What is SRSD?
Below is a brief overview of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). We also invite you to read the free articles written by thinkSRSD’s team and the many SRSD researchers listed here. In a nutshell, SRSD is a structured and explicit approach that provides students strategies and deliberate skill practice activities (ie structured sentence expansion, variation and cohesion excercises) that lighten the cognitive load and enable them to translate their ideas onto paper more easily.
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SRSD’s Key Structured Literacy Characteristics
SRSD is a complex and deeply evidence-based approach to teaching writing, but thinkSRSD makes it easy for teachers to learn.
Research on SRSD done in empirical studies, as well as from schools partnering with us at thinkSRSD show the significant transformation this approach makes possible when teachers adopted deeply structured approaches to teaching writing. While there are many elements to SRSD, key characteristics are often already familiar to teachers. Starting with these, launches a successful start.
Exemplars & Tool Kits that Lighten Cognitive Load
The SRSD journey launches with a vision of possibility. Students see exemplars written by peers or in mentor texts, then receive lenses for analyzing these. Students are explicitly guided to notice key levels such as how text structure works, syntactic variation and word choice. They then engage in deliberate sentence expansion, variation and cohesion exercises.
Explicitly Build Self-Regulation
Inspired with vision, prepared with scaffolds, students watch models of how to go through the writing process and begin to use it themselves, with support. This support is designed to launch them as agentive, self-regulating writers who are in charge.
Scaffolds & Explicit Skill Building
These lenses then become scaffolds students use to create their own writing. Additional scaffolds such as how to follow the writing process are then offered. Students also engage in deliberate sentence level activities to help them compose more fluently.
Data=Based Instruction & Formative Assessment
Students finally learn how to evaluate writing. They work toward goals they set, writing for real purposes and enlisting support from their community of peers and adults Teachers, and students, regularly assess their writing, set goals and monitor progress toward these goals.
About Us
thinkSRSD is the community of teachers and researchers who use and study SRSD. We offer SRSD in-person professional development and e-learning courses taught by teachers with decades of experience using SRSD. The teachers at thinkSRSD have taught SRSD courses for over 10 years, since offering the very first open enrollment course in SRSD in 2008.
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