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This paper explores a five-year case example of two educators engaged in practice-based professional development (PBPD) for the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model in a middle school. It examines the transformative effects and challenges of improving writing instruction, the activities involved and alternative PBPD delivery methods. Highlighting a collaborative effort between an institute of higher education (IHE), a middle school and ThinkSRSD, a PBPD for SRSD developer, the example underscores the long-term benefits and innovative insights into engaging with PBPD for SRSD over multiple years.

The case involves analyzing survey data collected over five years. These surveys, which included specific SRSD-related queries and open-ended questions, were instrumental in assessing the evolution of the educators’ perceptions regarding SRSD and their engagement with PBPD. Additionally, the paper details PBPD activities as documented in a research journal, providing a comprehensive account of the developmental process.

Through a cross-institutional partnership, two middle school general educators participated in PBPD for SRSD for 30 h across five years. Their engagement with PBPD progressed from initial introduction and implementation to facilitating PBPD for SRSD among peers and at the national level. Over time, the most consistently enacted SRSD action was “memorize it,” while actions such as “discuss it,” “support it” and “independent performance” showed greater variability. Both educators consistently praised SRSD and sought continued PBPD engagement over the five years.

Our case example is the first five-year analysis of PBPD for SRSD among general middle school educators, highlighting the benefits and challenges of adopting evidence-based writing instruction. Our example emphasizes the need for continuous and focused professional development in areas crucial for student success, including self-regulation, prewriting strategies and techniques for fostering independent performance. Moreover, the two middle school educators’ critical feedback is invaluable for refining PBPD for SRSD. This work also enriches professional development schools (PDS) literature by offering effective strategies to support middle school teachers in developing a vibrant writing community, a cornerstone for student advancement in writing.

Struggling writers and students with disabilities tend to have difficulties with multiple aspects of the writing process. Therefore, in this chapter, we describe Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD; Harris, Graham, Mason, & Friedlander, 2008). SRSD is a writing intervention with extensive research demonstrating its effectiveness for improving the writing quality of struggling writers and students with disabilities when implemented by both teachers and researchers in a variety of educational settings. We also describe an ineffective writing practice, stand-alone grammar instruction. Although this type of grammar instruction is explicit, it is removed from an authentic writing context, and decades of research have demonstrated its negative effects on students’ writing quality. We close the chapter with recommendations for future research on SRSD as well as general suggestions for teachers who provide writing instruction to struggling writers and students with disabilities.

Relatively limited attention has been paid to the academic needs of students with emotional and behavioral difficulties. Effective interventions are needed to support these students academically, behaviorally, and socially. The purpose of the concurrent studies reported here was to investigate the effectiveness of academic support in writing for fourth- and fifth-grade students (six boys, two girls) and second- and third-grade students (seven boys, one girl) with writing and behavioral difficulties. The Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) approach was implemented as a tier-2 intervention within a comprehensive, integrated three-tiered model of prevention including academic-, behavioral-, and social-skills components. Students learned an on-demand writing strategy for their state writing-competency test. Dependent measures included number of story writing elements, total number of words written, and writing quality. Fourth- and fifth-grade students who completed the intervention improved in total number of story elements. There were mixed results for the total number of words written and writing quality. Second- and third-grade students did not improve their total number of story elements, total words written, or writing quality. Students in both studies scored the intervention favorably, while there were mixed reactions from teachers. Findings, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed. Implications for the construct of evidence-based practice (EBP) are also explored, including concerns regarding frequent assessment of writing throughout intervention regardless of stage of instruction in the SRSD model.

The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) – a platform by which senior leaders, with the help of consultants, can have an honest, collective, and public conversation about their organization's alignment with espoused strategy and values. The research has identified a syndrome of six silent barriers to effectiveness and a dynamic theory of organizational effectiveness. Empirical evidence from the 20-year study demonstrates that SFP always enables truth to speak to power safely, and in a majority of cases enables senior teams to transform silent barriers into strengths, realign their organization's design and strategic management process with strategy and values, and in a few cases employ SFP as an ongoing learning and governance process. Implications for organization and leadership development and corporate governance are discussed.

