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Evidence-Based Writing Instruction is Crucial to Superintendents Under Pressure

The just-released 2025 edition of 2025 American Superintendent Study: Mid‑Decade Update from AASA paints a clear picture: leading a school district today is more complex, demanding, and high-stakes than ever before.

Finance, staffing, safety, politics, all these factors combine to put enormous pressure on district leaders. Yet, what stands out most in the data is how committed superintendents remain to their fundamental mission: ensuring that every child receives a high-quality education.

For educators and advocates of evidence-based writing instruction, these findings reinforce a powerful truth: classic models of piecemeal curriculum adoption or short-term interventions are increasingly unsuited for the realities of districts today. What districts need is a writing framework that’s research-aligned, sustainable, easy to implement, and built to relieve burden rather than add to it. That’s exactly where SRSD Online comes in.

Below, I walk through key findings from the AASA study, what they reveal about the current state of U.S. public education administration, and why SRSD Online is uniquely positioned to address those needs.

What the AASA Study Reveals

1. The Superintendent Role Is Growing Wider and Heavier

According to the study, the job of a superintendent now demands more than ever: today’s district leaders must possess a range of skills as communicators, coalition-builders, strategic managers, instructional advocates, and civic leaders, all while devising an overarching strategy to meet these diverse demands. 

They juggle budgets and staffing. They manage safety concerns and community expectations. They balance politics, varying stakeholder agendas, public trust, and, at the core, academic quality and equity for students, including those with learning disabilities. 

In short, superintendents are stretched thin. They don’t have time to craft complex curricula, reinvent writing instruction frameworks, or launch multiple pilot programs.

2. Financial Pressure Is the Dominant Concern

Of all stressors reported, financial and budget issues took the top spot. For many leaders, financial constraints dominate their time and hinder their ability to launch or sustain new initiatives. 

Meanwhile, many districts face shrinking resources, competing mandates, and increased demands for safety, mental-health supports, and community engagement, all under tight budgets.

3. Staffing, Politics, and Community Demands Multiply Complexity

Leaders now routinely confront challenges related to staffing shortages, turnover, recruitment pressures, students’ needs, safety and security demands, and increasing political controversy around curriculum, equity, and community backlash. 

At the same time, superintendents report that the job remains meaningful; many find the greatest satisfaction in seeing students grow and succeed through effective instructional strategies. According to the study, nearly 89% of respondents said they are “satisfied or very satisfied” with their role, even under pressure. Still, the broader context shows that school leaders can no longer rely on one-size-fits-all approaches to curriculum or instruction.

4. Districts, Especially Small or Resource-Limited Ones, Need Solutions That Don’t Add Work

Given all the competing demands (financial, administrative, community, political), many districts cannot afford to support heavy curriculum development or complicated PD initiatives.

For small or rural districts, especially, central office staff may be minimal or non-existent; the superintendent might wear multiple hats, functioning as an independent leader in various capacities. The study notes that superintendents vary widely in their day-to-day responsibilities depending on district size, community context, and resources. 

In that reality, any new program must be easy to adopt, low-overhead, and manageable at the school or teacher level, not reliant on district-level curriculum departments that many districts lack.

What Districts Need Now (And What SRSD Online Offers)

Drawing on those findings, here are what superintendents and districts most need, and how Self-Regulated Strategy Development from SRSD Online meets those needs head-on.

A Simple, Low-Burden Implementation Strategy

Given how stretched leaders and central offices are, schools require a framework that doesn’t demand heavy district-level coordination or staffing. Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) courses and one-on-one mentoring from SRSD Online are ideally suited for exactly this.

• SRSD’s effective writing strategies and streamlined writing process make it an ideal strategy for educational development.
• Teachers receive explicit training and tools; districts don’t need to invest in creating materials.
• Ongoing coaching and support can be managed within existing staffing models.

By offering a turnkey system, SRSD Online reduces load, not adds to it.

High Value, Cost-Conscious, Sustainable Instructional Investment

In an era when budgets dominate conversation, districts want high ROI, interventions that will last, not temporary “pilot-and-drop” programs. SRSD Online provides a long-term investment, not a fleeting fad.

Once teachers complete the self-paced course and internalize the approach, they carry SRSD writing instruction forward. Classroom implementation does not require annual license renewals or expensive re-training. And if they want to review a lesson or the materials, everything is right with them in the online course.

That means districts get enduring value and avoid constantly allocating scarce funds to reinvention.

Equity and Quality for Every Student Regardless of District Size or Resources

SRSD Online levels the playing field. Because it doesn’t require a large curriculum office or extensive resources, even under-resourced districts or small/rural schools can enhance student engagement and provide high-quality, evidence-based writing instruction.

This aligns strongly with superintendents’ moral commitment, which was noted in the AASA study, to high-quality education for all students. 

Whether a district is large, small, urban, or rural, SRSD Online provides a stable, research-based path forward.

Stability Amid Administrative, Political, and Social Pressure

With growing stress related to politics, community tensions, and external pressures, especially around curriculum, equity, and social issues, districts need stable, evidence-based instructional frameworks.

SRSD’s strength lies in its grounding in decades of research (the work of Dr. Karen Harris and Dr. Steve Graham) and its clarity in approach. That makes it defensible, transparent, and resistant to being spun into controversy or misused opportunistically.

When communities ask, “Why this writing program?”, SRSD offers a clear, evidence-based answer.

Writing Instruction Also Improves Reading Outcomes

One crucial finding is often overlooked in district literacy conversations: effective writing instruction supports reading comprehension. SRSD does not treat reading and writing as separate initiatives. It connects them through a shared, evidence-based instructional framework.

Research consistently shows that SRSD writing instruction supports stronger writing and contributes to measurable gains in reading comprehension.

“Writing more makes students better readers. Reading more makes students better writers. Teaching them together multiplies the benefits.”
Adapted from Steve Graham’s research on integrated reading and writing instruction

What the Research Shows

Across multiple meta-analyses led by Steve Graham and colleagues, integrated reading and writing instruction has produced statistically significant gains in both areas.

Research findings show that:

• Writing more frequently improves reading comprehension, with an average effect size of 0.35, a meaningful gain for classroom instruction.
• Writing about reading, such as summarizing, analyzing, or responding to texts, improves reading comprehension by 0.37 on standardized assessments and 0.50 on classroom measures.
• Teaching text structure and the writing process improves reading comprehension by 0.20–0.27.
• Instruction in sentence construction and spelling strengthens reading outcomes, with effects as high as 0.66.

SRSD strategies such as POW+TREE and TIDE make thinking visible. As students plan, organize, and reflect in writing, they strengthen the comprehension skills they rely on when reading complex texts.

Effect sizes reflect meta-analytic averages. Results vary by grade level, context, and implementation fidelity.

Leadership-Friendly: Empowers Teachers, Lightens Central Load

Because SRSD is designed to be teacher-implemented and internally sustained, district leadership doesn’t need to micromanage or rebuild instruction every few years. Leaders can focus their energies elsewhere (budget, policy, safety, community trust) while trusting that writing instruction is consistent, high-quality, and supported.

“SRSD Online has given our district a clear, ready-to-use writing framework that actually moves student learning. It works in real schools, even without big curriculum teams, and it respects our budget and our teachers’ time. This isn’t another program that fades after a year. It’s a sustainable approach that strengthens practice across classrooms and builds capacity from the inside out.”

Shelly Ferro, Curriculum Director

That aligns perfectly with what superintendents told AASA they need: scalable systems that don’t require constant oversight.

Scenarios Where SRSD Online Adds Real Value

To make this more concrete, here are three situations described by superintendents in the AASA study that illustrate exactly where SRSD fits, and why it matters.

Scenario 1: A Small Rural District with a Tight Budget and Limited Staff

A superintendent of a small district faces budget pressures, staffing shortages, and limited central office capacity. They want better writing instruction but worry about the cost, time, staff overhead, and the development of effective strategies.

What SRSD Online brings: A self-paced course for teachers, minimal overhead for administration, sustainable implementation, and high-quality writing instruction, all within the district’s tight constraints.

Scenario 2: A District Facing Turnover, Staff Burnout, and Instructional Instability

The shifting political or community pressures leave instruction inconsistent. The district has tried “short-term fixes,” but nothing sticks.

What SRSD Online brings: A stable, research-aligned writing framework that remains in the school regardless of who comes or goes. Teachers and coaches trained in SRSD carry the program forward.

Scenario 3: A District Seeking Equity but With Varied School Resources

Leadership wants every student to receive excellent writing instruction, ensuring that all students, regardless of their school’s resources (some well-staffed, others under-resourced), have consistent access to quality education.

What SRSD online brings: A universal solution because SRSD doesn’t require an extensive infrastructure; all schools (wealthy and under-resourced alike) can adopt it. It delivers equity in writing instruction across the district.

Now Is the Moment for Self-Regulated Strategy Development 

The findings of the 2025 AASA study show us that school leadership is at a crossroads. Demand is rising from budgets, staffing challenges, changing societal expectations. Yet amid all this, educational leaders remain deeply committed to student learning and equity.

What’s needed is a writing solution that understands their reality and enhances self-regulation through self-regulated strategy development. Something that reduces load, increases consistency, and aligns with evidence without adding new burdens.

SRSD Online has a design for precisely this moment.

• It meets districts where they are: whether urban, rural, large, small.
• It offers a cost-effective, sustainable path forward.
• It guarantees fidelity to the research of Harris & Graham.
• It supports teacher growth and student outcomes without requiring heavy central office support.

In short, SRSD online does not just provide an evidence-based writing program; it’s a strategic response to what superintendents are telling us they need.

A Call to Leaders: Prioritize Instructional Systems That Work

If you lead a district or advise one, consider this: now is the time to move beyond initiatives that demand heavy lift, uncertain outcomes, or short-lived impact.

The 2025 AASA Superintendent Study has made it clear: leadership bandwidth is limited; fiscal pressures are real; districts need sustainable solutions in instruction.

SRSD offers a clear pathway forward with effective writing strategies.

Let’s help more districts discover that writing instruction doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive, or ephemeral. It can be simple, research-aligned, equitable, and built to last. If we commit to systems that meet the needs of both students and leaders.

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SRSD Online and the Arizona Educational Foundation (AEF) have been awarded a major grant to lead a groundbreaking statewide initiative aimed at strengthening literacy instruction in elementary schools through evidence-based practices and innovative artificial intelligence tools.

