Professional development provided through participation in intensive summer institutes
offered through local affiliates of the National Writing Project (NWP) and follow-up consulting
projects designed and implemented by institute participants in their schools (i.e., a replication
model for teacher training) has shown great promise. In the NWP model, participants spend
about a month at a summer institute during which they write, share their work in peer responsegroups, publish their work, read scholarly papers about writing instruction, discuss teaching and
learning issues, and create demonstration lessons for their later use at school. They subsequently
become teacher-consultants, using their newfound expertise to collaborate with local school
colleagues as they examine and modify their writing instructional practices. Pritchard’s (1987;
Pritchard & Honeycutt, 2006; Pritchard & Marshall, 1994) work indicates that the NWP model
(and variations thereof) has a positive effect on teachers’ views of themselves as writers and
teachers of writing and their attitudes about writing instruction, with concomitant changes in
their reported practices and their students’ writing achievement. Nevertheless, the findings from
the studies conducted by Troia and his colleagues described earlier suggest that, even with
outstanding professional development opportunities and intensive support, teachers struggle to
implement an exemplary model of writing workshop. Numerous factors may impede teachers
ability to teach writing effectively, including substantial disparities in student backgrounds and
abilities, pressure to cover curriculum content, competing mandated priorities, underdeveloped
and misaligned district-sanctioned writing curricula and assessments, and uncertainty regarding
how to integrate basic skills instruction with process writing instruction (Troia & Maddox,
2004).
Recommendations for Future Inquiry
In a number of writing instruction investigations, not all students (in some cases, less than
half) whoare taught a strategy actually use it after treatment is discontinued. Moreover, although
changes in writing behaviors and performance can be maintained a month or so following
treatment, they frequently dissipate beyond that point. Additionally, although generalization of
treatment effects to different instructional contexts is rather easily accomplished, transfer to
different tasks, such as writing in a different genre, is more difficult to attain. These resultssuggest that strategy maintenance and generalization are elusive goals (see Gersten & Baker,
2001; Troia, 2002; for contrary evidence, see Graham, 2006). There may be a number of reasons
why writing strategy interventions are not more successful in helping struggling writers maintain
and generalize the strategies they acquire, each of which require investigation. First, strategy
instruction research often is conducted over a period of several weeks or months, but students
with learning difficulties may need a prolonged period of intervention to accrue demonstrable
benefits in affect, behavior, and performance (Wong, 2000). Second, in many cases, writing
strategy interventions are conducted outside of the regular classroom writing block or in
classrooms in which students are not exposed to a strong and comprehensive writing program.
As such, students may have limited opportunity to apply what they have learned, either because
they have not acquired pathways for strategy transfer to educationally relevant contexts or
because those contexts offer few supports for engaging in strategic writing behavior.
Consequently, future research should examine the effectiveness of a combination of writingstrategy instruction and the components of a strong writing program with particular emphasis on
how writing strategies and performance can be maintained over time and generalized across
writing assignments. Third, there has been a tendency to examine the effectiveness of writing
strategies in isolation—planning strategies rarely have been investigated in conjunction with
revision or editing strategies to determine their impact on writing behavior and performance,
both separately and in combination (see Graham, 2006). It could very well be that revising is at
the heart of accomplished writing and that much less time should be devoted to planning
instruction, an aspect of the writing process that is highly variable across tasks and individuals.
Fourth, the impact of writing strategies often has been assessed with discrete writing tasks that
are not well articulated with the general education curriculum in terms of the variety of writingactivities or content area mastery. It is likely that embedding strategy training in more
meaningful writing activities will produce more impressive outcomes in the fidelity,
maintenance, and transfer of writing strategies, but this requires the application of sophisticated
research designs.