ABSTRACT
Compose is best characterized as a collaborative conversation with students about the craft of writing. As you teach your students to develop and organize their ideas and to consider word choice, you also coach them in the flow of their language to work on sentence fluency. Compose is the place to highlight for students how talk and written text are sometimes different. During Compose, you slow down the writing process in order to magnify what it means to draft and revise ideas. Compose facilitates student ownership of both the writing process and the writing product. Compose offers a powerful place in which students can practice what it means to draft and revise. The Compose part of the lesson may sound like a natural conversation, but it takes intentional work to facilitate this well.
