Strategic Writing: The Writing Process and Beyond in the Secondary English Classroom

Deborah Dean is back with a significantly re-envisioned and revised edition of her popular Strategic Writing. After working with high school teachers who implemented the approach detailed in the first edition, Dean has refined, reorganized, and updated the material to better support classroom teachers dedicated to teaching not just the process of writing but also the strategies of writing that help students develop the ability to write effectively throughout their lives. Most of the changes were prompted by the desire to help teachers better understand an overall strategic approach that can counter the testing climate that pervades many schools.

This approach works within a workshop model and uses the writing process as an umbrella framework. In addition to providing engaging and practical classroom activities, this new edition offers:

(1) Explicit strategy talk, with lesson plans that differentiate between strategy, activity, and mini-lesson to further demonstrate how all three function in a strategic approach. (2) A focus on digital tools and genres, which have proliferated in the last ten years. (3) A more accessible organization, with the conceptual material in early, short chapters and the teaching ideas, examples of student work, and lesson plans in appendixes. (4) Grouping by types of strategies for better alignment with process than with rhetoric.

As always, Dean considers students’ out-of-school as well as in-school writing tasks, preparing them for a world in which writing is a critical skill, whether for school, work, information, or self-expression.