Caution – Must Stop Over-Prompting During Writing!!
January 25, 2025 What’s the Problem? Most educators who work with students with disabilities are aware that over-prompting can:
• Limit growth in learning (having too much support means that students don’t have to do the ‘hard work’
• Cause students to avoid risk-taking. Many students just want to be ‘right’ and over-prompting feeds into that. Students MUST take risks to learn.
• Contribute to ‘learned helplessness.;’ This is the situation where learners become passive and don’t take any control over their learning.
Over-prompting is a problem in all areas, but this blogpost will focus on over-prompting during writing.
Over-Prompting in Writing? Partners may over-prompt during writing for a variety of reasons:
• For emergent writers, partners may ‘help’ so that it ‘spells something.’ This is a problem because emergent writing can be a window into what students are thinking and what they have learned. Errors can help educators figure out how to target instruction. Partners often tell students what to write, even though the ideas may not belong