1️⃣I stopped “sending kids off” to write without explicit directions for what they were supposed to do during the “off you go,” aka the independent writing portion of the writing block.⁣ 🔄 Instead, students were given a specific checklist for each step of the writing process that included genre-specific expectations. ⁣ 2️⃣ I stopped teaching grammar in isolation. The conjunction caterpillar activity may have been cute, but the time, effort, and materials spent did not yield strong enough results to carry on like that. ⁣ 🔄 Instead, I incorporated syntactic awareness routines that took less than 10 minutes a day and allowed students to have sentence-level, contextual conversations about grammar that made the transfer of skills to writing much more effective than the 39th grammar worksheet ever could. ⁣ ⁣ 3️⃣ I stopped throwing writing acronyms at my students until they could identify the point of the acronym and where it fits in the writing process. There are COPS, CUPS, ARMS, RACE, A...