When I began teaching seventh and eighth grade English, right out of my undergraduate program, I thought I didn't need extensive training in composition theories and methods to teach thirteen and fourteen year olds how to write. I thought I could just use coiDiilon sense and my own experiences to manage a writing curriculum. Two years later, I found myself in graduate school studying, of all things, rhetoric and composition theories. My experience at the middle school level taught me that it was composition instruction that my students needed most of all. And even though I had taken some college courses and workshop in-selVices on teaching writing as a process, the methods of composition instruction they presented weren't working as effectively as the presenters and instructors claimed they would.