What does SRSD look like in a classroom?
Teachers and students consistently talk about how much fun SRSD has made writing instruction!
SRSD has such great faith in teachers. Teachers know their students, they know their community, they know their school and their classroom — and they have to be in charge of SRSD. It is not scripted, and it doesn’t ask teachers to give up anything they're doing that's effective for their students.
We use six general stages of instruction in SRSD. Stage one is Develop Background Knowledge. Stage two is called Discuss It (most teachers put those two together, and they kind of go back and forth between them).
Stage three is Model It. Now, many teachers today model, but modeling in SRSD is somewhat different. What we have found more effective across grade levels is what we call interactive modeling, where the kids are involved all the way through. The teacher also models self-regulation, and this is part of what makes SRSD so different than any other writing instruction. Teachers model planning: “I know I have to plan — what do I do to plan?” And the kids all respond, “Use your strategies!” The teacher also models writing difficulties. Writing is a social-emotional experience: for example, it can cause anxiety, frustration, and procrastination — but you can handle those things if you have writing and self-regulation strategies.
We teach four kinds of self-regulation: goal setting, self-monitoring, self-talk, and self-reinforcement. Self-reinforcement is simply saying, I like this idea. This is a good paper. The sentence is awesome! These are all things teachers model.
If teachers drop the self-regulation components — even just one! — their outcomes in the classroom can drop dramatically. Students need to know how to self-regulate writing: when it's going well, when it's hard, when to ask for assistance.
Stage four is Memorize It, or memorizing the mnemonic. This isn’t just the acronym itself, but what each letter stands for, why each part is important, and how to make each part good. Teachers have had a blast with this. They've come up with guitar songs, chants, and raps. One teacher decided that they were power writers in her classroom, because her kids were into Power Rangers. She came to school wearing a cape!
Stage 5 is Supported Practice, which is working in the zone of proximal development, gradual release of control, and scaffolding, (or I do, we do, you do) ... these all truly mean the same thing. We're moving away our support as students are ready, and students do more and more alone. Finally, Stage Six is Independent Performance.
These stages are recursive. For example, if you have a group of students who need to go back and do extra modeling — go for it. You don't expect all your students to be in the same place at the same time.
What does the research on SRSD show? Why has it spread the way it has?
We've been at this since the first study that I published in 1985 with Steve Graham and a doctoral student of mine. It took me about eight years to develop the first version of SRSD.
It's called Self-Regulated Strategy Development because it brings together so many different strategies — strategies for teaching, strategies for learning, for reading, for writing, now for math, science, and more. It's gone way beyond just writing, which is where I still focus.
There are over 200 studies now. That includes experimental, quasi-experimental, and single-case design studies — if they meet the requirements for high-quality research, they're included. SRSD research and instruction are happening in 26 countries. While we have learned so much, we still continue to learn.
Research has also looked at all kinds of settings — inclusive classrooms, low-income schools, medium-income and higher-income schools. One of the meta-analyses that came out just a few years ago showed it was effective across socio-economic status. In fact, SRSD has the largest effect sizes in writing outcomes across multiple outcomes of any researched writing approach.
Research has shown that SRSD works for students with writing difficulties, students with writing disabilities, students with learning disabilities, and students with emotional behavior disorders. It works for the whole class and small groups. It's now researched and very effective across grades one to twelve.
One of the things we have explained since early on with SRSD is that when you teach writing, you can get some improvements in reading. It's not a magic fix-all, but working on reading and understanding text and then writing — especially about something you're learning about, or something you care about — helps you organize what you know, think about the topic more, and when you're reading, it helps with comprehension.
Writing has long been an under studied and appreciated part of literacy. SRSD spread the way it has because teachers were looking for something that works. We're so fortunate that writing is finally getting the attention it needs and deserves.
What have you found when SRSD is brought into the earliest grades?
I was initially really very nervous about taking SRSD below third grade. I partnered with Dr. Young-Suk Kim at University of California, Irvine, Dr. Steve Graham, and Dr. April Camping to research SRSD for first and second grade for several years. We were in low-income school districts in California and Florida. We developed source texts that first and second graders could mark up for learning how to write to inform or to persuade. At the same time — and this is controversial — we taught sentence construction, spelling, handwriting, paragraphs, vocabulary, discourse knowledge, and academic language to talk about writing. One of the most important findings from these studies is that young children can learn mechanics, sentence structure, spelling, handwriting, and more, and learn to write at the same time. These kids just blew me away. And they loved to write!
We know from research and experience that by third grade, most U.S. students either strongly dislike or outright hate writing. And this is what we get for allowing them to try to figure it out on their own — creating a great deal of failure and a great deal of frustration! I can't tell you how many students we've worked with over the years who have started out saying things like, I was born this way. No one can teach me to write. You won't be able to help me. We have to help them believe in themselves as part of SRSD.
With first and second grade, there's no preconceived notions about ability. Those kids still love to write.
