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new concept as it allows the opportunity to catch and address misconceptions in
the moment (Riches, 2019). Once modeling is finished, the teacher and students
should practice together by completing a graphic organizer as a group, with the
teacher guiding and prompting students with their ideas to ensure they complete it
correctly. Finally, the students can choose their own topics and fill out an organizer
independently. At this stage, the teacher should check student work and provide
feedback before the students begin to write their own individual essays. Before fully
releasing students to complete their work, the teacher can also model how to use the
organizer during the writing process and how to follow it exactly when drafting. This
is beneficial if students practice “stream of consciousness” writing, where they write
whatever comes to mind and change from topic to topic. This practice of adhering
directly to the pre-planned organizer can help to prevent deviation when students are
writing on their own.

Color Coding
Another easily implemented organizational strategy is Aumen’s Step-Up-to-
Writing (2015) color-coding strategy. With this strategy, students are taught to
color code their topic sentence in green to mean “go” and decide what they will
share; their reasons or facts in yellow meaning to “slow down” and explain the key
concepts; their details in red to mean “stop” and present evidence with explanation
and examples; and then their conclusion in green again to mean “go back to your
topic.” This process allows students to visualize the way the paragraph is organized
through color, and once they have finished drafting, they can return to what they
have written and highlight with the appropriate colors to make sure they followed
their plan accordingly (Auman, 2015).
Again, a quick adaptation of the strategy allows students to modify the color-
coding strategy to edit their work, helping them to remember the integral parts of
an informational essay as shown on their graphic organizer. As shown in Figure 1,
the hook and closing statement were pink, the topic sentence was green, the three
facts were yellow, and the two examples for each fact were orange. This color-
part association allows students to go back into their essays and highlight with the
corresponding colors to check to make sure each piece has been included. It provides
students with a way to edit that is more visual, which is beneficial when working
with a population of special education students.
Students should first learn to color code their writing using anchor papers of
previous student work or teacher-generated work. The use of anchor papers allows
students to “gauge an appropriate level of expectations or quality” (Culham, 2010,
p. 7) and model good writing much like a mentor text. Students practice identifying
and highlighting the key pieces of an essay through the anchor papers and analyze
if any pieces from the graphic organizer are missing. Students are then prompted
to give suggestions or “feedback” about the missing pieces and what they believe
needs to be added to include each key piece. From that practice, students should be
able to apply the process to their own writing.
It is important that students are provided with a color-coded graphic organizer
(Figure 1). Using the organizer, students can identify the corresponding colors and
what they planned on writing and then cross reference the plan with their draft.
Students should then highlight their work if it matches and leave it blank if it does
not. If students have a missing element indicated by a blank section, they know they
need to edit that area as it does not match their organizer.

Educators’ Choice 9