By Christine Gavin Teahan
Founder & Director | CGT Learning Throughline
Aligning Instruction, Curriculum, & Community

In part 1, we looked at why a short writing prompt can overwhelm a student with dyslexia. Writing asks students to hold an idea in mind while choosing words, building a sentence, spelling, and forming letters, all on the same limited “desk” of working memory. When spelling or handwriting still takes conscious effort, less room is left for planning and composing. That is why a student’s spoken explanation of the Stamp Act can be much stronger than what reaches the page. In this post, we turn to what teachers can do about it.

Executive function is involved in writing, but “improve executive function” is too broad to guide a lesson. Teachers need an instructional target they can model, observe, and practice.

In a study of 402 struggling readers and writers in grades 3-5, executive function and motivation were associated with spelling and, indirectly, with writing performance (Ahmed et. al., 2022). Writing-specific processes—including handwriting, spelling, planning, editing, and revision—were also associated with students’ writing performance. The instructional implication is important: students need direct teaching in the processes that produce a piece of writing. It is not enough to give them more prompts and hope that planning or revising develops incidentally.

Lower-level skills and higher-order processes require different kinds of teaching. Spelling, handwriting, and keyboarding need accurate instruction and enough practice to become increasingly fluent. Planning and revision also need explicit instruction, as well as modeling, guided practice, and routines that students learn to use with greater independence. Teachers can reduce unnecessary demands during a particular assignment while continuing to build the skills that students will need in the long term.

The aim is to decide which part of writing students are learning and keep other demands from obscuring it, without lowering expectations for the content.

Before assigning a paragraph or essay, model the process of breaking down the prompt for your class. And make those steps available to students on the board, on paper, or in a digital document. Use concrete actions such as read, mark, choose, outline, draft, revise, and edit.

The sequence should be specific to the assignment. “Complete prewriting” is less helpful than “Choose two details and place each one under the claim it supports.” A general checklist can remind students that planning comes first, but it cannot replace instruction in how to plan a particular response.

As students gain skills, expand the planning tool. They might move from sorting two details under a claim to grouping several ideas, selecting an order, and showing how each section supports a larger argument.

Pause at the transitions between steps and ask students to reflect on what they have completed and what comes next. At first, the teacher may lead the pauses. Later, students can use the sequence on their own.

These stages serve different purposes:

• Planning is deciding what to say and how to organize it. A linear plan works best.
• Drafting is turning the plan into sentences and connected text.
• Revising is improving meaning, clarity, and organization.
• Editing is correcting spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and usage.

When students try to manage all four simultaneously, the most immediate concern often takes over. For a student with dyslexia, that concern may be spelling. A misspelled word can interrupt the sentence before the idea is complete. If the student stalls at spelling, how can they get the rest done if they are attempting to do it all at once?

Explicitly teach each stage of writing, and give each its own brief directions and criteria in an assignment. Also, make sure to clearly distinguish between editing and revising. For example, correcting the spelling of the word representative is editing. Adding an explanation of why the lack of representation angered the colonists is revision. Students need explicit instruction in both.

Many writing and grammar “lessons” are presented to teachers as generic fill-in-the-blank style worksheets that don’t intentionally focus students on meaningful chunks of sentences. Carefully consider where the focus of your instruction will be.

For example, if students are expected to use subordinating conjunctions, teach the underlying relationship before asking them to use the structure in a paragraph.

Begin by explicitly teaching the meaning of although and how writers use it at the beginning of sentences.

Then, model an introductory dependent clause (without using the grammar jargon):

Although Parliament needed money,________

Then teach the students how to add the main clause:

Although Parliament needed money, many colonists opposed the Stamp Act.

Think aloud as you build the sentence and demonstrate how the clause you are adding is one that could stand alone as a complete thought. Show where the comma goes and why. Then, construct another example with the class before students try one independently. This gives students practice with sentence construction without also requiring them to come up with new content.

For more ideas about how to break down writing skills at the sentence level, see The Writing Revolution by Hochman, Wexler, and Maloney.

Students with dyslexia still need explicit, cumulative spelling instruction and support in developing fluent handwriting or keyboarding. They also need access to grade-level content and thinking while those skills are developing.

Depending on the purpose of the assignment and the student’s plan or accommodations, support might include:

• speech-to-text;
• a personal spelling reference;
• permission to mark uncertain spelling and continue drafting; or
• partially completed notes or an outline when content knowledge, rather than planning, is being assessed.

The support should match the instructional goal. If the lesson is assessing understanding of the Stamp Act, spelling difficulty should not prevent the student from showing that understanding. If the lesson is teaching a spelling pattern, the student needs to produce and examine the spelling.

You can also compare what a student says with what a student writes. Ask for a brief oral response before drafting, or let the student dictate one section. Much fuller oral response suggests that transcription may be limiting written output, but this classroom comparison is not a diagnosis. Use it to choose supports and to decide what to examine more closely.

Students benefit from learning how to use a good strategy, not merely receiving the materials for it. A completed outline does little good if the student does not know when to look at it, how to find the relevant point, or how to check that the point appeared in the draft.

Model the questions a writer asks:

• What is my goal for this paragraph?
• Which step am I working on now?
• What information do I need in front of me?
• Does this sentence match the point in my outline?
• Am I revising ideas or editing?

At first, ask the questions aloud and prompt students to use the task sequence. Gradually reduce those prompts as students begin to initiate the steps and check themselves.

This approach is consistent with intervention research. A meta-analysis of 43 studies involving students with learning disabilities in grades 1-12 found positive effects for writing interventions overall, with especially strong results for explicit strategy instruction. Instruction in processes such as planning and revising mattered; assigning those processes without teaching them did not produce the same benefit (Gillespie, A., & Graham, S. 2014). More recent work also supports combining writing strategies with goal setting and self-monitoring.

Choose one paragraph assignment you already plan to teach. Before giving it to students, decide if you can replace the paragraph assignment with sentence-level instruction. If you stick with the paragraph, do the following:

1. Break the task into visible steps.
2. Prepare a simple outline that matches the prompt.
3. Select one sentence structure to model with familiar content.
4. Decide what students will check during revision and what they will check during editing.
5. Identify one transcription support that is appropriate for students who need it.

As students work, watch for observable changes:

• Do they begin sooner?
• Do they return to the outline while drafting?
• Does the written response include more of what they explained orally?
• Are they able to revise meaning before turning to spelling and punctuation?
• At which step do pauses and errors increase?

Those observations will not provide a clinical assessment of working memory, but they can improve your next instructional decision.

A student with dyslexia who struggles to write may understand the content, have relevant ideas, and be willing to work. The difficulty may lie in coordinating several processes that are not yet fluent. Teachers can respond by making the process explicit, teaching each part, and reducing competing demands when they interfere with the purpose of the assignment.

Students with dyslexia need explicit instruction in spelling, transcription, sentence construction, planning, and revising, and enough support to participate in complex, grade-level thinking while those skills develop.

Supporting executive function in writing doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means deciding what students are learning in a given task, teaching that process explicitly, and keeping other demands from crowding it out. It means intentionally scaffolding instruction and then gradually fading out the scaffolds so that students do not become dependent on them. Students with dyslexia often need sustained instruction in spelling, transcription, sentence construction, planning, and revising. They also need access to complex, grade-level thinking while those skills develop. Teachers can provide both, and students need both.

Christine Gavin Teahan is the founder and director of CGT Learning Throughline. Formerly, she was a middle school teacher of students with language-based learning differences, after which she spent 6 years leading professional development for The Writing Revolution. She holds a BS and MEd in Special Education