The $11.5 million project, Pathways to Evidence-Based Literacy, will be funded under the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) expansion grant initiative – a U.S. Department of Education program. Pathways seeks to broaden the use of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). SRSD is one of the most rigorously researched and impactful writing instruction models in the world. The project will specifically address a longstanding challenge in education: helping teachers successfully integrate evidence-based practices into real-world classroom schedules and curricula.

AEF and partners SRSD Online and American Institutes for Research (AIR) will collaborate on a statewide initiative to provide SRSD professional development to instructional coaches and teachers. Over the course of the grant term, the team will develop an AI-powered integration course designed to help educators embed SRSD seamlessly into daily instruction—removing barriers that have historically slowed the scale of evidence-based literacy practices.

Over five years, the project will reach more than 75 elementary schools, while the team rigorously evaluates processes and outcomes through a large-scale randomized controlled trial. AEF will serve as project manager; SRSD Online will serve as implementation and development lead; and AIR will serve as independent evaluator.

“This grant positions Arizona as a national leader in literacy innovation,” said Kim Graham, CEO of the Arizona Educational Foundation. “By combining strong evidence, professional learning, and AI-enabled supports, we are helping educators overcome the ‘last mile’ challenge of implementation—so students benefit where it matters most: in the classroom.”

“We know SRSD is powerful. With this grant, we endeavor to carve out a path through which schools can integrate and sustain it, and through which students can become skilled, confident writers for life,” adds Dr. April Camping, Research Director at SRSD Online.

In addition to improving writing outcomes for students, the project will generate open-access tools, policy briefs, and professional learning resources to support replication across districts and states. All grant-funded materials will be made publicly available, extending the project’s impact far beyond Arizona.

For districts wishing to participate in this initiative or for general inquiries, contact Kim Graham, Chief Executive Officer at in**@************on.org.

For general inquiries, contact su*****@********ne.com.

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About SRSD Online: SRSD Online empowers educators to transform students’ writing and learning through Self-Regulated Strategy Development: one of the most researched and most effective approaches to writing instruction. Through accessible, high-impact online courses and ongoing coaching, SRSD Online helps schools build internal expertise, sustain improvement over time, and ensure every student gains the tools they need to think, write, and learn more effectively.

About the Arizona Educational Foundation: Since 1983, the Arizona Educational Foundation (AEF) has served at the frontlines of Arizona’s PreK–12 public education system, celebrating excellence and addressing challenges facing schools, educators, and students. Founded by former Arizona State Superintendent of Public Education Carolyn Warner, AEF is the only statewide education foundation charged with elevating Arizona education by showcasing schools and educators that exemplify best practices. The 11 statewide programs and initiatives AEF provides serve as critical interventions that stabilize schools, build leadership pipelines, and expand opportunities for students and districts who too often go without. Public education is the heart of a community, and AEF remains focused on ensuring every student, in every community, has access to the resources, educators, and opportunities required to succeed.

About American Institutes for Research®: The American Institutes for Research® (AIR) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducts behavioral and social science research and delivers technical assistance to solve some of the most urgent challenges in the U.S. and around the world. From education to workforce development, to healthcare service and delivery, community safety and well-being, nutrition, agriculture, and food security, our work drives toward practical solutions that improve lives for families and communities. We do this work because we are dedicated to closing gaps to opportunity and access across the lifespan. At AIR, we know that improving outcomes begins with systems that work for everyone, so we lead with expertise, follow the evidence, and never stop drawing new connections to fulfill our mission.

What the Data Shows and How SRSD Helps Schools Respond

Across the country, many educators worry about declining or stagnant literacy performance. Reading and writing scores have continued to drop in many states, and achievement gaps are wider than they were a decade ago. These trends did not start during the pandemic. Also concerning is that writing is not assessed at the national level with the same consistency as reading. The most recent national writing assessment took place in 2017, but the data still have yet to be shared. Schools now face an urgent challenge: students need stronger support in both reading and writing.

To help address the need for quality instruction, teachers should be supported with quality PD to teach reading and writing well. Research offers strong evidence that writing instruction plays a key role in improving both writing and reading outcomes, and the opposite is also true – reading instruction can improve reading and writing outcomes. We know that both need dedicated time, balance, and explicit instruction.

Reading scores have declined across grade levels

NAEP Reading results for grades 4 and 8 show steady drops since 2012.
According to the 2022 NAEP Reading Report Card:

• Grade 4 reading scores fell 3 points from 2019 to 2022.
• Grade 8 reading scores fell 3 points over the same period.
• Both grade levels show long-term stagnation or decline compared with earlier years (NAEP Reading, 2022).

These declines reflect more than a short-term disruption. They show a pattern that began before the pandemic and continued after it.

The lowest-performing students lost the most ground

NAEP also reports results by percentile. Students in the bottom quartile experienced the sharpest declines:

• At the 10th percentile, reading scores fell significantly more than those of higher-performing peers.
• The gap between high and low achievers has widened over the past decade.
  (Long-Term Trend 2022)
  

This widening gap shows that students who struggled with reading before the pandemic were the most affected by instructional disruptions and inconsistent literacy practices.

Reading levels for 9-year-olds fell to the lowest point in decades

In the NAEP Long-Term Trend assessment for 9-year-olds, reading scores dropped 5 points between 2020 and 2022, the largest decline since the 1980s. NAEP notes that average reading performance for this age group is now similar to levels last seen in the early 1990s.

This decline signals that early readers need more structured support in foundational skills, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Writing performance has also declined

NAEP’s most recent national writing assessment took place in 2017, however the data have not yet been released, which is a significant challenge for educators and researchers. In 2011, NAEP results showed that

• Fewer students could write clear, organized explanations or arguments than prior years.
• Students struggled with sentence construction, organization, and elaboration.
• Many students had difficulty communicating their ideas clearly and coherently.

Although NAEP has not released a full writing assessment since 2011, state-level writing results and national literacy indicators show continued declines.

Combined, these data reveal a consistent pattern: students are struggling with the skills that support comprehension and written expression.

The broader picture

Across these measures, NAEP’s findings point to the same conclusion:

• Students need more structured support with vocabulary and comprehension.
• Many students lack strategies for understanding complex texts.
• Writing performance mirrors reading performance, showing gaps in planning, organizing ideas, and producing connected text.
• Teachers can benefit from clear tools for teaching writing, and PD to support high quality instruction.

These patterns do not reflect a lack of effort on the part of teachers. They reflect the need for stronger systems and more explicit approaches to reading and writing instruction.

Why the Persistent Challenges? Students need more explicit instruction

Reading and writing are complex skills. Students learn them more effectively when teachers model their thinking, guide practice, and use clear routines. Decades of research from both the science of reading and the science of writing show that explicit instruction strengthens comprehension, vocabulary development, and writing quality.

A major review of writing research by Graham, Gillespie, and McKeown (2013) found that strategy instruction, modeling, and guided practice lead to strong, consistent improvements in student writing. The authors also noted that explicit writing instruction supports broader literacy growth by helping students understand text structure, generate ideas, and revise with purpose.

When classrooms move away from consistent explicit teaching, such as reducing modeling or relying heavily on open-ended tasks, students lose opportunities to learn the mental processes behind skilled reading and writing. These gaps accumulate over time and contribute to the literacy challenges many schools face today.

The lowest-performing students were the most vulnerable

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that the largest declines occurred among the lowest-performing students, especially those at the 10th and 25th percentiles.

These students often entered school with weaker vocabulary, limited background knowledge, and fewer strategies for understanding complex text. When instruction became inconsistent or less structured, these students fell even further behind, widening the achievement gap.

This pattern appears across years of NAEP data:

• High-performing students remained mostly stable.
• Students with early reading or writing difficulties experienced the largest declines.

This reinforces what many educators see in classrooms: students who need the most support are the ones most affected by changes in literacy instruction.

Why Writing Matters for Literacy Growth

Writing instruction plays a major role in improving reading achievement. The science of writing, supported by decades of research, shows clear benefits:

• Writing about text improves reading comprehension (Graham & Hebert, 2010).
• Explicit teaching of writing strategies helps students organize ideas, build vocabulary, and understand text structure.
• Writing develops critical thinking, content knowledge, and a deeper understanding.

When students write regularly, they learn to slow down, process information, and explain their thinking. These skills support reading growth at every grade level.

This is why declining reading rates and weak writing instruction often appear together. Strong writing instruction is not an “addition” to literacy. It is a central part of it.

Why SRSD Works: What the Research Shows

SRSD uses clear, explicit instruction

SRSD gives teachers a simple, predictable way to teach the writing process. Teachers model their thinking out loud so students can see how writers make decisions. Students learn each step of planning, drafting, and revising. They then practice these steps with support until they can write independently.

This approach comes straight from the research. Decades of research show that explicit instruction, modeling, and guided practice consistently improve students’ writing outcomes across grade levels.

Research:

• Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing Next 
  • Strategy instruction produced the strongest gains of any writing practice tested.
• Graham, S., McKeown, D., Kiuhara, S., & Harris, K. (2012).
  • Meta-analysis of writing instruction for students in elementary grades.

SRSD builds self-regulation

SRSD teaches students how to manage themselves as writers. They set goals, use positive self-talk, check their progress, and monitor their strategies. These routines help them stay focused and approach writing with more confidence.

Self-regulation is a key factor in SRSD’s effectiveness. Research shows that when students learn to manage their attention, emotions, and strategies, they write better and learn more.

Research:

• Harris, K. R., Graham, S., & Adkins, M. (2015).
  • Practice-based professional development for SRSD increased student use of self-regulation strategies.
• Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Mason, L. (2005).
  • Improving writing performance,teaching, planning, monitoring, and self-talk routines.

SRSD supports students

One of the most consistent findings in SRSD research is that all students can make the strong gains in their writing. This includes students with learning disabilities, ADHD, executive function challenges, and students who struggle with writing stamina or organization.

SRSD works because it breaks writing into small, manageable steps and gives students explicit tools for each part of the process. It also supports motivation, which is often a major challenge for students who struggle.

Research:

• Harris, K. R., Graham, S., & Mason, L. (2006). Improving the Writing, Knowledge, and Motivation of Struggling Young Writers. SRSD produced large effects for students with learning disabilities.
  
• Ray, A., Graham, S., Harris, K. R., et al. (2024). The writing of students with LD and a meta-analysis of SRSD writing intervention studies: Redux

SRSD is practical for teachers

Teachers need tools that work in real classrooms. SRSD provides:

• Clear lesson sequences
• Sample think-alouds
• Progress-monitoring tools
• Ready-to-use student materials
• Models, exemplars, and videos that show what instruction looks like
• A predictable structure that reduces planning time

Teachers often say SRSD brings clarity and consistency to their writing block. They know exactly how to support students from the moment they begin the lesson through independent writing.

