ABSTRACT
As a method of instruction, interactive writing is nested within the gradual release of responsibility model between teacher modeling and shared writing on one side and independent writing on the other side. When used regularly along with teacher-directed, shared, and independent writing, interactive writing ensures that your students have experienced an opportunity to write with teacher support. This method allows and encourages you to seize and maximize these unplanned opportunities when they offer a teachable moment that will advance and strengthen the writing and, more important, the writers. This flexibility allows you to teach your students where they are as writers and offer them genuine instructional guidance that is both timely and relevant. Young writers need to know all of these elements and, moreover, need to practice them simultaneously in real time, just as real authors do.
