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Conference with Joshua (from Mark Overmeyer: How Can I Support You?)

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How Can I Support You? Strategies for Effective Writing Conferences www.stenhouse.com/0879.asp Grades 2-6 40-minute DVD + Viewing Guide Available February 2012 Watch Mark Overmeyer as he conducts six individual writing conferences and one group conference with students in grades three and five.

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Teaching Students to Examine Craft Moves and Author's intent (5-8)

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Teaching Students to Examine Craft Moves and Author's intent in Mentor Persuasive Essay in Order to Support Revision (5-8)

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A Danielson Observation of a TCRWP Fourth Grade Writing Workshop in an Integrated Co-Teaching Class - An Observation of a Writing Minilesson

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Watch how a teacher guides Kindergarten students toward Information Writing.

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Peer Conferring: Students Teach Each Other to Revise in Order to Orient their Readers (3-5)

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Using a Writing Survey

How do you get to know the writers in your classroom at the beginning of the school year? When I still had my own classroom, I took a writing sample on the first day of school and then scored the sample using our district's rubric. This first-day assessment gave me a good idea of which students used paragraphs or had good control of mechanics or wrote with detail. As I look back, though, I wonder if this was a sufficient way to really know my students as writers.

For example, if you were to really know me as a writer you might know:

I write a lot of stories about my daughters

I need a deadline to actually get words on paper

I want to write a professional book for teachers

I tend to write in loud-ish places like my kitchen table or my backyard

I haven't used my writer's notebook in over a year

I love to write and I hate to write and I love the way this dichotomy makes me feel

I struggle to find my voice in nonfiction

I have writing mentors such as Kate DiCamillo, Katie Wood Ray, and my colleagues here at Two Writing Teachers

I've encouraged many of my colleagues to become writers

You would not know any of those things about me as a writer if I simply gave you a writing sample. You would have to talk to me (preferably over coffee) to know me as a writer. I regret not taking the time to understand my students better as writers.

I think it takes many weeks of writing and conversation and sharing to begin to uncover the writing identities of students. There is no quick and easy method. However, a writing survey at the beginning of the school year is a step in the right direction and can serve as a springboard for conversations to come. Some questions you might ask:
If you had to choose a room to write in, what would it sound like? Would it be silent? Would there be a TV or radio playing in the background? If you could only write about one thing all year long, what would that be? Imagine yourself fifteen years from now, a famous published author. What did you write? Is there anyone whose writing you really admire? Do you prefer to write with pencil/pen or on a computer? Have you ever had a bad writing experience? Do you know any writers? Where do you think writers get story ideas from? What does "living like a writer" mean to you?
As I think about using a writing survey in classrooms this year, there are three caveats I will keep in mind:

1. There is no substitute for good conversation. This survey will serve as a conversation starter, not as an assessment.

2. There will be many students who have no identity as a writer. Many students will be unable to answer some of these questions. That is okay, too - the lack of an answer is all the answer I need.

3. The survey could be completed using pen and paper. It could also be completed digitally on a Google Doc or Google Form. A third option would be to use the questions as 'interview questions' and complete the survey with each student one-on-one over the first few weeks of school.

Taking the time at the beginning of the school year to learn about students in this way will help me be a more responsive and empathetic writing teacher all year long.

(For more on getting to know your student writers, don't miss Beth's thoughtful post from earlier this week.)

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How do you get to know the writers in your classroom at the beginning of the school year? When I still had my own classroom, I took a writing sample on the first day of school and then scored the sample using our district's rubric.

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Jen Serravallo Walks You Through The Writing Strategies Book

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In the spirit of all things DIY, we created a homemade video series for our upcoming publication, DIY Literacy: Teaching Tools for Differentiation, Rigor, and Independence. We gave an open call for your problems and did you deliver! Each week, we fielded one of your questions and designed a teaching tool to help address that problem in real time.

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Teacher's College (TCRWP)

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Re-Making Essay Writing Katherine Bomer's Book:  The Journey is Everything

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Re-Making Essay Writing Katherine Bomer's Book:  The Journey is Everything

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Special Offer: Save 30% off our list price automatically when you buy 15 or more.

"In the electric, pulsating world around us, the essay lives a life of abandon, posing questions, speaking truths, fulfilling a need humans have to know what other humans think and wonder so we can feel less alone."
-Katherine Bomer

Sadly, many students only know "essay" as a 5-paragraph, tightly structured writing assignment that must check all the boxes of a standardized formula. How did essays in school get so far away from essays in the world? Katherine makes a powerful case for teaching the essay as a way to restore writing to think-that it is in fact necessary for students' success in college and career. "Essay helps students write flexibly, fluently, and with emboldened voices," she writes in The Journey Is Everything, "qualities they can translate into any assigned writing task in school or in life." She argues that the close reading of essays fulfills the recommendations of state and national standards, while practice in essay writing leads to better academic and test writing. More importantly, "Essay gives its author the space, time, and freedom to think about and make sense of things, take a journey of discovery, and speak her mind, without boundaries."

Don't students deserve the chance to develop their own topics, discover their own writing voices, and learn to structure prose organically, according to the content? Katherine gives you tools, strategies, and activities to bring a unit on more authentic writing into your practice. Rediscover the power of the essay to bring out students' true thinking-their true selves. Because after all, the journey is everything.