An exploratory study was undertaken to examine the implementation of strategy instruction in persuasive writing with a class of 10 adolescent students with severe emotional/behavioral disabilities (EBD). Several learner characteristics were observed to interact with curriculum and instructional variables. Modifications were made, on an ongoing basis, to respond to these student characteristics. After approximately four months of instruction, findings indicated that all students had mastered the components of effective persuasive essay writing, and performed competently on criterion writing measures, greatly different from performance at the beginning of instruction. Although the design of this investigation does not allow for definitive causal explanations, insights were gained regarding the interaction between EBD characteristics and strategy instruction. Implications for further research are discussed.

Adolescent students with disabilities often struggle with completing writing tasks efficiently. Until recently, most research regarding writing efficiency or fluency has examined production skills such as handwriting with young writers or examined how to use measures of fluency to assess student performance. In this chapter, 10 studies that directly address the impact of instruction on adolescents' writing fluency will be reviewed. Findings indicated that when teacher modeling and structured practice was provided for writing within a time limit, students' writing improved in the number of ideas or text parts written and in holistic quality. When measured, improvement generalized to a standardized writing fluency test. Implications for future research are noted.

This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language.

In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing instruction. SRSI was adapted from the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model (MacArthur et al., 2015). The SRSD model includes self-regulation writing strategies, text and genre knowledge and think-aloud modeling. Findings allowed for a comparison of TSI and SRSI, in which organization knowledge does not need to be taught using SRSD methods. Measures of writing outcomes, including writing quality and summarization of main ideas, were administered after a one-month intervention.

Results revealed that, compared with traditional instruction, the TSI and SRSI groups each exhibited better writing outcomes. Compared with the traditional instruction group, each technique had a unique impact: SRSI on writing quality, and TSI on main ideas included in written summaries. Linguistic and textual analyses of students’ writing revealed that the TSI and SRSI group learners both demonstrated high syntactic complexity, content organization and lexical variation in their compositions.

The present study provides empirical evidence that explicit teaching of SRSI writing strategies or TSI can be implemented effectively and elicit gains in elementary school L2 learners’ written output. A clear division does not exist between self-regulated writing strategies and text structure knowledge; the two techniques should be complementary, as suggested in the earlier SRSD model.

Classroom-based research has addressed the need to enhance self-regulated capacity in writing. However, writing has become more challenging for primary school learners. In addition, writing is a cognitively demanding process. The plethora of processes involved in writing may be one of the factors that caused difficulties in writing. Thus, writing proficiency relies on the development of text structure knowledge and the fostering of self-regulation capabilities.

This chapter provides a descriptive review of recent intervention research practices intended to improve the literacy skills of students with emotional or behavioral disabilities (EBD). A systematic search procedure identified 21 investigations that had been published in the past five years. These studies are described within the categories of peer-mediated literacy interventions, reading interventions, and writing interventions. Generally, it has been found that such practices as peer mediation, direct instruction (DI), cognitive text mapping, and writing strategy instruction including the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model have led to substantial improvement in the literacy skills of students with EBD. These strategies were apparently successful because they served generally to focus student attention and to provide cognitive models for executing literacy tasks. Implications for practice and future research are provided.

Writing, as a critical academic skill, is receiving national attention – joining the ranks of reading, mathematics, and science. The focus on increased writing performance standards for all students has implications for students with learning disabilities (LD), as these students are most likely to struggle with basic writing skills, and with expressing their ideas and demonstrating knowledge through written expression. Fortunately, research-based practices have been established for teaching students with LD across writing dimensions. In this chapter, instructional approaches for writing instruction, and current and future trends for addressing standards, are described.

Many students in the United States struggle to achieve proficiency in writing. Writing is an important skill to develop, as it is a way for students to communicate what they know and integrate knowledge and critical thinking skills. A lack of writing proficiency can have a significant impact on academic performance in secondary school and on postsecondary outcomes. Improving writing instruction requires theoretically sound, scientifically validated teaching practices, including assessments and instructional methods. It also requires that teachers are well prepared to implement such practices, including using assessment data to tailor instructional methods to meet the needs of students who experience significant writing difficulties. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of advances in research and practice related to validated teaching practices designed to improve the writing outcomes of students with intensive needs, and to describe an innovative way to prepare and support teachers to implement such practices.