16382975 collaboratively-developing-an-effective-program-for-teaching-writing

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DEVELOPING THE WRITING I.Q.* PROGRAM:

*(I = Impact of content, Q = Quality of language)

A Strengths-Based, Best Practices Process Journal and Resource Guide for Teachers K - 12

By Jim Evers

Dominican College Writing Project

DEVELOPING

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THE WRITING I.Q.* PROGRAM: *(I = Impact of content, Q = Quality of language)

A Strengths-Based, Best Practices Process Journal

and Resource Guide for Teachers K - 12

By Jim Evers

Dominican College Writing Project

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DEVELOPING THE WRITING I.Q. PROGRAM: A Strengths-Based, Best Practices Process Journal and Resource Guide for Teachers K - 12 __________________________________________ by Jim Evers Copyright ! 2004 James L. Evers All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission of the author. Printed by Dominican College Writing Institute 470 Western Highway Orangeburg, NY 10962 845-359-7800 Ext. 210

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................1 -10 Bane of Superintendent's Day Three Principles for Teachers of Writing What You Can Expect from Using This Process Journal Why a Common Curriculum is Needed Some Classroom Issues Putting Marks on Papers Rubrics and Guides Writer's Guide and Assessment tool Back Ground of the Writing I.Q. Program Being a Writing Coach Where the Content of this Publication Came From Professional Writing Final Thoughts Suggested Structure for Seminar Charge to Teachers

PART ONE SEMINAR PROCESS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL........11 Section One: EXPLORING LOCAL REALITIES.....................................................................................11 Step 1. Clarifying Your Thoughts About writing....................................................11 Step 2. Collecting Local Best Practices...................................................................14 Step 3. Identifying Other Widely-Used Best Practices...........................................16 Step 4. Reviewing Key Resources..........................................................................16 Section Two: BUILDING THE WRITING IQ GUIDE AND ASSESSMENT TOOL Step 1. Critiquing Collected Writing Samples........................................................22

Step 2. Putting it All Together in a Writing I.Q. Writers Guide and Assessment Tool....................................................................................................26

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Step 3. Using the Tool and Coaching Writers........................................................31 Self-coaching/Assessing Peer coaching/Assessing Teacher Coaching (conferencing) and Assessing Parent Coaching and Assessing Workbook Section Three: EXPLORING KEY REALITIES OF WRITING..................................................................35

PART TWO A REVIEW OF BEST CLASSROOM PRACTICES AND KEY RESOURCES.....45 Review Section One: BRIEF EXPLANATIONS OF WIDELY-USED BEST PRACTICES...................................46

A. Writing-As-Process..........................................................................................46 B. Writer’s Workshop..........................................................................................52 C. Mini-

Lessons....................................................................................................55 D. Portfolios..........................................................................................................57 E. Self/Peer/Teacher Coaching and

Conferencing.................................................59 F. Talk-Write........................................................................................................61 G. Free Writing.....................................................................................................63 H. Speed

Planning.................................................................................................65 I. Demand

writing................................................................................................65 J. Writer’s

Journal/Journaling..............................................................................67 K. Genre................................................................................................................69 L. Multi-

Genre......................................................................................................71 M. Writing Across The

Curriculum.......................................................................73 N. Handbooks.......................................................................................................75

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O. History of English Language...........................................................................77

P. Suggested Supportive Practices........................................................................79

Building a Data-Base of Best Practices Creating a Colleague Mentoring Program

Training the Parents Review Section Two: SUMMRAY OF KEY RESOURCE Books.................................................................................................................................81 Web Sites...........................................................................................................................85

PART THREE WHAT NEXT: EXPLORING THE STEPS NEEDED TO SUSTAIN AN

EFFECTIVE WRITING

PROGRAM............................................................................87

APPENDIX

Case Report Using the Writing I.Q. Program........................................................90 Author's Background and Acknowledgements.......................................................92 Demand writing.................................................................................................* Helping Your Child to Be A More Effective Writer in School............................* Common Errors and Mistakes to Avoid in Using English..................................* Brief History of The English Language..............................................................* *For copies of these contact the author at: www.jamesevers.com

