What is the Science of Writing?

Teachers introduce the POWeR writing process alongside the TIDE-L organizational framework, then guide students through a close, color-coded analysis of a carefully chosen exemplar that makes the features of effective writing visible, concrete, and immediately aspirational.

Teachers orchestrate rich, collaborative reading, speaking and writing experiences in which POWeR and TIDE-L comes alive through daily self-talk, think-alouds, pair sharing, and high-ratio student talk, building the skills and confidence writers need to respond to high-rigor prompts and complex-text. Through repeated practice and explicit support in memorizing each mnemonic, teachers gradually release students across roughly ten POWeR Cycles until students almost ‘back-pocket’ the strategies and become drivers of their own learning, making the more rigorous learning more accessible and joyful.  

Teachers empower students to become precise, honest evaluators of writing by guiding them through collaborative scoring of exemplars and below-standard pieces, transforming assessment into a motivating, goal-driven practice rooted in growth and deepening ability to produce increasingly better writing. Students must memorize and internalize the language of the scales, terms drawn directly from the standards and anchored to the highest level of performance, because without deeply understanding the ideas behind these terms and the level of writing they describe, students cannot self-regulate toward reaching those standards. As Kanfer (1972) established, self-regulation depends on the clarity and explicitness of the performance standard itself. Students demonstrate that understanding when they use these terms naturally, and ultimately when they call them up and use them privately as they write alone, since writing is at its core a private act guided by an inner voice, and it is precisely these terms that give that inner voice what it needs.

Less a new lesson than a natural deepening of Lesson 3, Lesson 4 enriches scoring by weaving in explicit instruction and modeling on the power of revision, using a peer’s below-standard draft to give students the emotional distance that is often hard to hold when revising one’s own writing. That small but important shift helps students discover that revision is where good writing becomes truly excellent. Woven into weekly scoring routines (sometimes called “Feedback Friday”) across every POWeR Cycle, revision becomes an expected part of writing at all phases, taught and supported until students revise as fluently as they plan.

Teachers guide students to independently discover the organizational structures of any text type by teaching “back mapping” – deconstructing exemplars back into TIDE-L or CSPACE-L ‘jot talk’ filled organizers, cultivating flexible, transferable planning habits that make writing feel purposeful and manageable across every genre.

Saving the best for last, in Lesson 6, teachers even further open up the writer’s mind by modeling rich, relatable self-talk (or ‘replacement talk) and self-regulation strategies through think-alouds, equipping students with the inner language of confidence, persistence, and strategic self-direction they need to guide themselves through every step of the writing process. All through from Lesson 0, teacher instruct students in what self-talk is, how to use it, model using it and scaffold student use. This final lesson further deepens, centers and expand this key element. 

No. Releasing Writers is an integrative approach that is designed to embed seamlessly with what you already use. We offer specialized courses to help you integrate with all major HQIM or self-created curricula. If you prefer, we also have stand-alone Lesson Plan units, but we find most schools want to integrate with their exisiting SS, science and ELA curricula right out of the gate. Our ‘Power Cycle’ makes this easy to do.

We offer live PDs and meetings, led by teachers, coaches and school leaders who have all used the approach and seen ELA impact. We have also developed scaffolds to help you launch available only at our TPT think SRSD site. Our goal is to make it easy for you to launch evidence-based practices in ways that lead not just to writing growth, but overall ELA proficiency gains.

Yes. Releasing Writers includes the key ingrediants from decades of peer-reviewed research – and proven implementation in our schools nationwide. We are built on this research, and have followed careful fit and fidelity guidelines to make Releasing Writers easier to pick up and show wider ELA impact (gains in reading comprehension, sentence quality and further areas.) After facing barriers around how to integrate common well-supported isolated writing instruction models with the day to day needs of teachers, we discovered how to integrate multiple evidence-based practices for teaching reading and sentence writing with writing instruction in our unique POWeR Cycle model.

Absolutely. Everyone does. We have yet to see two schools take this on without customizing away. We guide schools with specialized ‘fit and fidelity’ tools to help you embed Releasing Writers nto your existing curriculum and align with state standards, as well as to meet local context needs. We honor and respect teacher-expertise. Our team includes school-based practitioners who have used evidence-based approaches for teaching writing for decades, tracking the research and adapting it to fit the needs of our varied contexts in ways to make it endure over time and lead to greater ELA proficiency gains.