This new statement, "Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing," published by NCTE in February 2016, replaces NCTE's November 2004 "Beliefs on the Teaching of Writing."
In order to provide high quality writing opportunities for all students, teachers need to understand
The wide range of purposes for which people write and the different kinds of texts and processes that arise from those purposes;
Strategies and forms for writing for public participation in a democratic society;
Ways people use writing for personal growth, expression, and reflection, and how to encourage and develop this kind of writing;
How people make creative and literary texts, aesthetic genres, for the purposes of entertainment, pleasure, or exploration;
The ways digital environments have added new modalities while constantly creating new publics, audiences, purposes, and invitations to compose;
The range of non-public uses of writing for self-organization, reflection, planning, and management of information, and the many tools, digital and otherwise, that people use for these purposes;
Appropriate genres for varied academic disciplines and the purposes and relationships that create those forms;
Ways of organizing and transforming school curricula in order to provide students with adequate education in varied purposes for writing;
How to set up a course that asks students to write for varied purposes and audiences.