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INTRODUCTION Superintendent's Workshop Days: Often the Bane of Good Practices In the 35 plus years that I’ve been in education, I remember how often I disliked many of the training programs offered on Superintendent’s Day. Ed Joyner, Executive Director of Yale’s School Development Program (Commer Schools) once named these days as “drive-by training.” Rightly so. They usually focus on the educational fad of the day or on a topic that one of the administrators is working on for his or her doctorate. But, what I disliked UmostU about those workshop days was that the speakers/trainers, though considered experts, never seemed to have an interest in what we were already doing. Rather than building on what was already working well or already in place, these presenters often implied that we were off track, and they had something better. By not focusing first on what was already working, these programs implied to teachers that the administration did not value what the teachers had been doing. That the presenters may indeed have had something better, to me, is beside the point. The lack of respect for what teachers were already doing was rude, and that rudeness undermines staff morale and the value of the any existing good practices. Even some of the weaker practices in a school may have some qualities that are of value, but no practice can be improved effectively through insult. Instead, let's move existing practices forward by finding the hidden good qualities in them and then build on those qualities. That's what will happen in this publication. I begin with the premise that what you already are doing vis- a- vis the teaching of writing has significant value for helping you build an even more effective program.

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Three Principles for Teachers of Writing: Because I worry about the way young writers are being taught and judged in their writing in many schools, I am working from three strongly-felt personal principles for teachers of writing: 1. Anyone who teaches writing at any level should also be doing some writing, preferably for publication, or at least for personal practice and/or for personal guidance such as journaling. 2. Anyone who teaches and assesses writing has an obligation to let students know and understand the writing standards they are expected to meet and for which they will be assessed. 3. Anyone who teaches writing could be more effective if she/he stopped thinking of her/ himself as a teacher of writing and began thinking of her/himself as a writing coach. What you can expect to gain from using this journal: 1. You can expect to gain a renewed confidence in your own best practices for teaching writing. 2. You can expect to gain a broader understanding of the teaching of writing in your classroom, in your school, in your district, and in schools in general. 3. You can expect to gain a set of common terms, practices, and assessments selected cooperatively by you and your colleagues. 4. You can expect to gain a writer’s guide/assessment tool that will be cooperatively created for use by students, teachers, and parents. 5. You can expect to gain a personal journal of resources, ideas, and best practices.

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Why a common curriculum is needed: As students encounter new teachers each grade year, they discover that not all teachers teach writing in the same way, nor emphasize the same elements of writing, or use the same terms. UDevelopmentallyU, this is not as helpful to the students as would be an approach that Uat leastU included a few consistent common practices, terms, and assessments. For example, in non-fiction essays, teachers usually ask for a key sentence that states the topic of the essay. Some call this the “topic sentence,” others call it the “theme sentence,” still others call it the “controlling idea sentence,” and some call it the “main idea sentence.” Each of these terms is fine, but it would be more helpful to the students if all teachers in a given school and in a given school district used the same term for this key sentence. And it would be more helpful to students if there were a similar consistency of a UfewU other terms used. In the journal section of this publication, teachers will decide and agree on which terms should be common to all teachers in the school and/or in the district.

Students also benefit from experiencing some common classroom practices in the teaching of writing. For example, such practices might include writer’s workshop, writing-as-process, journaling, peer coaching, peer editing, and teacher conferences. Further, students benefit when they experience common assessment approaches from year to year and from teacher to teacher. And, students further benefit from having all of their teachers, not just their language arts teachers, use the agreed-on common terms, practices, and assessments. SOME CLASSROOM ISSUES: Putting Remarks on Papers: I recently came across an article in the on-line edition of the UC.S. MonitorU by a college freshman English professor about putting written remarks on student's papers. It seems that this professor was troubled over how often he labored to make his remarks justify the grade that he gave to each paper. He eventually gave up justifying and simply told each writer how and why the paper affected him.

