill you're teaching and also hear the thoughts of their peers, which can provide different insight compared to what you provide when teaching.
Writing Conferences
One-on-one writing conferences are a great way to give students individualized feedback on their writing. It allows you to challenge students who excel at writing and are ready to add an advanced skill to their repertoire. Conferences also give you space to support struggling students by giving them specific feedback on what they need to work on most.
These conferences can be completed during independent work as you call students one by one to your desk to confer with them.
If a writing assignment takes 2 weeks and you have 30 kids, you might try to meet with 6 kids each day so that you can meet with every kid twice before they finish their assignment and turn it in. If you have a 30 minute block for independent writing, that would give you 5 minutes per student. For example:
Week 1 (Repeat for Week 2)
Day 1: Students 1-6
Day 2: Students 7-12
Day 3: Students 13-18
Day 4: Students 19-24
Day 5: Students 25-30
Authentic Writing Tasks
Sometimes students do best with learning when they see how it relates to them.
Writing an essay because the teacher said to is much less enticing than writing a letter to the principal to convince them to extend recess - a great first step toward writing a persuasive essay!
Check out a few more ideas of how to make writing more authentic through real-world writing opportunities:
Blog Post (Post to Your Classroom Website)
Classroom Newspaper (Send Home to Families Weekly)
Sports Report (Summarize Professional Game)
Letters (Write a Thank You Letter to a Parent Volunteer or Facilitate Pen Pals)
Book Review (Ask the Librarian to Post These)
Brochure (Promote a School Club)
Public Service Announcement (Raise Awareness about Recycling or Safety)
Interview (Veteran)
Survey Summary (Favorite School Lunches)
Post Card (Vacation Recap)
Writing Prompts & Story Starters
If students are struggling to get started with their narrative writing, consider giving students story starters to get their creative juices flowing.
You can use these suggestions to help spark creativity:
As the door creaked open, I saw something that I thought I would never see again.
Emilia always had the most fascinating dreams. Then, one day, her dreams started to become reality.
As I was walking through the forest behind our backyard, I thought I heard a whisper, but there was no one in sight.
After weeks of searching, Sarah finally found what she had been looking for. After three more days, she wished she had never found it.
The small village of Coral Bay was nestled by the sea. The villagers led peaceful lives there until a figure emerged from the water.
I woke up startled. After I took a moment to orient myself, I realized that I was in my backyard on the grass, with a light shining down on me from above and the whirring sound of an engine floating above me.
The entire village banded together to slay the dragon that had started circling the hills nearby, but I knew something no one else did.
I was already in my pajamas reading when I heard a whimper on the front porch. I opened the door to see what was making the noise.
Maya had meant to kayak back to her family's campsite before it started to pour, but she got caught in the storm, and her kayak was pushed by the waves until she landed on the shore of a cave.
In a hidden city where everyone had a unique superpower, Zahra discovered that she was the only one who was ordinary.
Find the complete list of writing prompts HERE. (COMING SOON!)
You can also check out Scholastic's interactive Story Starter that gives students a fun prompt to write about.
Conclusion
Scaffolded writing instruction plays a crucial role in developing confident writers. Scaffolding assignments with graphic organizers, sentence stems, and paragraph frames provides support and structure throughout the writing process. Through these scaffolding techniques, students can develop their writing skills, gain confidence, and unleash their creativity.