Part I: Informing Our Vision of Essay

Ch. 1: How to Read an Essay Closely

Ch. 2: Reclaiming Essay

Ch. 3: Naming Craft in Essay

Part II: Translating the Vision to Classroom Practice: How to Write an Essay

Ch. 4: Living Like an Essayist

Ch. 5: Growing Topics into Ideas

Ch. 6: Drafting the Essay

Ch. 7: Shaping and Fine-Tuning the Essay

Part III: Transferring the Vision of Essay to Academic Writing

Ch. 8: Studying Essay Can Improve Academic Writing

Ch. 9: Assessing Essay

Afterword: Let Them Be Heroes

Guest Essays:

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater: Drop-Off Cats

Katie Wood Ray: You Are What You Eat

Randy Bomer: What I Want to Be...

Randy Bomer: There Is a Hercules of Everything

Vicki Vinton: The Thing About Cats

Georgia Heard: Querencia

Isoke Titilayo Nia: The List

Gianna Cassetta: Ice Girls

Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich: They Don't Tell You About That

Deb Kelt: Tattoos: Marked for Life

Lester Laminack: You Didn't Know Me Then

My dream in this book is to occupy essay! I want to reboot the original name of it- essais: little attempts, experiments, trials-and bring essay writing back to its exploratory roots. I want to take the noun, essay, and convert it to the verb, essaying, as Paul Heilker suggests (1996, 180), to describe the trying out we do when we write. When I sit beside students in writing workshops and ask, "What are you working on in your writing?" I hope to hear something like one of my former fifth graders once said: "Well, I'm essaying how it's weird that all us kids are friends and work together in this class, but at lunch, we sit in little groups with our own . . . um . . . colors . . . races? . . . and stuff. And does that mean those are our real friends and not the ones in the class? And why do we do that?"

In this book, I'll ask you to occupy beautiful and brilliant essays, what Robert Atwan calls "the sparkling stuff " featured in his annual Best American Essays series, to create possible models for how to teach essay in ways that will let students discover what they think and want to say. Beginning in Chapter 1, you'll read closely two spectacular examples by Brian Doyle and Dagoberto Gilb just to see and hear and be moved, and to say, "Ah, this. This is it!" Chapter 2 defines explicitly what essay is and is not; then in Chapter 3, I use excerpts from published essays to name specific craft features you can show students. I also suggest how to help students read mentor texts to develop their own definitions of essay.

The chapters in Part 2 of the book will show you how to teach students to develop ideas into essays. We'll explore the writer's notebook as a place to generate, store, and experiment with material (Chapter 4) and then as a place to collect thinking and thickly texture the material to elaborate an essay idea (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 offers strategies for the move from notebooks to first drafts, and then Chapter 7 shows how to help students revise drafts and find a shape and structure without formulas.

As you consider how to teach your students to write essays, I invite you to write along with them because being a writer of your own essay will anchor your understandings and your knowledge of the content and process of writing. You can then teach from "what writers really do," a phrase I borrow from Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton, authors of What Readers Really Do (2012), who argue so eloquently for teachers to look to our own reading experiences to know how to teach reading. Our authentic experiences "need to serve as our rudder as we navigate through curricula and standards, data and assessments" (46).

In Part 3 of the book, I show how practicing essay writing can indeed lead to powerful and well-written academic writing (Chapter 8), and I explore assessment that honors the essay's open-ended and organic essence (Chapter 9). Finally, in the Afterword, I cap off my argument and sound a clarion call for making time to write essays in schools.

Speakers
Email planningservices@heinemann.com if you would like to contact Katherine Bomer directly about professional development support.

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Special Offer: Save 30% off our list price automatically when you buy 15 or more. "In the electric, pulsating world around us, the essay lives a life of abandon, posing questions, speaking truths, fulfilling a need humans have to know what other humans think and wonder so we can feel less alone."

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Opinion Writing Teaching Videos Teacher's College (TCRWP)

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Opinion Writing Teaching Videos Teacher's College (TCRWP)

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Informational Writing Teaching Videos Teacher's College (TCRWP)

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Informational Writing Teaching Videos Teacher's College (TCRWP)

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Narrative Writing Teaching Video from Teacher's College (TCRWP) 

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Narrative Writing Teaching Video from Teacher's College (TCRWP) 

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Best Practices to      Re-energize Writers and Readers

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Best Practices to      Re-energize Writers and Readers

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Video Presentation by Mollie Cura and Rusul Alrubail

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Re-energizing our Struggling Learners: Strategies for Reading and Writing

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Experts Rusul Alrubail and Mollie Cura discuss best practices to support struggling readers and writers.

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Mollie's Resource Page (planning guides & more)

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Mollie's Resource Page (planning guides & more)

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An awesome website with tons of resources for writing teachers.

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A meeting place for a world of reflective writers.

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This is a link to the WRITING WORKSHOP Units of Study Orientation Videos. There are videos for each grade (K-6).

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Thank you for your interest in the Video Orientations from Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Click on the links below to view the Grades K-8 Writing Units of Study videos and be sure to browse the links located at the bottom of this page for additional information.

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Heinemann. A division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Thank you for your interest in the Video Orientations from Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Click on the links below to view the Grades K-8 Writing Units of Study videos and be sure to browse the links located at the bottom of this page for additional information.