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My reactions to the professor's practice are both supportive and yet critical. While I agree that our remarks to writers ought to be honest explanations of why and how the writing affected us, I also feel that if we don't know before hand some of what we are going to look for in a given assignment, then it seems the writer's work stands the chance being evaluated by an evaluator's indecisiveness, whims, or situational standards. Yes, I'm sure that there is a need to read each writer's piece with a fresh and open mind, letting the piece guide our reactions. However, I'm also sure that there are some characteristics that we teachers, including this professor, consistently look for in every assignment. If we and the professor would collect a series of papers we've marked throughout a semester, I know that we would find some remarks that occur constantly and that speak to characteristics that we feel should be in any paper. Shouldn't the writers at least know before they write what these consistent characteristics are that we expect? It isn't fair to our students to hide our internal expectations from them. Also, I have found that once students' papers are handed back graded, despite any critical or constructive remarks I may have put on the papers, most students assume that the assignment is completed and is to be forgotten. Little is learned by these students from post-writing remarks. Rubrics and Guides: The professor further said that he didn't use a grading-rubric (a rubric used for scoring a paper) because he felt that he couldn't decide beforehand what he was going to like in a given assignment. I too dislike the grading-rubrics because they are error directed, and most of them are far too detailed in far too many aspects of writing to be of value as a guide to writers or even to evaluators. Writer's Guide and Assessment Tool: Instead of a grading-rubric, what you will create in this journal is a writer's guide and assessment tool. It will be similar in structure to a rubric, but it addresses your expectations rather than writer's errors. UAndU, the expectations will center on only two aspects of the writing: the impact of the content and the quality of the language (The Writing I.Q.).

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The guide and assessment tool that you will create will be for students to use UasU they write and a tool for assessing (by self, peer, and teacher) what has been written. Students should be taught how to use the guide for UanyU writing assignment. And, if there are any additional specifics that you might hope for in a given assignment but that are not in the tool, you should tell your students what these are before they write. BACKGROUND OF THE WRITING I.Q.: In the mid 1960's, I was trained in using the Diedrich Scale, a precursor to today's ubiquitous grading-rubrics. In truth, I never used it in my classrooms because I found it confused writers more than coached them. Then in the 1980s, when I returned to the public school classroom after spending time in private education and in business, I found a key resource that actually became the background for the Writing IQ Program. It was INSIDE OUT: Developmental Strategies for Teaching Writing, by Dan Kirby and Tom Liner (Boynton/Cook). In a chapter entitled "What is Good Writing," Kirby and Liner come to the conclusion that good writing can be judged by two key attributes: it is interesting and it is technically skillful. They then established a guide that included five criteria for each of the two attributes. I gave a copy of their criteria guide to my students and required them to use the guide as they planned and wrote their essays. Then, after the essay was written, the students had to do a Kirby/Liner Conference, first with themselves and then with a peer, before handing in any essays to me. My students preferred calling it a "Kirby Conference." (The alliteration worked for them.) And used to say, somewhat teasingly, to each other, "Hey, did you do a 'Kirby Conference' on this?" What I saw happening was that my students were paying closer attention to both the content and the language in their assignments. From that I developed my first teacher training programs around "interestingness" and "technical skillfulness," calling the program The HIT Writing Program, (Honing Interestingness and Technical skillfulness). However, one summer after having given the HIT program to many teachers, it occurred to me that a piece of writing can have an impact on a reader without it necessarily being interesting, and that a writer's technical skillfulness really depended on the grade level, age, and maturity of the writer. That's when I changed the program to The Writing IQ

