Writing to understand and being understood: Basic design principles for writing instruction

In this chapter, we discuss three basic design principles for creating or redesigning effective writing lessons: initiate communication and metacommunication, demonstrate procedures, and differentiate. These principles should guide the (re)design process and can be used for describing and evaluating instructional units. We consider these principles to be basic knowledge for language teachers, although the ability to implement them with maximum effect will take some years of professionalization via experience in practice and in-service training to obtain. We sketch three consecutive developmental phases in teacher development. We will demonstrate the generic power of these three principles using cases we distilled from classroom practices in Chile and intervention studies designed and tested by teacher-researchers in the Netherlands. We conclude that the essence of writing lessons – understanding and being understood – is not often realized. Having access to the outcomes of research-based interventions can support in-service programs to help teachers move through these three developmental phases and become more experienced writing educators.