The Writing Process

Scaffolding the Writing Process: How do I move my students from non-writers to independent writers?

As I began to dive into an article search for my first blog review, I quickly became overwhelmed by all of the options. So many great articles and topics! At that point I stopped myself, and truly thought about what I wanted to explore in more depth. What did I experience on a daily basis with the students that I work with? The answer came fairly quickly-difficulty with the writing process!

When you really stop to think about it, writing truly is a complex process, most especially for those individuals with physical and/or learning challenges. It is not only a cognitive skill, but a fine motor challenge as well. It is easy to see why a pencil is not a realistic option for many students, but what about a computer? Very often, the accommodation for a student with written expression difficulty is to omit a lot of the paper and pencil tasks, and assign them to a "computer". Ok, taking a student and putting them in front of a computer for their writing task and expecting great outcomes is not going to happen for every individual. I've tried. And failed. You now have an issue of integrating spelling, typing, and the complex process of putting words together to demonstrate ideas. In those moments, I always felt as though I was jumping from one sinking ship to another.

I enjoyed this article, as it presented a review of scaffolding the writing process to move a child with learning, cognitive, or physical disabilities from being a non-writer to a successful, independent writer-with a little help from assistive technology. On an interesting note, as I read through the article, the topic shifted primarily to literacy and reading skills and it's role in the writing process. Students will not be successful writers if they cannot read. The article reviews the new Classroom Suite 4 software, and the many advantages it holds in addressing this challenge we are faced with as educators and professionals in this field. Classroom Suite 4 contains dozens of templates that directly address the key components of reading instruction to include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The theory is that this will build a solid foundation for students to be able to recognize sounds and syllables, thus developing the ability to connect sounds with letters and to form letters into words.

Classroom Suite 4 also provides a variety of writing templates, that provide the scaffolding necessary to build writing skills. Students are able to experience activities for sentence buliding, vocabulary building, and errorless writing. Students start with putting pictures together in order to build their sentences. Each picture will be read aloud when the student simply glides the mouse over it. There are many features of this program that build upon these skills. There is built-in word prediction. Teachers can add word banks to promote writing fluency. As students progress, so do the leveled templates. Each guides and supports the writing process.

Another great feature of this particular software that the article reviewed was it's accessibility to all learners. Classroom Suite 4 is compatible with the IntelliKeys keyboard or IntelliSwitch-which is a wonderful alternative to the standard keyboard.

The writing process is very complex and poses many challenges to many students. It is encouraging to see products designed to help build these skills. The only possible disadvangage: cost.