Best Practices: Writing and Response Intervention

There is a great deal of talk these days about Response to Intervention, or RtI. Most of it centers around reading and math, but there are ways to incorporate intervention strategies into your writing instruction to help those students having difficulties with written expression. The following activity is designed to teach students how to monitor their word count and build motivation for writing.

Title: Increasing Writing Productivity with Self-Monitoring

Appropriate Grade Level: Grades 1-8

Brief Description: The purpose of this intervention is to increase word production through self-monitoring of word counts. The rationale behind this intervention is that the more students write, the more effective they will become at writing. As students learn to monitor their amount of writing output, they will strive to increase that amount. A benefit of this intervention is that it improves students' motivation for writing.

Materials Needed:

1. NEO 1 or NEO 2 for student writing (one NEO per student preferably)
2. Knowledge of the following key command to display word counts on the NEO 2: ctrl-W.
3. Student-made line graphs for recording word counts
4. Posterboard chart with bar graph for recording class word counts
5. Red felt-tip marker
6. Watch with second hand, kitchen timer, or stopwatch

Procedure/Steps:

1. Select a time for freewriting using NEO 2s. Freewriting should be conducted daily or several times a week.
2. Explain to the students that they will be learning to evaluate their progress in writing by counting and recording the number of words they write during each session.
3. Model for the students how to use the key command ctrl-W to display the number of words they have written on their NEO 2s.
   1. Note that ctrl-W will also display the number of characters, paragraphs and pages written.
   2. Depending on your age group and skill level, you may want to track more than one indicator.
4. Display the class chart and explain that you will be graphing the total number of words written by the class for each writing session. Using the group average number of words written correctly calculated during the observation period, set a weekly goal of total words to be written by the class. Draw a red line on the chart to indicate that goal. Raise that goal by about 5% each week.
5. Discuss specific topics students may select, provide a writing prompt, or permit students to select their own topics. Provide approximately 15 minutes for writing.
   1. To help your students, select from the nearly 400 Write On! writing lessons available for the NEO.
   2. Use AlphaSmart Manager 2 to select and send lessons to your students’ NEOs.
   3. You can differentiate your instruction by selecting appropriate lessons based on each student’s interest or skill level.
6. After students finish writing, demonstrate how to create a simple line graph on their chart and have them record the number of words they wrote during that session on their graphs.
   1. Remind them to press ctrl-W to display the number of words that they’ve written.
7. Provide an opportunity for students to voluntarily share their writing with the rest of the class.
8. Each week, review journals and graphs to monitor student self-recording and to obtain the class word count total for recording on the class chart. Discuss progress in achieving the weekly goal and praise students if they meet or exceed it.

Suggestions for Evaluating Effectiveness:
Count the number of words in freewriting samples for a group of selected students or for the entire class for several weeks. Count each word whether it is spelled correctly an unconventional invented spelling.

Comments/tips:
This intervention can also be done for 3-5 minute periods. In that case, give students time to brainstorm ideas and to plan their writing before the time begins.

Source:
Adapted from https://www.msu.edu/course/cep/886/Writing/page2.htm
Rathvon, N. (1999). Effective School Interventions. New York: Guilford Press.

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