Chapter 14 page 335
the questions that are used to generate good ideas for the writing. The teacher asks herself, “Who are the
main characters in my story?” The students contribute ideas for who the main characters might be, but the
teacher takes the lead, showing students how to do the thinking needed to generate good ideas for a story.
The teacher then asks herself the other questions, and the students contribute answers.
After modeling the strategies, the teacher gives students a chance to try it with her help. The
students again work together as a class to write a new story, but this time the students take the lead in the
writing, and the teacher acts more as a recorder, providing help only when needed as the class generates a
story plan together. Then each individual student writes a story based on the class’s plan. In this way, the
students move from the teacher’s model to writing a story with lots of help. After that, they will soon be
ready to try writing stories on their own.
The teacher also models for students how to use the general purpose strategies. The teacher makes
statements such as the following to illustrate how to set goals, monitor, and self-reinforce.
Ɣ Setting goals: “What do I want to do first? As I start writing, I have to think what I want to do here.
I certainly want to write a good story that is interesting and has all the parts of an interesting story.
Those will be my goals for writing this story”
Ɣ Monitoring: “I’ve just written a paragraph. Does that make sense? Will people be able to understand
it? I think that maybe this part is a little confusing....”
Ɣ Self-reinforcement: “Oh! I really like that part! That’s a really interesting paragraph. That’ll make
people wonder what is going to happen next!”
Through modeling the cognitive processes she uses to implement the strategies, the teacher demonstrates
for students how to use the strategies in a way that they can try themselves.
Students making thinking visible. SRSD gives students many chances to make their thinking
visible, both in class discussions and in work with peers. In class discussions, teachers ask students to use
the strategies as they plan papers together and explain how they used the strategies when writing their own
papers. In extensive group work, students talk with each other about using the strategies and help each
other use the strategies. Each time that students ask one of the questions out loud, they are making their
strategy use visible. Students also make their strategy use visible every time that they make statements such
as “Don’t forget that one of our goals is to make the essay interesting,” “Let’s make sure that we tell about
where the story is happening,” “Let’s have the story happen in school,” and “Let’s transfer by using the
TREE questions when we write a story for our class newspaper.”
Scaffolding strategy use and fading scaffolding over time. In SRSD, teachers employ many
forms of scaffolding to help students master the strategies, and they fade their scaffolding over time. One
form of scaffolding, as we have seen, is cognitive prompts. Each of the acronyms students learn (such as
POW and TREE) prompt students to carry out target strategies such as picking ideas, organizing notes,
and writing and saying more (the POW strategies).
A second scaffolding technique is hints and feedback, which teachers provide as they interact with
students and write comments on students’ essays. Teachers work intensively with students—one on one, in
groups, and in whole-class discussions—to ensure that each student masters the writing strategies they are
learning. This requires that teachers carefully evaluate each day how each student is doing, so that she can
give each student the help needed to master the strategies.
A third form of scaffolding in SRSD consists of diagrammatic representations. SRSD employs
diagrammatic representations to help students understand the parts of stories and persuasive essays. Figure
14.7 shows a diagram that teachers give students to help them identify the different parts of a story.
Initially, teachers work with students in a whole-class discussion to show them how to identify parts of a
story they have read. The teacher fills in the chart displayed via a projector so that students see how to use
the chart. Gradually, the students learn to fill in the chart on their own for stories they have read. After they
have mastered use of the chart for stories they have read, the students start using the chart both to generate
ideas for their own stories and to check whether their stories have all the parts they should have. Thus, the
chart helps students evaluate their own work as well as generate new ideas.