We have started teaching writing explicitly and systematically, however our knowledge of sentence structure is limited. Do we need to know a lot about grammar to help students?

If you are teaching writing in an explicit and systematic way, you are already doing well. To continue to see growth in students you do need to know a great deal about grammar and sentence structure. This begins with the eight parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and articles). You then need to understand sentence structure, however you can't build...