Preaching What We Practice: A Study of Revision

Abstract

In this article, a three-tiered nationwide study of the pedagogical implications of teachers' revision practices in digital writing environments is discussed. The study investigates the use of revision in the personal and professional writing of teachers and the teaching of revision in their own classrooms. During a three year period, data were collected from a sampling frame of 150 National Writing Project Summer Institute sites, resulting in 181 study participants, and included a longitudinal pre- and post-survey (including Likert survey items and open-ended questions), focus group and follow-up questions, and analysis of writing/revision samples. Results indicated that the strategies that teacher-participants historically used when revising their own writing were not the strategies they used with students. After attending the National Writing Project (NWP) Invitational Summer Institute (ISI) and participating in the associated Electronic Anthology (EA), however, the practices that the study's teacher-participants embraced while teaching writing revision to students in their own classrooms aligned more closely with the practices that they employed in editing their own writing.