Teaching Writing Strategies

The steps are these: 

Scaffold students' learning of the strategy.
Scaffolding the learning of a writing strategy means helping students to try the strategy with teacher assistance. This is best done in a writing workshop. The workshop setting is ideal for giving varying degrees of assistance according to individual needs. It is also ideal for conferring with individuals and for setting up partnerships and peer groups so that students can assist each other in the learning of strategies. Even when a writing workshop is not used, some amount of in-class writing with teacher assistance is necessary to make sure that writers practice using the strategy being taught.

Repeated practice and reinforcement.
Helping students to work toward independent mastery of the strategy through repeated practice and reinforcement means giving them opportunities to use the strategy many times with decreasing amounts of assistance each time. The idea here is that it is better to teach a few key writing strategies well than it is to teach many of them insufficiently. Students value and master the things we have them do repeatedly. In a way, this gets back to identifying strategies worth teaching -- look for ones that are crucial to writing processes, such as strategies for planning particular types of writing, or for structuring texts certain ways. Then model, practice and repeat.