How many of these best practices are evident in your programming? What can your program work on incorporating or strengthening? How do these best practices need to be adapted or adjusted for the after-school literacy environment?
The links embedded in the list of "key elements" of successful writing instruction will take you to pages with resources and suggested strategies.
Writing Strategies, which involves teaching students strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions.
Summarization, which involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how to summarize texts
Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions.
Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific, reachable goals for the writing they are to complete.
Word Processing, which uses computers and word processors as instructional supports for writing assignments.
Sentence Combining, which involves teaching students to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences.
Pre-writing, which engages students in activities designed to help them generate or organize ideas for their composition.
Inquiry Activities, which engages students in: developing specific goals; analyzing immediate, concrete data; use specific strategies to conduct the analysis; and develop ideas and content for a particular writing task.
Process Writing Approach, which interweaves a number of writing instructional activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities, writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing.
Study of Models, which provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing
Writing for Content Learning, (also called "Writing Across the Curriculum" or "Writing to Learn") which uses writing as a tool for learning content material.