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Program: Impact of the content and Quality of the language. However, I remain deeply indebted to Dan Kirby and Tom Liner and their influential book, INSIDE OUT. Where the content of this seminar process journal and resource guide came from: This publication should prove to be very practical for you and your colleagues because the content of both the journal and the guide has come from my experiences as a classroom teacher UandU from feedback from hundreds of teachers in development programs that I have given over the years in many schools and graduate programs. To add support to that, in the Appendix is a case report and some statements about this program from teachers in one of those schools where, for two years, I facilitated them in putting together their writing curriculum for grades 2-5. Being a Writing Coach: The key point I'm getting to is that if you were to function more as a writing coach than a writing judge, you would be able to guide the process of developing writers at each step of the way. Just as a violin teacher or a gymnastics instructor guides learners, you would begin exactly where each writer is rather than where some abstract standards say each should be. The key question to ask of yourself is: Why wait until the assignment is done, even in a college freshman course, to give instruction? By being a writing coach rather than being a writing judge, you can avoid putting children in the trap of being given instruction after the fact. Instead you can be giving them developmental instruction before and during the writing process (See Writing-as-Process in Review Section). A coach looks to see what can be built on, what needs to be honed, what needs to be modified. UAn effective coach, particularly of young or beginning level writers of any age, begins not with what's wrong but with what are the writer's strengthsU. He or she finds something to be built on even in the writing of very limited writers, especially if the assignments encourage writers to write about themselves and what they know about. (For example, one way to do this is by first assigning the genre of personal narratives. It is the best genre to build all other genres from because it builds confidence in writers by allowing them to write about what they know.) Professional Writing: Let me put this call for coaching into perspective. I work for a publishing company as a critical reader. All manuscripts to be published by this publisher have been selected first by an in-house committee of manuscript readers. They make suggestions that are passed

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on to the authors for consideration. After the authors make what they feel are the needed modifications, the manuscripts are then sent to several external critical readers, such as I, who individually, make suggestions for the manuscript. Again, these suggestions are passed on to the authors, and after the authors make any additional modifications they feel are needed, the manuscript goes to the publisher's content editor who edits the content and then finally to a proofreading editor for final changes. In most cases it is a year to a two-year process from original proposal to final publication. Lots of coaching and editing takes place during this time. Additionally, I write and have published several business training guides and dozens of professional articles. Before I submit any writing to a publisher, including the manuscript of this journal, I send it to my personal editor for critiquing. My editor makes suggestions and critical remarks (coaching me) that I weigh carefully before modifying my work. This is true for all professional writers, even those who make good money as writers. Why then is it that so many teachers fail to take a writer through this fine-tuning process but instead give an assignment and then judge it after something is written? UAre we teachers expecting our young, developing writers to be more proficient in their writing skills than professional writersU? Sure, I know the argument: Teachers have 20-30 students per class and there just isn't time to individualize writing instruction, especially since many teachers are now pressed, they think, to get their students ready for state tests. Respectfully, I say, nonsense. Teachers - at any grade level - who have learned to become writing coaches, and who, for example, use the practice of writing workshop (See Best Classroom Practices Guide.), and who have developed writing guides such as you will from this journal, and who have taught their students to be peer coaches and self-assessors (See Best Classroom Practices Guide.), find that they can individualize their teaching of writing, as you too, will learn. Further, you will see from a case study included in this introduction, and to which I can personally testify from my own classroom teaching experiences, that students in such classes tend to do excellently on state tests. Final Thoughts: 1. As stated above, in this publication the encouragement is for you and your colleagues to develop the commonalities rather than having them imposed on you. The curriculum, then, becomes yours.

