The Process Approach to Writing Instruction, Chapter 19, by Pritchard & Honeycutt

This one's going to be about process, and it's going to focus on teaching K-12. It's also going to talk about the NWP and whether it's advancing professional development for teachers.

They start with a lit review. But they'll only include studies that use observation (empirical) evidence. And only those that deal with K-12. Are they limited, or focused? We'll see.

Hillock's "natural process mode" sounds like a vacation for the teachers and a waste for the students. Glad we finished with that theory. Or are we? We did something very similar in ENG 086 at Essex a few years ago. Prewrite-Plan-Write-Revise. Sounds similar to what the authors are describing. The research later determines that teacher instruction helps students' writing improve with the process model.

Let me say one more time that I hate hypothesis. This time, I cannot highlight or quote. Is it dependent upon the page that's being annotated? I'm signed in, I'm using Chrome. This program is a nuisance, not a useful tool. Disrupting my reading, is all it's doing.

The process model seems to have evolved and continues to evolve. They talk about education in rhetoric in ancient Greece, and then jump to the 50's when writing began to be understood as a process. There were also writing groups, but not widespread until the 70's. The process approach was born when writers wanted to introduce how real writers write into classroom instruction. This has been the standard in writing pedagogy since the 1980's, but it's usually been presented as linear instead of recursive. Linear isn't really how it works, though.

Janet Emig's dissertation, I remember: convey message and self reflection. And the Graves study, which was basically all observation and case study with little kids. We read both last semester (or over the summer?). And now Elbow's work. It's like a bunch of old pals...

Research in the 80's about the process approach says that using the process approach almost every day gives best results. This from lots of schools and huge sample sizes, but none of the data is actually available. What? And the term "process writing" was never defined for the study. Really? and even the researchers don't agree on what it is. So what's the value of the research?

Calkins' study seems extremely problematic. Sample size of 1? I would assume that an intelligent and harworking child's writing would have developed from one grade to the next regardless of the teaching method.

Honeycutt used the "grounded approach."

Prewriting is a large part of the process approach. Before, the only prewriting was discussing the assignment.  Also, revision was neglected prior to the process approach.

So, does the National Writing Project help train teachers to teach the process approach? The summer institute is the tool that is supposed to handle this task. It serves approximatel 1 in 40 teachers in all states, and has lots of testimonial to say that it does improve teachers' teaching strategies. The ability to study transferability to the classroom is not available. Most evidence is empirical, based on teacher feedback of "teacher impact, " not student impact. However, there is evidence that students benefit from the training the teachers receive, and that coworkers (teachers) benefit from the shared learning of teachers in their schools. In 2004, the NWP put some research standards into place to evaluate their impact.

The authors call for studies to determine whether the process approach is better for certain genres of writing than others. They also want to see the subprocesses studied. They want to see pedagogy grounded in research to determine best practices.