Teaching Writing

Over the last year, the work of Nancy Atwell and Vicki Spandell have made a large impact on the way facilitate writing for all students. Matching their discussions on writer's workshop with my knowledge of writing development and the writing process allows me to create a writing program, with instruction and assessment, for all abilities and needs.

I teach mainstream freshmen at all abilities levels, so I see a range of ability and need in my classroom. Writing develop has five stages: emergent, initial, transition, basic, and refinement. However, my students mainly fall into the description of basic and refinement stages of writing development. My students are knowledgeable and capable of various prewriting strategies and are capable of revision and editing. (That's not to say that all students preform these tasks unless I pressure them to do so). My students also tend to write drafts that require several sittings to complete and they use focused questions from me and the writer when they do formal peer conferencing. Most of my students also love to receive feedback on their writing, whether from peers or from me. Many of my honors students exhibit traits of the refinement stage such as writing differently than they speak, writing for many different purposes or from different points of view, and high mastery for grammar and mechanics. Meanwhile other students, usually those not in honors courses, have some traits of transitional development, such as thinking revision is redoing their work, trouble editing, and stories that cover all points of the plot equally.

With such a wide range of students, it is important that I design a program that reaches all students. I've implemented a writing workshop in my classroom and have found that its flexibility meets the range in students needs better than my previous writing program. This program also has the ability to meet the needs of ELL students, although I have not yet had an ELL student in my class.

I see my students for eighty minutes every other day. Using Atwell's suggestion that students are more likely to read at home than to writer at home, I structured my class-time to have a block of thirty minutes of writing time at the end of every period. First of all, this structure created predictable writing time as recommended by Regie Routman in Writing Essentials (2004). My students know that they are expected to write every class, so they easily transition into this activity and are used to the types of activities they can preform during this time. They know they can work on any stage of the writing process of a piece, or they can refer to the menu on the board if they need more specific direction. This helps to meet the different abilities in the classroom. Students can work at their own pace and focus on their own areas of need during writing time. For example, a student who needs extra time to process can take longer drafting a story than a student who needs to spend more time on editing a final draft. Likewise, this class structure allows ELL students the opportunity to do activities such as having stories scribed, tape recording and playing back stories, working on phonics and vocabulary, or using pictionaries, which might otherwise interfere with or stand out in a class where all students were working at the same pace on the same step.

Other than the ten to fifteen minutes of required silent time, students are allowed to talk during our writing time. As Routmen (2004) summarizes: “A community of writers who share ideas and respond helpfully to one another makes it easier and more enjoyable to write.” Often, this social interaction takes the form of conferencing. Some conferences are very informal. I often see friends swap notebooks and read each other's work, more to share an idea or receive affirmation than to ask for deep criticism. Other times, a small group of students will sit discussing one students topic in-depth for several minutes. I've also observed students asking each other for quick help or criticism, such as how to spell a word, a synonym, or to read a line over to see if it “sounds okay.” When I started writing workshop, I was weary of this aspect of the program; I thought no writing would occur and students would always be off task. While there are still talkative students and students who avoid work, from observing my students I've seen that pretty much all students do write every class period and the social interaction provides them with support. The social interaction in the classroom also helps ELL students. These students not only receive greater exposure to language being used, but they can use their peers as a resource; as Routman summarizes Freeman and Freeman (2002), Krashen (2003), and Knapp et al. (1995) in Writing Essentials: “English Language Learners ... are more apt to succeed when they are immersed in a challenging curriculum and give lots of opportunities for scaffolded conversations and shared experiences.” Kagan and Holt also argue that working collaboratively helps to build self-esteem.

During writing time students can also conference with me, which is advocated by Atwell (1998), Routmen (2004), Graves (1994), and Calkins (1994). I typically see two types of conferences: students who want help getting started and students who want help polishing a draft. In general, conferencing allows me to get to know my students personally and as writers. I am able to validate their attempts, respond to their content as a reader, and offer guidance about what next steps to take next. Also, teacher conferencing is a great opportunity for me to individualize instruction for the various ability levels and needs in my classroom. For example, one conference may focus on helping a student notice places in a story where the reader wants more detail and I can talk to the student about exploding the moment, as Barry Lane puts it in After the End (1993). Then the next conference, might focus on word choice in a persuasive essay and helping the writer to see how specific word choice can turn off or sway the reader. Preforming these lessons as a full class would not be as effective as giving the information to individual students through a personal conference dealing with their specific piece of writing. Having time built into class for conferencing with me is an additional way I can support an ELL student. During conferences, I can help build prior knowledge, make connections between new and old information, and classify information about various areas of language depending on the students literacy level in English and their other language(s). Conference time can also be a time where I could scribe for a student who has developed Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills, but not yet Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency.

