Are you a teacher that wants to help your students become better writers? Well, you have come to the right place. In this piece, we will discuss 9 strategies that you can use in the classroom to help your students become better writers.

1. “I Wonder…” Statements- A teaching idea created to help encourage students to ask more questions and to provide a model for active thinking while reading a given text. The statements can be used with any type of text either before, during, or after the reading. The “I wonder” statements can be made orally, visually, or in writing.
2. Journals– An informal writing tool which allows students to summarize, respond to, or further explore their ideas about what they have read.
3. Quickwrites– An informal writing technique which can help ascertain students’ prior knowledge of specific topics, monitor comprehension, or summarize newly acquired knowledge. Students write what they know about a specific topic, which can then be used to determine a starting point for teaching, to evaluate student learning, and to plan future lessons.
4. What is a Tickets Out- An informal writing tool which facilitates student reflection on their learning whereby students answer two questions: (1) what is the most important thing you learned in class today? and (2) what questions do you have about what you learned today? Students respond to the first and second questions, usually, by writing their answers on the front and backside of a graphic organizer, respectively.
5. Structured Note Taking- An informal writing technique which provides a visual framework or organizer to guide students in their note-taking. The visual framework resembles the layout of the page, and some focus only on the text while others include illustrations, charts, and graphs.
6. Text Boxes- An informal writing teaching tool in which the TextBoxes visually mirror the paragraphs, diagrams, and photos on a particular page. Each Text Box has two columns: the first column contains students’ notes about key facts, and the second column contains students’ reflections about the text and questions about what they have read.
7. Investigative Journals- A medium through which students record ideas about topics they want to investigate or about their ongoing research and that promotes inquiry, reflection, and critical thinking. Students should be encouraged to begin their journal entries with “I wonder,” which can serve as the basis for peer discussions or conversations in writing.
8. Dialogue Journals- A conversation tool in which students communicate in writing on a variety of topics which may or may not be prompted. They are also known as interactive journals.
9. Teacher-Guided Writing Lessons- Class exercises for writing instruction based on the specific needs of students, which focus on distinct aspects of written language, such as spelling and punctuation, that are unfamiliar to the learners as well as broader elements of language such as prewriting, paraphrasing, and editing.

What strategies did we miss?