Research:

• McKeown, D., Brindle, M., & Harris, K. (2021). Professional development for evidence-based SRSD writing instruction: Elevating fourth grade outcomes
  https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2020.1825052
• Harris, K. R., Graham, S., Brindle, M., & Sandmel, K. (2009). Tier 1, Teacher-Implemented Self-Regulated Strategy Development for Students With and Without Behavioral Challenges

• Without Behavioral Challenges

What This Means for Schools

Schools need a writing approach that is clear, practical, and backed by strong evidence. Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) gives teachers a predictable way to teach writing that works with any curriculum and supports all learners. More than 100 studies show positive outcomes for elementary, middle, and high school students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities, struggling writers, and students with attention or executive function needs.

SRSD improves writing and strengthens reading by helping students learn to think, plan, and monitor their work. These skills help them understand text structure, summarize more effectively, and build vocabulary. As students learn explicit strategies and self-regulation routines, they grow more confident and independent in both writing and reading.

For leaders, SRSD creates consistency across classrooms. Teachers use the same routines, language, and expectations, which helps students move smoothly from grade to grade. For coaches, SRSD provides a shared framework for modeling lessons, supporting teachers, and monitoring progress. And for students who struggle, SRSD offers a clear, reliable path to success that fits within any school’s existing curriculum.

SRSD does not replace what schools already use. Instead, it is a framework that strengthens the instruction inside the curriculum and lays a long-term foundation for literacy growth.

How SRSD Online Helps Teachers Use SRSD With Confidence

SRSD Online provides schools with a comprehensive training and support pathway. The platform includes:

• fully asynchronous teacher training
• step-by-step modeled lessons
• real classroom videos
• student-facing materials
• coaching tools
• facilitator and administrator courses
• schoolwide and districtwide implementation plans

Teachers do not need to guess how to use SRSD. They can watch examples, practice with guidance, and build confidence over time.

Schools also gain a system that supports consistency. Every teacher learns the same framework. Every student receives the same structure and language. This promotes equity and helps schools make steady literacy gains.

A Stronger Path Forward

Schools can take control to improve literacy performance. The data is clear. Students need more structure. Teachers need clearer, explicit, evidence-based guidance. Leaders need a plan that integrates reading and writing in a practical, scalable, and research-based way.

SRSD offers that path. It provides teachers with explicit writing routines. It helps students learn how to plan, organize, and revise. It builds the self-regulation skills students need to stay engaged and make sense of complex text. When schools use SRSD, writing improves. Confidence grows.

SRSD Online provides the support schools need to put this approach into daily practice. Teachers receive modeled lessons, classroom videos, coaching tools, and ready-made materials. Leaders receive clear implementation plans. Coaches receive systems that make their work easier and more consistent. Everyone works from the same shared language and structure, which strengthens instruction across classrooms.

The way forward is not more programs or more disconnected initiatives. The way forward is clearer instruction, stronger systems, and a shared framework that supports teachers in teaching and students in learning. SRSD brings that clarity.

Declining literacy rates present a real challenge, but they are not permanent. When schools teach writing explicitly and give students strategies they can use across subjects, literacy improves. Students write better. They read better. They think more clearly.

With the right support, schools can reverse current trends. They can build stronger writers and stronger readers. SRSD gives them a proven way to begin.

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Transforming Australian Classrooms with Effective Writing Strategies

Writing is not just an academic skill: it is how students learn, think, and share their ideas with the world. In Australia, as in many countries, writing outcomes have often lagged behind reading. Teachers have asked: How do we help students become confident writers? How do we prepare them for NAPLAN and beyond?

For more than 40 years, researchers have been refining an evidence-based approach to writing instruction that has powerful student impacts. The approach, known as Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), was developed by Dr. Karen Harris, and has helped teachers worldwide, Australia included.

What Is SRSD?

At its core, SRSD is a way of teaching writing that combines two things:

1. Explicit Writing Strategies – Students learn clear steps for planning, organizing, drafting, and revising their writing. Strategies like TREE (opinion), TIDE (informative), and C-SPACE (narrative) give them a structure they can use again and again.
2. Self-Regulation Skills – Students learn to set goals, monitor their progress, use positive self-talk, and reflect on their work.

This mix of writing strategies and self-regulation makes SRSD unique. Students don’t just produce better writing — they also become more confident, motivated, and independent as learners.

How SRSD Came to Australia

SRSD spread beyond the United States as researchers and educators in other countries looked for effective, evidence-based approaches. Australia became one of the first countries outside the U.S. to explore SRSD.

By the early 2000s, Australian teachers and literacy researchers were paying attention to SRSD because:

• NAPLAN (the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy) created new pressures for schools to improve writing outcomes.
• The structured literacy movement in Australia focused on explicit instruction, which aligned with SRSD’s clear routines.

Importantly, universities such as Australian Catholic University (ACU) sought to connect with world-leading literacy researchers including SRSD creator Dr. Karen Harris and writing scholar Dr. Steve Graham. Both were named Research Professorial Fellows in the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education

Australian Schools and SRSD

Over the last two decades, SRSD has become a significant part of the conversation in Australia’s writing instruction, particularly in the context of persuasive writing.

• Teacher blogs and conference reports show that Harris and Graham have presented workshops in Sydney and Brisbane.
• Australian literacy reviews, such as those by EdResearch Australia, include SRSD when discussing high-quality writing instruction.
• ACU’s Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education has highlighted SRSD as part of its commitment to evidence-based literacy practices.

Teachers in Australia who adopt SRSD often report the same thing: it helps students succeed on NAPLAN, aligns well with educational policy, and gives them the confidence to see themselves as writers.

Why SRSD Fits Australian Classrooms

SRSD aligns with several major priorities in Australian education:

1. NAPLAN Preparation – SRSD’s structured strategies map directly onto the writing genres tested in NAPLAN (persuasive, informative, narrative).
2. Structured Literacy – Australian schools are increasingly adopting explicit, structured approaches. SRSD is explicit, replicable, and easy to integrate into existing programs.
3. Equity and Inclusion – SRSD is effective for all learners, including students with learning difficulties, multilingual students, and high achievers. This makes it valuable in diverse Australian classrooms.
4. Teacher Support – SRSD is not just about students. It also gives teachers a clear roadmap, professional learning options, and coaching support.

Research Recognition in Australia

SRSD is featured in ACU’s Self-Regulated Strategy Development in Writing and Reading resources, showing direct relevance for Australian teachers. Further, Australian literacy reviews continue to point out that high-quality writing research is limited in Australia — making international models like SRSD especially valuable.

Looking Ahead

SRSD has been in Australia for decades, but its role is likely to grow even stronger in the years to come. With increasing demand for evidence-based teaching and professional development, more schools are turning to approaches like SRSD.

Karen Harris and Steve Graham have already laid the foundation through their fellowship ties, presentations, and research collaborations in Australia. Now, Australian teachers and leaders have the opportunity to take that foundation and build a culture of writing success for every student.

• Conclusion

The story of SRSD in Australia is part of a much bigger global movement. From its roots in the United States to its growth in Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and Australia, SRSD has always been about one thing: giving teachers and students the tools they need to succeed.

For Australian educators, the message is clear: SRSD is not just another program. It is one of the most researched writing approaches in the world, earning it the label of evidence-based practice. And thanks to the leadership of Karen Harris and Steve Graham, Australia is already part of the SRSD story.

Learn more about bringing SRSD to your Australian school: SRSD Online

Sources

• Australian Catholic University – Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Self-regulated strategy development in writing and reading
• ACU News: ILSTE Fellow is Regents Professor (2021)
• ACU News: Prestigious award for ILSTE’s Professor Graham (2021)
• ACU Research Bank – Steve Graham profile
• ASU Profile (Steve Graham CV) – Our Writing Research, presentation to ACU, Brisbane (2014)
• Association for Psychological Science – Fostering Budding Writers (mentions Harris as ACU Fellow)
• EdResearch Australia – Writing and Writing Instruction (includes SRSD)
• OZLitTeacher Blog – Writing Research Workshop with Graham and Harris

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Strategies for Individualized Writing Instruction

Students bring a variety of skills and experiences to the writing classroom. Some students arrive writing sentences with strong vocabulary, while others are still learning to form letters and words. Many sit somewhere in the middle. Teachers see this range every day, yet they are still expected to address each learner’s needs through effective teaching methods and help them make progress in the learning process. Often, this all takes place with limited time and limited curriculum support, in learning environments where student engagement can be a challenge.

We recently hosted a live Zoom conversation on our Facebook page between educators and Dr. Karen Harris, creator of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) and a leading researcher in the science of writing. Dr. Harris spoke directly to the challenge of developing content that meets the diverse needs of students. She explained that differentiation does not mean 25 different lesson plans. It means understanding what students can already do, knowing what each group needs next, and helping them move forward with clear, strategic instruction.

This blog brings together the key ideas Karen shared. It shows how SRSD, when applied within an effective learning environment, enhances the learning process through effective classroom strategies and makes the approach to differentiation both possible and manageable in real classrooms.

Watch the entire video discussion by clicking her image:

Start With Formative Assessment: “A Wealth of Information”

Dr. Harris began with one of the most important tools for differentiation: formative assessment. In SRSD, teachers collect student writing samples before instruction begins. This is a baseline, not a test.

Teachers should carefully consider how they introduce this step. She warns that many students panic when they hear the word “test,” even in early grades. To alleviate these fears, teachers can try telling students:

“I want to see what you already know. This isn’t for a grade, and only I will see it.”

This simple shift reduces anxiety and leads to more honest writing. That authentic baseline becomes the foundation for understanding each learner.

Once teachers review student samples,teachers can sort them into three manageable groups:

1. Students who already show many of the skills you plan to teach
2. Students performing in a typical grade-level range
3. Students who begin far behind through no fault of their own

The goal is not to label students. The goal is to understand readiness levels so instruction can support each group.

“Practice Makes Progress”

Dr. Harris reminded teachers that the purpose of writing instruction is growth, not perfection. SRSD helps students progress through repeated practice, clear strategies, and gradual release. Some students may write a strong essay early on. Others may only write a few sentences at first. Both groups can grow.

However, students who begin behind often make the largest gains when instruction is explicit and supportive.

But Karen noted a second truth: advanced writers often do not grow as much as they could because they aren’t sufficiently challenged.

Differentiation must lift all learners, those who need heavy scaffolds and those ready for more independent work.