The ability for students to conference with me and peers during their writing time fits into one of the major principles of my writing program, which is also part of our school and state curriculum: Writing is a process consisting of prewriting (or planning), drafting, revising, editing, and publishing (Routman, 2003; Calkins; Graves, 1983). My students have received instruction on the writing process before entering my classroom, but we are always going back to the process to define its steps and discuss how to use them. Where I used to just lecture about the steps, I've since learned that modeling of the steps works better to illustrate how to use them, which Vicki Spandell, Nancy Atwell, Katie Wood Roy, and Linda Rief advocate. Earlier this year, I took my students through the steps I used to write a poem. I shared with my students how I got the idea for my poem while I was driving, so when I got home, I rushed to map out my thinking. I then explained how I zeroed in on one idea and how I decided that a poem would be the best genre to use for my idea. The lesson ended there that day, and I asked students to think about how they narrow down a topic and chose a genre while they worked on their prewriting. Another day I showed my students my first draft of the poem. I showed them how I didn't worry too much about the structure, grammar, or spelling because I wanted to get the ideas down. Still another day, I showed them the changes I made through three drafts of my poem and did some additional revision out loud while they watched, and then we discussed the different types of things one can do while revising a poem. These short lessons on the writing process help students in a few ways. First, they allow them to see how the steps are used on a real piece of writing. Secondly, the students saw my life as a writer, particularly how I choose topics that are from my deepest interests (Graves). Lastly, they allow me to start the gradual release of responsibility process with these writing skills. For example, after the lesson where I shared my revision, I asked students to share in the demonstration and provide their input on what to revise in a different draft.

One of the most important elements of my writing workshop design is choice as endorsed by Atwell, Graves, and Routman. For me, reading Vicki Spandell's chapter on “The Right to Choose a Personally Important Topic” in The Nine Rights of Every Writer (2005), helped me to see why choice is so important for students while still explaining that there a balance still exists between choice and necessary content writing. Now, my students chose their own topics and to try different genres. For most students, the choice is their favorite part of my class. These students are excited to work in their favorite genres and to try new ones, or they have a wealth of subjects to explore through writing. However, there are many students who find such choice overwhelming. I often conference with these students about how I choose a topic. We discuss what they know a lot about or if there are important life experiences they want to share. Or, we might begin by looking at the list of genres posted in the room and seeing if one sounds more interesting than the others. Choice is another element that supports writing for ELL students. Allowing such students to chose a topic about which they already have knowledge can make writing much less daunting than processing new material and writing in a new language at the same time. Also, just as with other students, choice can be a motivator.

The writing workshop easily matches many of the elements of my school curriculum. For example, I can easily work on grammar and conventions with students individually, or when I see a persistent problem with all students, as mini lessons for the whole class. These items of the curriculum easily fit into the local, state, and national assessments we participate in such as the NWEA, the SAT verbal section, and local assessments that evaluate student writing. Another large area in the freshmen curriculum is achieving deep revision versus surface revisions, and is highly supported by Donald Graves and Barry Lane. The workshop format allows students ample time to rework their pieces alone and with support from peer and me; additionally, I am able to give multiple mini-lessons on the topic and foster gradual release of those skills.

However, other aspects of the writing workshop do not directly address our assessments. So, there are times when I must suspend student choice for us to work on types of writing they will need to do for assessments. The timed essay portion of the SAT and literary analysis essays needed for AP courses are perfect examples. Students do not elect to do these types of writing on their own; in fact, most of my students have never done them before. So, at certain points in the year, we suspend choice and the students work on these types of writing. However, as much as possible, the rest of the structure of writing workshop is kept the same. For example, students still use social interaction while writing their lit analysis essay and I still model the steps of writing a timed piece.

The writing workshop also allows me to foster the connection between reading and writing that Allington and Richard Gentry promote. Not only do my students receive time to read and writer every class period, but there are several other opportunities for them to connect being a reader and being a writer. I encourage students to emulate the craft of the writer's whose work we read, such as using the literature and poetic devices we study in our class discussions of literature in their own writing. But perhaps the most common connections is when a student asks me about trying a new genre. Many students wrote children's books this year, but were unsure of how to start since they hadn't read one in years. Similar situations happened for students writing book or movie reviews, pamphlets, sports articles, or various types of poems. When students come to me with these concerns, my first advice is to look in the classroom library for examples of the type of writing they want to try and read them critically. I tell them that those examples are the templates and directions for trying that genre on their own. The ELL student is also helped by the connections formed between reading and writing through using a workshop design. Having time to read at the beginning of class as well as allowing reading as part of processing for writing increases ELL students exposure to print.