Using Sentence Frames in the Classroom
The Writing Revolution Templates
I spent a semester trying to get students to move past the basic subject-verb-object structure in their writing, and these templates ended up being both the solution and the source of my biggest frustration. The basic idea is straightforward: you give students a structured frame to fill in, and over time they internalize the syntax. The framework was originally built by Rachel and Brian Enders, drawing on Hayden McNeil's groundwork at the Institute for Learning at Penn. The core tool is what they call sentence stems—short open-ended prompts that start with a syntactic cue like "Although," "Since," or "This shows that." The problem most people hit is that students learn to parrot the frames rather than use the underlying reasoning. I saw this happen in my own classroom. Students would produce grammatically correct sentences that said absolutely nothing substantive because they were focused on hitting the template structure instead of thinking about what they were arguing. The workaround I landed on was to require a content-first draft where students wrote a free-form version before applying any frame. It added about ten minutes per assignment, but it made the difference between empty syntax and actual argumentation. The three types of frames in the system are the although/but/therefore structure for argumentation, the since/because/caused structure for explanation, and the descriptive frames for narrative or expository writing. Each one trains a different mode of thinking. The although/but/therefore frame, for instance, forces students to acknowledge a counterargument before stating their position. That's valuable scaffolding for academic writing, but it becomes a crutch if you never transition away from it.
Here's the part nobody really talks about: the templates only work if you systematically fade them out. I kept using them through the entire year because it was easier than designing alternative assignments, and by the time the spring exams came around, most of my students couldn't write a coherent paragraph without a stem on the board. You need to phase them out across a six to eight week cycle, moving from filled-in frames to partially blank frames to open-ended prompts. The curriculum guide has a suggested timeline, but it's optimistic for most real-world schedules. I compressed mine into four weeks and accepted that some students would need extra support during untimed assessments. Another practical issue is alignment with your existing curriculum. These templates were designed with a general literacy focus in mind, which means you're doing the adaptation work for your specific subject area. When I used them in a social studies class, I had to rewrite roughly sixty percent of the stems to fit the content standards and the specific historical thinking skills I was targeting. A stem like "One cause of the event was ___" works fine until you're studying a complex multi-causal event like the French Revolution, at which point you need more nuanced frames that distinguish between long-term structural causes and immediate triggers. The resource itself is available through the Manhattan Research site, and there's a free sample chapter on their website. The full curriculum guide runs about eighty dollars for the book, and the supplementary materials vary. I found the printed manual useful mainly as a reference rather than a step-by-step script, and I made most of my materials by adapting the basic stem structures directly rather than buying the pre-made units. It took more upfront time but produced better-aligned results.
There's also a digital companion called The Writing Revolution Digital Platform that offers more ready-to-use templates and tracking tools. It costs additional money and some schools subscribe through districts. Honestly, the free stem list from the original book covers about ninety percent of what you'll need if you're willing to do the adaptation yourself. The digital platform's main advantage is the progress tracking dashboard, which is useful if you're managing multiple sections and need to monitor which students are progressing through the fading cycle. The method has real limitations that worth being upfront about. It does not work well for English language learners who are still building foundational sentence-level grammar, because the frames assume a baseline syntactic competence. It struggles with highly creative or informal writing assignments where the rigid structure feels artificial. And for advanced placement or IB courses, the templates can become too simplistic after the initial scaffolding phase—you'll need to supplement with more complex rhetorical frameworks fairly quickly. If you're considering implementing this in your own classroom, the honest assessment is that it's a solid starting point but not a complete writing program. The sentence stem approach teaches form before substance, which means you need to pair it with deliberate content instruction and regular feedback on idea development. Used as one component of a broader writing curriculum, it cuts the time students spend staring at a blank page by roughly half and improves the mechanical quality of their drafts within two to three weeks. The deeper critical thinking and stylistic development requires additional instructional work beyond the templates themselves.
Get the Full Details
The Manhattan Research website at manhattanresearch.com has the free resources and the purchasing information. That's about all there is to know about sourcing the materials. The rest depends on how deliberately you plan the fade-out sequence and how honestly you evaluate whether your students are actually reasoning or just filling in blanks.