Challenging Strong Writers: “Look at the Next Grade’s Standards”

Karen also shared a simple way to stretch advanced writers: look ahead one grade level.

She encourages teachers to review the next grade’s standards and ask:

• Which skills could some students work toward now?
• How can these goals connect to SRSD strategies my students already use?
• What goals can students select for themselves?

Advanced goals might include:

• adding dialogue in narratives
• using more complex sentences
• adding stronger evidence or facts
• weaving in a single source before the full research process
• trying different hooks or openings

When writers help choose these goals, their ownership increases, and their self-regulation strengthens.

Differentiation Does Not Mean 25 Lesson Plans

Teachers do not need to create a different set of lesson plans  for each child. Instead, Dr. Harris recommends:

• grouping students by similar writing characteristics
• adjusting goals and rubrics for each group
• rotating groups as needs change
• using peer support to extend teacher capacity

Groups should shift across the unit. Some days may work best with mixed-readiness groups. Other days may call for small groups with specific needs.

Differentiated instruction is not about sameness; it is about adopting classroom strategies and teaching methods that ensure meaningful progress for each learner. It is about adapting to different learning styles and ensuring meaningful progress for each learner.

Stations: Built-In Differentiation Inside SRSD

SRSD Online encourages teachers to use stations for guided practice. Karen noted that stations are a natural way to support differentiation.

Examples include:

• a self-talk station for students who need more internal language
• a planning station with a leader modeling POW + TREE
• a revision station where students practice checking specific goals
• mixed-ability pairs working on topic sentences, reasons, or sentence variety

Teachers may assign stations or allow students to choose based on their goals.

Stations keep practice active, focused, and responsive to what each student needs.

What the Research Says About Differentiation

The ideas Dr. Harris shared in her conversation line up with what her research team has documented for years. Two studies in particular show how SRSD supports differentiation when teachers receive clear guidance, ongoing support, and chances to reflect on student work:

Making it work: Differentiating Tier Two writing instruction with Self-Regulated Strategy Development in tandem with School-Wide Positive Behavioral Support for second graders.

Illuminating growth and struggles using mixed methods: Practice-based professional development and coaching for differentiating SRSD instruction in writing.

SRSD Can Be Adapted for Different Learners

In this first study, researchers examined how SRSD worked as a Tier 2 intervention in second-grade classrooms where student needs varied widely (Sandmel et al., 2009). Teachers used SRSD alongside school-wide behavioral supports. They modified parts of instruction, materials, and pacing while keeping the core of SRSD intact.

The study showed two important things:

1. SRSD is flexible. Teachers could adjust tasks, supports, and expectations while still delivering the strategy instruction students needed.
2. Students with different readiness levels benefited. Even with adaptations, students made meaningful gains in writing quality and independence.

This research reinforces something Karen often tells teachers: differentiation within SRSD is about adjusting what students practice, how much support they receive, and which goals matter most at a given moment.

Teachers Grow as Differentiators When They Receive Coaching

The second study linked above followed three teachers who implemented SRSD after  practice-based professional development (PBPD) and expert coaching (McKeown et al., 2016). The teachers served diverse groups of students and were learning SRSD for the first time.

The researchers found that:

• At first, teachers were unsure how to differentiate SRSD instruction.
• With coaching, all teachers learned to make whole-class adaptations.
• Some teachers learned to group students more strategically, and vary scaffolds without watering down instruction.

When following an approach rooted in PBPD, teachers have models, feedback, and time to practice. All of this helps improve teacher differentiation, and coaching helps them understand when and how to adjust instruction.

Why This Research Matters for Today’s Classrooms

Differentiation can feel overwhelming, especially in writing, where skill gaps can be wide and student attitudes vary. The research reminds us that teachers do not have to guess. They need:

• clear strategies
• explicit routines
• predictable steps
• and a framework that supports adjustment

SRSD was built for this.
It provides the structure teachers need to teach writing clearly and the flexibility they need to support every learner, from those who enter far behind to those who are ready for more challenges.

Supporting Student Motivation: Breaking the Cycle of Frustration

Motivation is key to learning in any subject. However, Dr. Harris shared that writing enjoyment drops sharply after third grade. Many students report disliking writing by fourth or fifth grade. This often comes from repeated frustration and the pressures of mandated testing

Students have told Karen:

• “You’ll never teach me to write.”
• “I was born this way.”
• “I can’t change.”

But after SRSD instruction, many of these same students show pride and confidence.

Differentiation requires paying attention to how students feel, not just what they can produce. To address this, teachers should:

• watch student emotional responses during lessons
• help students set and track individual goals in simple ways
• support students in developing individualized self-talk
• set students up for successful writing experiences

SRSD already supports this work through self-monitoring, reflection, and goal setting.

Rubrics Should Match Group Goals

Rubrics can support or hinder differentiation depending on how teachers use them, and they should include content that aligns with each group’s specific goals. Dr. Harris encouraged teachers to align rubrics with each group’s goals, not with generic expectations.

A student starting far behind might work toward:

• stating an opinion
• generating at least one reason
• organizing ideas with POW + TREE

An advanced student might work toward:

• varied sentence types
• stronger evidence
• more complex openings

Rubrics help clarify when they align with readiness. They become tools for growth rather than fixed measures of success.

Peer Support: “One of the Most Powerful Differentiation Tools We Have”

Importantly, Karen also emphasized the importance of peer collaboration among learners. Peers can reduce anxiety and help students plan, revise, and understand the writing process more clearly.

Helpful routines include incorporating content to enhance understanding:

1. Peer Prompt Analysis Partners pull apart the prompt before planning.
2. Peer Planning Students talk through POW and make notes for TREE, which allows them to share the cognitive load.
3. Peer Feedback Teach students to praise first, then offer a helpful idea.
4. Peer Leadership Strong writers lead stations or model parts of tasks.

Peer collaboration expands the teacher’s reach and reinforces SRSD strategies.

Use Ongoing Assessments to Adjust Groupings

Differentiation is fluid. Dr. Harris recommends quick “show me what you can do” writing moments during the unit. These are not tests. They are short checks to see where students are.

These check-ins help teachers see:

• new strengths
• lingering gaps
• shifting group needs
• pacing adjustments

This information guides the next instructional moves.

Stage 5: Where Differentiation Matters Most

Stage 5 is for supported writing and often feels challenging. Students begin writing with less direct modeling and more independence, making differentiated instruction essential.

For advanced writers, teachers may give time for independent practice, or ask them to guide peer practice. Teachers should also consider how to:

• raise expectations
• offer more complex prompts
• encourage stronger examples and sentence variety

For writers who need more support, teachers should consider how to:

• slow the release of independent writing responsibility
• revisit steps of the strategies
• offer targeted scaffolds or revised organizers
• use small-group check-ins
• increase peer planning opportunities

Differentiation Creates Opportunity and Equity

Karen closed with a reminder that many students have not had access to the differentiated instruction they need to grow as writers. Differentiation is not an optional step. It is a way to give each student a fair chance to develop their skills and confidence.

SRSD was designed for this exact challenge. Its structure, explicit modeling, strategy instruction, self-regulation, gradual release, targeted rubrics, graphing, and station work, allows teachers to adjust instruction and meet individual student needs.

Differentiation helps every student move forward. SRSD gives teachers a practical way to do it.

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Teachers Deserve Clarity, Not Chaos: What Research Really Says about Effective Writing Instruction

After spending countless hours interviewing educators over the past seven years, I’ve noticed a consistent theme that often goes unspoken: broad theories or big-picture ideas about teaching writing don’t translate into results.

Today’s classrooms are incredibly complex and demanding environments, and teachers face high expectations, limited time, and substantial pressure. With so much at stake, a clear, structured approach to teaching writing is essential.

In countless conversations, teachers describe the modern classroom as increasingly demanding, from testing requirements, data collection, new initiatives layered on existing ones, to rising expectations from families. In this context, structure and clarity aren’t just helpful; they’re essential supports.

And importantly, the research aligns with this need.

The Writing Crisis We Keep Ignoring

Karen Harris and Debra McKeown’s 2022 article “Overcoming Barriers and Paradigm Wars: Powerful Evidence-Based Writing Instruction” opens with a startling truth: most of our students cannot write well enough to meet grade-level expectations. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 24% of students at grades 8 and 12 are proficient writers. That means three out of four students leave school without the writing skills they need to succeed in college, work, or life.

For decades, this number has remained virtually unchanged. Despite countless new initiatives, writing curricula, and rubrics, our students’ writing outcomes have remained stagnant.

That’s not because teachers don’t care about writing. It’s because they’ve been asked to teach one of the most complex cognitive skills with too little guidance, too little time, and too many competing priorities.

Writing isn’t a single skill; it encompasses a range of skills, including planning, organizing, drafting, revising, and regulating one’s own thinking, all of which demand explicit instruction. As Harris and McKeown remind us, effective writing instruction involves far more than assigning a prompt. Students must learn to:

• Evaluate a writing task and determine its purpose and audience.
• Manage their ideas, emotions, and attention during the writing process.
• Set goals, self-monitor, and persist when writing gets hard.
• Draw on vocabulary, background knowledge, and genre conventions simultaneously.

That’s a tall order for a 10-year-old. And an even taller one for a teacher trying to differentiate across 25 students, all while navigating district mandates, pacing guides, and state testing calendars.

Why Writing Is So Complex and Why Teachers Deserve Explicit Support

Writing is not a natural process. Children don’t learn to write by osmosis or through exposure to good books alone. They need to be explicitly taught how to plan, elaborate, organize ideas, and regulate their own thinking as they write.

But here’s the catch: most teachers were never taught essential teaching techniques for writing. Harris and McKeown cite an article by Myers et al. that shows that only 28% of teacher preparation programs in the U.S. include a stand-alone course on writing instruction. For special education programs, that number drops to 10%.

In other words, teachers are being asked to teach a subject for which they were never properly trained.

When we give teachers vague directives like “use a workshop model,” “let students explore their voice,” “balance process and product,” we’re setting them up for frustration. Those phrases sound lovely on paper, but they don’t translate into day-to-day classroom decisions.

Teachers need, and deserve, a roadmap. A model that shows them exactly how to help students think like writers, not just write more words. That’s where evidence-based practices like Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) come in.

The Writing Wars: Process vs. Explicit Instruction

If you’ve been in education long enough, you know about the “reading wars.” However, you might not realize that a similar battle has been brewing in writing instruction for decades, as Harris and McKeown call it, the “paradigm wars.”

