Self-Regulated Strategy Development Instruction: Effects of Lesson Structure on a Teacher's Behaviors

Self-regulated strategy development instruction or SRSD is a method developed for teaching students how and what to think while writing. SRSD instruction for the persuasive writing strategy POW (Pick my idea, Organize notes, Write and Say more) + TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons, Explain reasons, Ending) helps students by teaching them to develop their thoughts into manageable components prior to and during the writing process. In this descriptive study a teacher's behavior was carefully measured to examine the effects SRSD for POW+TREE. The results show a high number of opportunities to respond were provided by the teacher. Furthermore, the ratio of opportunities to respond to praise increased as the student engaged in terminal writing behaviors. The results of the present descriptive study should be viewed as preliminary due to the lack of controls, however, it does offer insight into how POW+TREE positively effected one teacher's behavior.