How the Seven Steps started
The Seven Steps program was created by Jen McVeity, melding her expertise as an author, a classroom teacher and her passion for gifted education.
While working with gifted writers, she discovered that (in spite of their immense talent) they kept making similar writing errors over and over again. She set out to track the most frequent errors. There were seven of them.
For over two years, she used her author training and skills to experiment with ways to 'cure' the mistakes. The Seven Steps program began when she discovered the 'chunking' method. Breaking down writing into simple stages meant children were suddenly leaping ahead in their skills - and enjoyment - of writing.
Like all great techniques, the Seven Steps to Writing Success has proved to work with ALL kids, not just gifted children. In fact one school has just claimed that 18 months after implementing the Seven Steps, their state tests have revealed that over 25% of their grade 5 students were 'off the scale'.
The Seven Steps program is now in a third of Australian schools and is used by over 16,000 teachers.