On one side are the advocates of process writing or Writers’ Workshop, . On the other hand, there are proponents of explicit strategies instruction. While both approaches extoll a process, regular and frequent writing, student-student and student-teacher interaction, and student decision making, strategies instruction is more explicit. It also follows a more systematic approach than process or writers workshop, and is generally a longer experience from start to finish as students learn to apply the strategies their learning to their writing.

The process movement, inspired by Donald Graves, reminded us that writing is deeply personal and that students need to see themselves as authors. However, even Graves himself admitted that the movement had gone too far. In a 1995 interview, he said, “We tried to do everything in conference. It can’t be done.”

Research confirms his concern. The average effect size for process-based approaches is around 0.34, which is considered a modest gain. In contrast, strategy instruction, like SRSD, can produce effect sizes above 1.0 and sometimes much higher. That’s not a small difference. In educational research, anything above 0.8 is considered a large effect.

Those aren’t just numbers. They represent real, measurable improvement. Students who once dreaded writing are becoming confident, capable authors.

What SRSD Actually Is and Isn’t

SRSD isn’t a curriculum. It’s a framework for teaching writing that blends explicit instruction with metacognitive and motivational supports.

At its core, SRSD is about making the invisible processes of good writing visible. Teachers model exactly how to plan, write, and revise while thinking aloud, showing students the internal dialogue of a writer and incorporating explicit instruction writing strategies.

Students then practice those strategies collaboratively, giving and receiving peer feedback, with scaffolds that are gradually removed as they gain independence. They learn to set goals, use self-talk, monitor their progress, and reflect on their growth.

Critics who call SRSD “robotic” or “teacher-centered” misunderstand it entirely. SRSD isn’t rigid or formulaic. It’s not “fill in the blanks” writing. The research tells a different story: when teachers use SRSD, students not only write better, but they also become more motivated, self-efficacious, and demonstrate greater engagement. They believe in themselves as writers.

And teachers? They report feeling empowered, not constrained. They finally have a clear path to follow.

Teachers Want to Get It Right But the System Makes It Hard

Here’s where the article hits home for me: the biggest barriers to evidence-based writing instruction aren’t philosophical. They’re practical.

Harris and McKeown outline four main obstacles that prevent SRSD and other EBPs from scaling in schools:

1. Lack of effective teacher preparation and PD: Teachers aren’t given the training they need. Even when Professional Development exists, it’s often one-shot and disconnected from classroom practice. In contrast, effective SRSD professional development typically involves hours of modeling, practice, and feedback, not a half-day workshop.
2. Curriculum adoption processes: Most district curriculum committees still prioritize factors like cost, digital compatibility, and brand familiarity over evidence of effectiveness. That’s a problem. As the authors note, evidence of impact didn’t even make the top ten criteria in a national survey of adoption factors.
3. Time for writing instruction: On average, elementary teachers spend just 15–20 minutes per day on writing. In upper grades, it’s even less. Writing is often the first thing cut when schedules get tight, yet it’s the very skill that supports learning in every subject.
4. High-stakes testing: Teachers feel pressured to “teach to the test,” narrowing instruction to formulaic responses that mirror test rubrics. The result? Students learn to perform, not to think.

These barriers aren’t theoretical. They’re what teachers tell me all the time. “I’d love to teach writing better,” they say, “but I don’t have time. I don’t have training. I don’t have support.”

It’s not a lack of motivation. It’s a lack of structure and clarity.

Clarity Isn’t Control, It’s Empowerment

There’s a misconception that providing teachers with step-by-step guidance somehow undermines their professional autonomy. I see it differently.

Clarity is not control. Clarity is freedom.

When teachers have a proven framework like SRSD, they can focus their energy on what matters, such as adapting, connecting, and teaching.

Harris and McKeown describe SRSD as “learner-centered but teacher-guided.” That’s exactly what today’s classrooms need. Teachers don’t need more untested ideas; they need tools that work and permission to use them confidently.

In every classroom I visit where SRSD is implemented with fidelity, I see the same thing: calm confidence. Students are aware of what’s expected of them and are achieving impressive learning outcomes. Teachers know how to guide them. The chaos of “What do I do next?” is replaced by purposeful learning and participation.

The Evidence Is Clear and So Is the Message

In their 2022 article, Drs. Harris and McKeown presented a discussion on SRSD facts vs. fictional misunderstandings:

• Fiction: SRSD is only for students with disabilities. Fact: SRSD benefits all students. Over 120 studies across grades 1–12 show strong, generalizable gains in writing quality and motivation for diverse learners.
• Fiction: Researchers get better results than teachers. Fact: Teachers implementing SRSD achieve the same, sometimes better, outcomes as researchers. Average fidelity is 90% (in a systematic review of SRSD professional development, Harris et al. teacher fidelity averaged 90% of SRSD components implemented).
• Fiction: SRSD creates formulaic writing. Fact: SRSD helps students think flexibly and adapt strategies. It teaches structure without stifling creativity.
• Fiction: SRSD is culturally narrow or “colonial.” Fact: SRSD has been successfully implemented in under-resourced schools and multilingual classrooms worldwide. Its focus on self-regulation, empowerment, and voice makes it a powerful tool for equity.

When implemented effectively, SRSD changes not only how students write, but also how they perceive themselves as learners.

What Teachers Keep Telling Me

When I talk to teachers, from Boston to Brisbane, I hear the same message: “We want to get it right. We just need to know what ‘right’ looks like. That’s not resistance. That’s professionalism.

Teachers don’t fear innovation; they fear wasting time on things that don’t work. Every new initiative added to their plates without a clear rationale or training erodes trust and adds stress. SRSD offers a way out of that cycle. It provides explicit instruction and structure, but it’s not rigid. It builds metacognition, but it’s not abstract. It respects teacher judgment while anchoring instruction in research.

It’s the clarity teachers crave and the evidence students deserve.

A Call for Evidence and Empathy

As I read Harris and McKeown’s work and compared it to my teacher surveys, one idea keeps rising to the surface: improving writing outcomes seems to require evidence and empathy. The authors do not frame it this way, but their findings suggest a straightforward truth. Strong instruction depends on research, and sustainable change depends on understanding the realities teachers face.

For me, this means recognizing that evidence alone can feel prescriptive, especially when teachers are already navigating crowded schedules and shifting priorities. At the same time, empathy without evidence leaves us unsure about what actually helps students learn. Teachers deserve clarity, support, and approaches grounded in what works.

Interpreting the authors’ message through this lens, improving writing instruction involves:

• High-quality, practice-based professional learning, not brief one-off sessions
• Curriculum decisions that take research seriously, rather than treating “research-based” as a checkbox
• Protecting daily time for writing, because the skill grows only when students practice it
• Making instruction explicit and transparent which reduces cognitive load and helps every student access strong writing strategies

To me, clarity is more than good pedagogy; it’s a form of care. In a profession that has been asked to do more with less for years, offering explicit, evidence-based guidance respects teachers’ time and honors their expertise. It communicates a message that aligns with the spirit of the research, even if not stated directly:

We see the challenge. We value your work. And we want to support your success.

The Bottom Line

Writing is how students make sense of the world. It’s how they learn, think, and express who they are. But to teach writing well, teachers need more than passion; they need direction.

As Harris and McKeown remind us, “Writing must join center stage with reading, math, and STEM in our priorities.” That won’t happen until we stop treating writing as an afterthought and start equipping teachers with proven frameworks, such as SRSD.

After seven years of classroom feedback, here’s what I know for sure: when teachers have clear, evidence-based guidance, they feel confident. When they feel confident, students thrive. And when students thrive as writers, everything else, reading, thinking, learning, rises with it.

Teachers don’t need more chaos. They need clarity. And I believe that clarity is the most empowering gift we can give.

References: Harris, K. R., & McKeown, D. (2022). Overcoming barriers and paradigm wars: Powerful evidence-based writing instruction. Theory Into Practice. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2022.2107334

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Understanding Explicit Teaching in Writing

Education researcher Carl Hendrick releases a monthly roundup of new studies in the field of learning science. His posts are short and dense, packed with data that remind us what really works for students and teachers’ professional learning. This month’s research brief begins with a report from the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) that deserves the attention of every teacher.

The panel reviewed more than 120 studies on how children learn to read in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs, per the report), emphasizing the importance of evidence-based practices in education. Their conclusion was clear: the global literacy crisis is not a problem of access but of instruction. According to the authors, children aren’t learning to read because many classrooms are not using explicit, structured methods that teach language, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and writing.

That conclusion highlights the necessity of evidence-based writing instruction as a component of effective literacy instruction. It directly addresses how we teach writing, as well as why frameworks like Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) are essential. The same principles (explicit modeling, guided practice, and strategic self-regulation) are the foundation for both reading and writing success.

The crisis isn’t about access. It’s about instruction.

Around the world, 70 percent of ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries are unable to read and understand a short passage. The GEEAP report refers to this as a “crisis of instruction.” Too often, children are asked to figure out literacy independently, as though reading and writing will emerge naturally from exposure to books.

The evidence says otherwise. Speaking develops naturally; reading and writing do not. They must be taught directly, in a planned sequence, and practiced repeatedly with feedback.

The GEEAP report outlines six skills that need explicit attention:

1. Oral language – building vocabulary and syntax.
2. Phonological awareness – manipulating sounds in words.
3. Systematic phonics – connecting letters to sounds.
4. Reading fluency – developing automatic word recognition.
5. Comprehension – making sense of connected text.
6. Writing – producing language to express and reinforce understanding.

The key word is explicit. Students need to see what good reading and writing look like, hear the thinking behind the process, and practice under guidance until those skills become internalized.

That is precisely what SRSD provides for writing. It is similar to the principles of the “science of reading,” which include structure, sequence, and direct modeling, and applies these principles to composition. Students learn how to plan, write, evaluate, and regulate their own learning, instead of guessing what good writing looks like.

Writing is a core literacy skill, not an afterthought.

The GEEAP report names writing alongside oral language, phonics, and comprehension. That’s rare in global literacy policy, and it’s essential. Writing isn’t just a product of reading; it’s one of the six engines that drive literacy.

When students write, they rehearse text structure, deepen vocabulary, and consolidate what they’ve read. This is the “reading–writing connection” shown in Steve Graham and Michael Hebert’s Writing to Read report and confirmed again in the 2018 meta-analysis Reading for Writing. Teaching reading and writing together multiplies learning effects. SRSD supports this connection by guiding students to plan and organize their ideas before writing, as skilled readers do when planning and monitoring comprehension.

Explicit teaching produces equity.

Discovery-based approaches often give an advantage to students who already possess the skills to navigate literacy tasks. Explicit strategy instruction levels the field. When a teacher models thinking aloud, “Here’s how I decide what my topic sentence should say”, every student gains access to expert reasoning.

In SRSD, teachers model not just what to write but how to think about writing: how to set goals, how to use self-talk, how to check for clarity, and how to revise with purpose. Those self-regulation skills transfer to other learning domains, improving motivation and persistence long after the writing lesson ends.

Structure doesn’t mean rigidity.

Explicit teaching is sometimes criticized as mechanical or scripted. But structured instruction means lessons follow a logical sequence; it doesn’t mean students have no creativity. We have to lay a foundation first. In SRSD classrooms, structure becomes a scaffold. Once students internalize the strategy, they flex it to fit their ideas.

Teachers often describe this shift beautifully: first, students absorb and learn from  the cognitive model, then they set their own learning goals and begin scaffolded practice with gradual release. Structure becomes freedom. A freedom that motivates students to write, read, and learn more.

SRSD Online materials provide teachers with clear, detailed guidance through unit plans for the six stages of SRSD, known as meta scripts. These are not rigid scripts but adaptable guides that support teacher training and respect each teacher’s knowledge of their students, culture, and classroom context. Teachers can modify the language, examples, or pacing to meet their students’ learning needs and preferences. In doing so, they make the scripts their own by feeling confident, motivated, and empowered to deliver explicit instruction that truly fits their classrooms.

Retrieval practice only works when followed by feedback.

Hendrick’s review also highlights several other studies that reinforce what we know about effective learning, and each one has implications for writing instruction. In a recent meta-analysis, authors evaluated research comparing retrieval practice (quizzing and recall) to other active learning strategies, such as concept mapping and self-explanation. The advantage of retrieval was small, and it disappeared entirely without corrective feedback.

The lesson is simple: feedback completes the loop. In evidence-based writing instruction, that means students must get specific, actionable responses to their drafts, not just grades or generic praise. SRSD incorporates this into the process: students compare their work to goals, checklists, mentor texts, and exemplars, and revise it based on self-evaluation and feedback from teachers or peers. Reflection is not optional; it’s part of the learning process.

Handwriting builds early letter recognition more effectively than typing.

In a study of prereaders, children who practiced writing letters by hand or tracing them learned them more accurately and recognized them more quickly than their peers who typed. The physical act of forming letters strengthened the brain’s link between sound, symbol, and movement.

For early writing teachers, this is a reminder to keep handwriting in the mix. Digital tools are powerful, but fine-motor writing helps children internalize the alphabetic principle. Students who physically write their sentences engage memory and attention differently than those who only drag and drop letters on a screen.

Fluency improves with challenge, not comfort.

Another study found that fourth graders who practiced fluency using challenging texts improved more than their peers who used leveled readers matched to their ability. Students read the same passage multiple times with teacher modeling, partner reading, and performance practice.

The same applies to writing. When we consistently lower expectations, we slow growth. SRSD encourages teachers to set attainable goals: students may start by finding parts and progress to short, scaffolded sentences, but the ultimate target is independent, extended writing that challenges their thinking.

Emotional intelligence matters more for stories than for information texts.

A longitudinal study in China found that emotional intelligence predicted growth in narrative reading comprehension, but not in informational reading.

When students write narratives, they imagine characters’ feelings, motivations, and relationships, skills that depend on emotional understanding. In doing so, they draw on empathy, personal experience, and background knowledge. This concept is directly related to the idea that retrieving what we already know enhances new learning. It’s a lesson that extends beyond writing: in every subject, students learn best when they connect new ideas to what they already understand.

Explicit Instruction Supports Metacognition and Motivation

Across these studies, one principle repeats: students learn best when they know what to do, why they’re doing it, and how to check their own progress. That’s the essence of metacognition.

This three-part loop transforms writing from a mysterious talent into a learnable process. When students can explain their thinking, they begin to believe in their ability to control their learning. The belief in self-efficacy is one of the strongest predictors of academic success.

Research supports this. Decades of studies show that SRSD increases writing quality and motivation across grades and populations. In meta-analyses, effect sizes exceed those of other approaches to writing instruction, placing SRSD among the most powerful interventions in all education research. The GEEAP reports call for explicit, structured, and comprehensive instruction, which echoes what SRSD teachers have practiced for years.

Why Universal SEL Alone Doesn’t Move the Needle

One of the studies Hendrick highlighted tested a whole-class social-emotional learning program in 62 English primary schools. Teachers delivered 18 weekly lessons on emotions, relationships, fairness, and change. The results were statistically zero, with no measurable improvement in mood or well-being.

SRSD integrates emotion and cognition where they naturally belong. Students use self-talk to manage frustration (“I can do hard things”), set personal goals (“I’ll use at least three reasons”), and celebrate progress (“I’m proud of my plan”). These are genuine emotional-regulation skills, practiced in context, not scripted “feelings lessons.”

Reclaiming Instructional Time for What Works

Another dataset in Hendrick’s review, the OECD TALIS 2024 State of Teaching report, paints a familiar picture: teachers are overworked, lacking support, and swamped by administrative tasks. The report recommends freeing instructional time for high-value activities, explicit teaching, collaboration, and feedback.

Another key takeaway is that high-quality PD must feel relevant, practical, and immediately useful to teachers in order to meaningfully improve instructional practice.

This, too, is connected to SRSD implementation. When teachers learn and then adopt SRSD, lessons become more focused. Time once spent managing aimless writing sessions is redirected toward modelling strategies, guiding practice, and providing feedback. Teachers often report that classroom behavior improves because expectations are clear and students feel capable.

Effective instruction doesn’t require more time; it requires better use of the time we already have, with a focus on evidence-based writing instruction.

The Deeper Message: Evidence for Explicit Instruction and Effective PD

The research reveals that effective teaching is intentional. This principle applies to every subject area. SRSD embodies this idea. It helps students learn specific writing strategies and transfer those self-regulation and problem-solving skills to new topics and contexts.

Students do not magically absorb complex skills. Whether we’re teaching decoding, multiplication, or persuasive writing, they need us to make our thinking visible, model the process, and coach them toward independence.

The “science of reading” movement has made this explicit in the context of early literacy. The next frontier is the science of writing. SRSD operationalizes decades of research into a classroom practice any teacher can learn and any student can master.

What Teachers Can Do Right Now

Here are four practical ways to bring these findings to life:

1. Model your thinking daily. Narrate your decisions aloud: “I’m choosing this transition word because it connects my ideas.” Students can’t imitate what they can’t see.
2. Embed feedback loops. Don’t wait until the final draft. Pause for reflection and feedback after each stage (planning, drafting, revising). SRSD checklists make this easy.
3. Keep handwriting alive in the early grades. For K-1 students, combine oral rehearsal with physical writing. Trace, copy, and write to strengthen sound-symbol connections.
4. Teach self-regulation explicitly. Establish routines that allow students to set goals, track progress, and celebrate improvements. These moments fuel motivation more than any sticker chart.

A Closing Thought

Carl Hendrick’s monthly brief reminds us that good teaching is both art and evidence-based practice. The studies change, but the message stays the same: when we teach explicitly, support self-regulation, and align instruction to how the mind learns, students thrive.

This is refreshing clarity at a time when schools face crushing workloads, shifting curricula, social media influence, and policy noise. The literacy crisis isn’t destiny; it’s an opportunity to emphasize evidence-based writing instruction. By choosing evidence-based frameworks like SRSD, we can rewrite that story with one lesson, one strategy, and one confident young writer at a time.

References

• Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (2024). Improving Learning through Structured Pedagogy. World Bank & FCDO.
• Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2010). Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading. Carnegie Corporation of New York.
• Graham, S., Liu, K., Bartlett, B., et al. (2018). Reading for Writing: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Reading and Reading Instruction on Writing. Review of Educational Research, 88(2), 243-284.
• Hendrick, C. (2025). The Research Brief: What’s New in Learning Science. carlhendrick.substack.com.
• Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (2009). Self-Regulated Strategy Development in Writing: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(2), 363-384.

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Enhancing Cognitive Skills through Writing Activities

Students need both reading and writing to be ready for school, work, and life. Both skills matter, and both require knowledge for success.

For many years, schools have taught reading and writing as if they were separate without adopting effective strategies for integrating the two. Reading comprehension often receives more time and attention, while writing is left behind.

Research shows this is a mistake. Reading and writing are closely connected. Improving one can lead to improvements in the other. For example, students understand a text better when they write about what they read (Graham & Hebert, 2010). When they read strong examples, their own writing improves because they can develop an understanding of effective genre elements and text structures (Graham et al., 2024).

We cannot continue treating these skills as two different things. Students need daily practice in both reading and writing, which support each other. The good news is that integration can fit within lessons teachers are already teaching.

How Reading and Writing Work Together

Reading and writing share a similar foundation, as both require prior knowledge of language and concepts. Both rely on vocabulary, knowledge of sentence structure, and an understanding of how texts are organized.

Writing Makes Reading Stronger

Writing about content helps students process texts more deeply, enriching their reading comprehension and knowledge. Through comprehension monitoring, students can evaluate their understanding as they write, requiring them to sort ideas, choose evidence, and explain it in their own words. This experience of reflecting and elaborating helps deepen comprehension.

A meta-analysis by Graham and Hebert (2011) found that writing about reading significantly raised comprehension across grade levels. Strategies like summarizing, note-taking, and answering questions in writing gave students a stronger grasp of what they read.

Reading Makes Writing Stronger

Reading also builds better writers. When students read, they see how authors structure arguments, explain ideas, and use language to engage an audience. Mentor texts provide models they can imitate.

In 2018, Steve Graham and colleagues published Reading for Writing, a meta-analysis showing that reading interventions positively impacted student writing. The effect was strongest when reading instruction included attention to text structure and craft. This demonstrated that reading instruction can benefit both comprehension but also prepares students to be stronger writers.

Reading and Writing: A Two-Way Street

The lesson is clear: reading and writing work like a two-way street. When taught effectively, each one can support the other and lead to improvements in a variety of reading and writing skills, including comprehension, decoding, vocabulary, writing quality, mechanics, and output.

Why Schools Need Reading-Writing Integration Now

Schools are turning to integration for research and practical reasons and addressing questions about effective literacy instruction.

Standards and Tests

Across states, standardized tests now require students to write using evidence from texts. College- and career-ready standards, Common Core, and other frameworks emphasize source-based writing. State tests reflect this expectation. Students must read a passage and then write an analysis or argument. Without integration of reading and writing instruction, students struggle.

Equity and Access

Integration of reading and writing instruction also supports equity. Students who need extra help, such as multilingual learners or students with disabilities, benefit from learning reading comprehension and writing strategies together. Both skills reinforce vocabulary, comprehension, and expression. Research on Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) shows powerful results for these groups, highlighting effective strategies for integrating reading and writing (Graham et al., 2013; Harris et al., 2008).

Time and Workload

Time is the most common concern in schools. Teachers cannot add a new block just for writing. They cannot cover two separate programs in full. Integration of reading and writing instruction is the solution, focusing on effectively delivering the main idea. By embedding writing into reading blocks, teachers make every instructional minute count.

This also reduces teacher workload. Instead of two different lessons, teachers can plan one integrated lesson incorporating reading and writing within the same text. Many educators describe this as more natural and efficient, with reading comprehension strategies enhancing the integration of writing instruction.

Classroom Practices That Work

Integration does not require a brand-new program. Small shifts in strategies make a big difference.

While Reading

• Annotate with purpose. Ask students to jot questions, notes, or quick reactions in the margin to support reading comprehension monitoring. Later, use those notes as evidence in writing.
• Use mentor texts. Show how authors structure ideas, build arguments, and use transitions.
• Written responses. Before the discussion, students write a prediction, summary, or reflection, which aids in predicting the content and improving reading comprehension. Research shows that writing about texts improves comprehension (Graham & Hebert, 2010).

While Writing

• Cite evidence. Teach students to pull quotes, paraphrase, and link ideas directly to what they read. This practice reflects standards and assessment demands.
• Quick writes. Have students write for two minutes before sharing. This supports focus and prepares all learners, including quieter ones, for discussion.
• Revision as clarification. Connect revision to comprehension strategies. Just as rereading clears up confusion, rewriting strengthens meaning.

Across Subjects

Integration works across all disciplines by enhancing students’ knowledge.

• In science, students read lab procedures and then write clear reports.
• In history, they read sources and write essays supported with evidence.
• In math, they read problems and write explanations of their reasoning.

Research on writing in content areas (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008) shows that this type of integration deepens learning across subjects.

How SRSD Supports Integration

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) provides teachers with a structured way to connect reading and writing.

Strategy Instruction

SRSD offers clear strategies for planning and writing, incorporating explicit instruction to enhance understanding. For opinion writing, TREE helps students remember: Topic sentence, Reasons, Explanations, and Ending. For informative writing, TIDE helps them organize: Topic, Important Ideas, Detailed Explanations, and Ending.

The main idea here is that when students use TREE or TIDE, they not only organize their essays but also recognize the same structures in their reading. Students can also use these strategies to identify elements in text that they can use in their own writing. In this way, SRSD helps reading and writing skills reinforce each other.

Self-Regulation Skills

SRSD also builds self-regulation. Students set goals, use self-talk, develop their knowledge, and monitor progress. These skills apply to both decoding and reading and writing. A student who uses self-talk like “Did I explain this reason clearly?” in writing can also ask questions such as, “Did I understand this paragraph?” while reading.

Fits Any Curriculum

Because SRSD is a method, not a curriculum, it can be used alongside existing curricula and within content areas, allowing it to integrate seamlessly with text-based activities. Teachers can embed it in reading blocks, writing workshops, or use it to support content-area learning. This flexibility makes it ideal for schools that want integration without replacing their curriculum.

Common Challenges and Simple Fixes

Challenge 1: “It Feels Like Extra Work.”

Teachers worry that integration adds one more task, raising questions about effectively managing classroom time. The solution is to keep lessons short and incorporate strategies that maximize learning time, such as integrating text analysis into existing activities. SRSD mini-lessons often replace isolated skill drills. One lesson serves two goals: better reading and better writing.

Challenge 2: “Our Reading and Writing Programs Don’t Match.”

Many schools buy separate programs. This can make integration harder. A simple fix is to use the same tools across both. For example, a graphic organizer can help analyze a text while reading and plan an essay while writing. The tool stays the same while the purpose shifts.

Challenge 3: “I Haven’t Been Trained for Integration.”

Many teachers were prepared to teach reading and writing as separate subjects. Students do need explicit instruction and time dedicated to each while they build respective skills. But teachers can work to identify how to connect reading and writing effectively. SRSD training provides models and practice for writing.

A Look Inside the Classroom

Here’s an example of integration in action.

A fifth-grade class reads an article about recycling. During reading, students underline facts about how recycling helps the environment. They jot notes about which facts are most important.

Next, the teacher introduces TIDE. Students write a topic sentence: “Recycling helps protect our world.” They choose three reasons from their notes. They explain each reason in detail in the article. Finally, they write a strong ending.

In one lesson, students practice comprehension, annotation, planning, and essay writing. Reading informs writing, and writing deepens reading. Research calls this reciprocal literacy (Graham et al., 2024).

Now Is a Great Time to Integrate Reading and Writing Instruction in Your Classrooms

Reading comprehension strategies and writing instruction can each benefit one another. Students who only practice one are missing half the picture. When schools bring them together, students read more deeply and write with more confidence.

Decades of research back this up: writing improves reading (Graham & Hebert, 2011), and reading improves writing (Graham et al., 2018).

SRSD Online is here to help. Our Writing to Learn™ courses show teachers how to teach writing through clear strategies and self-regulation. Whether your school wants to strengthen Tier 1 instruction or provide Tier 2 supports, SRSD offers the evidence-based path forward.

Let’s stop treating reading and writing as separate. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more about how SRSD can help your school.

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Implementing Proven Teaching Techniques

When a study lasts nearly two years and follows almost a thousand students, educators take notice. That’s exactly what happened in 2025, when researcher Dr. Naymé Salas and her colleagues published one of the most extensive longitudinal studies ever conducted on Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD).

Their goal was simple yet ambitious: determining whether students could maintain SRSD-related writing gains over time. What they discovered was both encouraging and instructive, offering fresh insight into how explicit writing instruction shapes student growth long after a unit ends.

Let’s look at what they found in the Long-term effects of an SRSD writing intervention for elementary school children (2025) and how their results reinforce what SRSD Online has built into our long-term professional-learning model.

What the Study Showed

Dr. Salas’s team worked with second- and fourth-grade students across 13 schools in Catalonia, gathering vital feedback on the effectiveness of their interventions. Using materials adapted from Limpo & Alves (2013), they taught a planning strategy—the first of SRSD’s core writing strategies through 11 one-hour lessons focused on opinion writing.

Each session reflected key SRSD principles:

• Explicit strategy instruction that showed students how to plan before writing, organize ideas, and create structured essays.
• Guided modeling and practice that allowed students to watch the process and then try it themselves with teacher support.
• Gradual release of responsibility, giving students more control over planning with each session.

Although the intervention centered only on the planning component of SRSD (and did not assess student confidence, attitudes toward writing or sentence components like grammar or handwriting), the effects on the writing process were clear. Immediately after instruction, students’ essays were better organized and more complete, and their planning quality improved substantially, demonstrating effective writing strategies.

Even 18 months later, these students still outperformed peers who had not received the SRSD-based instruction. This highlights the importance of integrating the writing process into effective instruction, particularly in planning quality and text structure. That level of durability is rare in writing research and underscores how even one SRSD strategy, when taught explicitly, can make a long-term difference in how students approach writing.

What We Can Learn from the Study

Dr. Salas’s team also identified a significant challenge: even substantial gains begin to fade without continued support.

By the 18-month follow-up, some decline appeared, especially among younger students who no longer had opportunities to apply or revisit the planning strategy in later grades. The researchers noted several contributing factors related to the writing process:

• The intervention concluded after the first year, with no additional SRSD instruction or reinforcement.
• Teachers and administrators did not receive ongoing professional development or coaching in SRSD.
• The planning strategy was not integrated into the broader writing curriculum once the study ended.

In other words, the SRSD framework itself was highly effective, but the surrounding system did not sustain it. Rather than a shortcoming, this finding offers valuable guidance: to preserve writing gains, schools must embed SRSD within a lasting instructional ecosystem that supports teachers, connects to curriculum, and reinforces strategies across years.

Curriculum Integration: The Key to Sustainability

A key difference between controlled research settings and school-wide implementation is curriculum integration. In Dr. Salas’s study, SRSD was implemented as a discrete set of lessons, a necessary choice for scientific clarity, but not a sustainable school structure.

At SRSD Online, we’ve built our professional-learning system around this insight. We help teachers weave SRSD into their curriculum, ensuring it complements rather than competes with their adopted materials.

Educators learn to enhance literacy by:

• Map SRSD strategies such as TREE, TIDE, and C-SPACE onto existing ELA and content-area units.
• Use SRSD as the how behind their current writing lessons.
• Align each SRSD stage from Develop Background Knowledge to Independent Performance with pacing guides and assessment frameworks.

When SRSD lives inside the curriculum rather than beside it, sustainability follows naturally, enhancing the writing process for students and educators alike. This alignment is what transforms short-term intervention effects into long-term instructional habits.

What We Recommend for Long-Term Sustainability

Over the past decade, SRSD Online has developed a professional-learning model designed to address the research’s call to move beyond a single-year intervention toward a sustainable, whole-school approach.

Our framework blends high-fidelity SRSD training with the structures schools need to maintain: coaching, curriculum integration, and multi-year maintenance.

Here’s how we make it work.

Year 1: Training and Capacity Building

The first year establishes shared understanding and confidence.

• Administrators, coaches, and teachers train together, ensuring leadership and instruction are aligned.
• Each school receives a custom pacing plan—whether starting with one grade, a cluster, or a full-school rollout.
• Teachers learn to deliver SRSD lessons across multiple genres: opinion (TREE), informative (TIDE), and personal narrative (C-SPACE).
• Fidelity and data tools support reflection and progress monitoring.

By the end of Year 1, SRSD becomes part of the school’s instructional DNA. Teachers collaborate through a common language, students internalize writing strategies, and administrators can track measurable growth.

Year 2: Integration and Sustainability

With the foundation set, Year 2 deepens expertise and expands reach.

• Teachers receive advanced training and live coaching to refine modeling, feedback, and differentiation.
• SRSD extends into content-area writing in science, social studies, and other subjects, integrating the writing process to turn writing into a tool for thinking.
• Administrators and coaches craft a sustainability plan with data review, mentor development, and staff-turnover support.

Year 2 shifts schools from learning SRSD to owning it, where teachers mentor peers and students independently integrate the writing process strategies.

Years 3 and On: Maintenance and Growth

After two full years of training, SRSD Online continues partnering with schools for guided maintenance focused on refinement and reflection:

• Annual data reviews and goal-setting with leadership teams.
• Targeted refreshers for teachers and coaches.
• Ongoing fidelity checks to maintain instructional quality.
• Lesson updates and new exemplars added to each site’s lifetime library.
• Support expanding SRSD into new grade levels or subjects using mentor texts as a key resource.

These maintenance years directly answer the challenge Dr. Salas’s research illuminated, keeping writing instruction active and visible long after the initial implementation period ends.

A Study That Proves the Foundation and a Model That Builds on It

Dr. Salas’s 2025 study is a landmark in writing research. It demonstrates that even teaching one core SRSD strategy, planning, can yield long-term gains in students’ writing performance.

At the same time, her findings point to what’s next: to sustain and deepen those gains, schools need an ongoing system that supports teachers, aligns curricula, and nurtures education and SRSD across grades.

That’s precisely what SRSD Online provides:
Our two-year training ensures mastery.
Our curriculum integration ensures alignment.
And our ongoing maintenance ensures longevity.

Because when it comes to writing instruction within the writing process, short-term success isn’t enough. The real goal, shared by Dr. Salas and SRSD Online alike, is lasting transformation for students, teachers, and entire school communities.

Ready to Bring Long-Term SRSD Success to Your School?

Learn more about our two-year training and sustainability model: srsdonline.org

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Evolution of Educational Techniques

Over the past century, educators and researchers have been chasing the same elusive goal: How do we teach students to write well? Writing isn’t just a set of skills; it’s a complex act of thinking, problem-solving, and self-expression that requires a clear methodology to guide effective instruction. Yet, for much of the twentieth century, writing instruction focused narrowly on surface features like grammar, handwriting, and correctness rather than the cognitive and motivational processes that make writing meaningful.

That long arc of trial and discovery is exactly what Steve Graham and his colleagues examined in Trends in Writing Intervention Research: 1930s and Onward (2025). Their review traces the evolution of writing intervention studies across nine decades, revealing how our field has moved from mechanical drills to the deeply strategic and self-regulated approaches that define the science of writing today.

What emerges from this sweeping analysis is more than a historical account; it’s a powerful validation of how far we’ve come and where the evidence leads us next. For educators searching for what truly works in writing instruction, the story points squarely toward frameworks like Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), a model grounded in decades of research on what helps students not only write better but also think and learn through writing.

The Early Years: When Writing Wasn’t About Writing

In the early decades of writing research, instruction was dominated by mechanical concerns. Classrooms in the 1930s through the 1960s often treated writing as a product to be corrected, not a process to be taught. Interventions focused on penmanship, spelling, and grammar drills. Students were expected to improve by practicing these isolated skills repeatedly, much like athletes refining a single motion.

This approach reflected a behaviorist view of learning. Students could master writing through imitation and reinforcement, without exploring the cognitive work behind composing text. The assumption was that good writing would naturally emerge once students could form letters, spell words, and follow grammatical conventions.

But over time, educators began to notice that despite hours of practice, students still struggled to express ideas clearly, organize their thoughts, or engage readers. The focus on correctness didn’t translate into better thinking or communication. Something fundamental was missing: instruction that engaged the mind, not just the mechanics.

The Process Revolution: From Product to Process

By the 1970s and 1980s, the field of writing instruction experienced a profound shift. Researchers began to recognize that writing wasn’t simply a matter of recording thoughts but a way of generating them. The cognitive revolution reframed writing as a process involving planning, translating, editing, and revising, all driven by purposeful thinking.

This new lens sparked a wave of studies exploring how writers plan their ideas, set goals, and monitor their progress. The work of scholars like Flower and Hayes provided a blueprint for understanding writing as problem-solving, a task that required mental strategies rather than mechanical routines.

In classrooms, this thinking evolved into what became known as “process writing,” which aimed to improve literacy through active engagement with the writing process. Teachers often encouraged students to brainstorm, draft, revise, and publish in workshop-style settings. Students were given more ownership and time to discover their voices. For the first time, writing instruction acknowledged that good writing develops through reflection and iteration.

Yet process writing, while liberating, often lacked structure. Many students, especially those who struggled academically, floundered when asked to “just write.” The freedom to explore didn’t necessarily provide the guidance they needed to plan effectively or sustain motivation. Researchers began asking: What if we could make the invisible mental processes of good writers explicit? What if we could teach struggling writers the strategies that strong writers instinctively use?

The Strategy Instruction Era: Teaching the Writer How to Think

These questions gave rise to a new generation of research in the 1980s and 1990s that would transform writing instruction forever. Instead of assuming students would “discover” how to write, researchers began teaching them how to plan, organize, and regulate their thinking through techniques such as sentence combining.

Steve Graham and Karen Harris emerged at the forefront of this movement. Through decades of research, they developed what would become the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model, a structured, flexible framework for teaching students both the strategies for writing and the self-regulatory skills to use them effectively.

The core idea was simple yet revolutionary: strong writing requires both knowledge (what to do) and control (how to manage yourself as you do it). Students learned explicit strategies like POW (Pick ideas, Organize notes, Write and say more) and TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons, Explain reasons, Ending). But they also learned how to set goals, talk themselves through challenges, and reflect on their progress.

This dual focus addressed what earlier decades had missed. Teaching writing wasn’t just about cognitive strategies but about motivation, confidence, and persistence. SRSD showed that students achieve remarkable growth when they understand why strategies work and learn to take charge of their writing.

The Self-Regulation Breakthrough: Writing as Thinking and Self-Management

SRSD didn’t just change how we teach writing; it changed how we understand writers. By combining cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components, SRSD reframed writing as a self-regulated act of problem-solving. Students weren’t passive recipients of instruction; they became active agents in their learning.

The research that followed was extraordinary. Study after study revealed that SRSD improved the quality of student writing and enhanced motivation, self-efficacy, and independence. Students learned to see themselves as capable writers, an identity shift that research consistently connects to higher achievement.

This was the breakthrough decades of fragmented interventions had been building toward: a model that treated writing as a teachable, transferable, and empowering skill.

The Twenty-First Century: Expanding What Writing Means

As the field entered the new millennium, writing research began to diversify in scope and purpose, with a growing emphasis on assessment. Studies explored how writing strategies could be applied across genres like narrative, opinion, and informative, as well as across populations from early elementary through high school and beyond.

Researchers also began to examine how writing connects to other domains: reading comprehension, critical thinking, content learning, and even emotional regulation. The line between reading and writing blurred, as evidence showed that the two processes feed each other in powerful ways. When students write about what they read, they deepen comprehension; when they read to learn how authors express ideas, they become stronger writers.

Technology further reshaped the landscape. Digital writing tools, collaborative platforms, and multimodal composition expanded what it means to “write.” Yet even in these new contexts, strategy instruction and self-regulation principles held strong. Students still needed structure, guidance, and reflection to make meaning—exactly what SRSD provides, regardless of medium.

Patterns Across Ninety Years: What the Research Reveals

The Graham et al. (2025) review offers a remarkable bird’s-eye view of the entire field. Over ninety years of intervention studies, a clear trend emerges: writing instruction has steadily moved away from isolated skill drills and toward integrated, strategic, and self-regulated approaches.

The evidence shows that interventions focused on grammar or handwriting alone rarely improve overall writing quality. By contrast, programs that explicitly teach planning, organizing, revising, and self-regulation consistently yield stronger results. These patterns hold true across ages, ability levels, and instructional settings.

In other words, the science of writing has reached consensus on what works: teach students how to think like writers, not just write like students. The SRSD framework embodies that shift more comprehensively than any model to date.

What This Means for Classrooms Today

This history carries a clear message for teachers and administrators: effective writing instruction is intentional, explicit, and deeply human. It’s not about assigning more writing, it’s about teaching students how to write well and giving them tools to sustain effort when it gets hard.

The research legacy summarized by Graham and colleagues underscores several key practices that schools should prioritize today, emphasizing the critical role of literacy in these practices:

• Teach writing strategies explicitly. Don’t assume students know how to plan or elaborate; show them, model it, and let them practice with support.
• Link writing and reading. Treat them as two sides of the same coin. Writing deepens reading comprehension and vice versa.
• Build metacognition and motivation. Teach students to set goals, use self-talk, and reflect on their growth.
• Create consistent systems across grades. When every teacher shares a common language and structure for writing, students build transferable habits of mind.
• Use evidence-based models like SRSD. Frameworks developed through decades of research ensure that instruction is engaging and effective.

The most encouraging insight from this 90-year journey is that change is possible and doesn’t take decades. Once teachers implement structured, evidence-based approaches like SRSD, student writing quality, confidence, and independence gains appear rapidly. Teachers often say they can never return to how they taught writing.

Looking Ahead: The Next Chapter in Writing Research

If history has shown us anything, it’s that writing research is never static. Graham et al. note that the next frontier lies in integrating writing instruction with technology, collaboration, and reading-to-learn models. Artificial intelligence and adaptive learning tools are already beginning to reshape how students receive feedback and plan their writing.

Yet even as tools evolve, the principles remain the same. Students will always need to understand why they write, how to organize their ideas, and how to persevere when challenges arise. Self-regulation, strategy use, and explicit instruction are the constants that define the foundation of effective writing, regardless of future innovations.

SRSD offers precisely that adaptable foundation. It’s not a script or a program; it’s a framework teachers can make their own. Whether guiding first graders through their first opinion paragraphs or helping high school students compose persuasive essays, SRSD allows educators to teach writing as both a skill and empowerment.

A Century in the Making

The story told in Trends in Writing Intervention Research: 1930s and Onward is ultimately one of progress and persistence. For ninety years, researchers have been refining our understanding of what helps students become writers. Each decade builds on the lessons of the last, gradually revealing that writing success depends not on correction or compliance but on cognition, motivation, and self-direction.

Today, educators have the advantage of standing on that century of evidence. We know what works, which includes regular assessment to measure progress and inform instruction. We have models integrating cognitive science, motivation theory, and classroom practicality. And we have proof: thousands of teachers and students worldwide who have seen that everything changes when writing instruction becomes strategic and self-regulated.

SRSD didn’t appear overnight. It represents the culmination of decades of research, collaboration, and classroom testing. But its true power lies in what it offers to the next generation of teachers and learners: a pathway to make writing not just a skill to master, but a way of thinking that transforms learning.

As we look ahead to the next century of writing research, one truth endures: effective writing instruction begins when we teach students to take charge of their own minds, one strategy at a time.

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