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2. Though you are looking to build commonality into the teaching of writing, the curriculum you build should not be considered as the only way one can or should teach writing. Rather, the curriculum you create should be limited to a select few, but key, common terms, practices, and assessments. That leaves room for each teacher to still practice her/his unique style of teaching and still meet each class’ unique needs. 3. Once the curriculum is created and implemented, it regularly should be revised and refined, when experience and changing needs call for such revision and refinement. SUGGESTED STRUCTURE(S) FOR A SEMINAR/TRAINING PROGRAM: Ideally, in a given building, it would be helpful if UallU teachers who teach writing attended the seminar and worked in grade level groups. Some schools have held separate seminars for each grade level; others have brought together representative teachers from the various grade levels who, after the seminar, train their grade level colleagues in the seminar outcomes. In any of these arrangements, a facilitator would be helpful; however, because the outcomes of this program are to be arrived at primarily by the classroom teachers, it would be best if the facilitator is someone who is highly objective and does not have a predetermined curriculum in mind. Ideally, the lower grades should tell the next level grade what terms, practices, and assessments they, in the lower grades, are using, and so on up the grade levels. Throughout the school year, the lower grades also should inform the next level grade of any changes made in their program. Developmentally, it works better that way than if it is the upper grades telling the lower ones what to do. And it is most important that there is a continuing dialog between all grades and all schools in the district. UMaterials Needed for the Activities in the Journal 1. Each teacher should bring to the first session copies of three unmarked sample pieces of writing from his/her grade. Have enough copies of these three samples for each of the teachers of the same grade level. One sample should be of a weak piece, one of an

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average piece, and one of a strong piece. These samples should also be free of the writers' names. 2. Someone should make certain that a flip chart or, even better, two or more flip charts, and markers are available in the seminar room. Groups will be writing ideas on the flip chart and then those pages will be posted in the seminar room. (Flip chart paper and/or large sheets of newsprint paper will also work.) Masking tape will also be necessary for posting the pages. CHARGE TO TEACHERS OF WRITING: I would encourage all of you who teach writing to do lots of writing yourselves. It humbles you as a teacher of writing, particularly if you try to get something published, and it moves you away from being a guardian of correct spelling, grammar and usage as it moves you instead toward being a coach of effective writing. Best wishes to all who teach and especially to those who teach writing; it can be a most rewarding experience. Jim Evers, Nanuet, NY, 2004

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PART ONE: SEMINAR PROCESS AND CURRICULUM

DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL

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JOURNAL SECTION ONE:

EXPLORING PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE STANDARDS

STEP 1: CLARIFYING YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE TEACHING OF WRITING Note: Some of the activities you will be doing are elementary in nature because they are designed to give you a reminder of some “elemental” aspects of writing and of teaching writing. Also, since many of these activities are to be used with your students, it is best if you try them first, yourself. ACTIVITY A. Purpose: To give yourself a record of some of your thoughts, concerns, dreams, and aspirations about the teaching of writing.

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Task: Use as much time as you need to freely write UanyU thoughts you may have about the teaching of writing in general as well as the teaching of writing in your classroom, in your school, and in your district.

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ACTIVITY B. Purpose: To get everyone talking about the teaching of writing so as to gain some clarity, especially as it pertains to your local realities. Caution: Make a collective effort to keep this session from becoming a gripe session or one that focuses on what’s wrong with the teaching of writing, or with the administration. Instead, let this session be a way of posting thoughts, concerns, dreams, and aspirations. Working on related problems will happen later throughout the process. Task: After completing Activity A, start a sharing session with your colleagues, and as you and your colleagues share, record for yourself any of the ideas you wish to record in this journal. Also have someone list on a flip chart the key topics shared. Post this flip chart page on the meeting room wall.

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STEP 2. COLLECTING LOCAL BEST CLASSROOM PRACTICES ACTIVITY C. Purpose: To give yourself a record of what you feel are your best practices in the teaching of writing. Task: Take as much time as you need to record below what you know are UyourU best practices for the teaching of writing.

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ACTIVITY D. Purpose: 1) to honor the best practices of yourself and of each other

2) to cross enrich each other in doing so Suggestion: Regularly, share best practices with each other, occasionally model best practices for each other, and even do some co-teaching with others. Further, it also would be beneficial for the teachers in a given school and in the school district to have a computer data-base of best practices which includes the names of who can give help to others wanting to learn more about how to use a given best practice. Task: Have a sharing session with your colleagues, and record for yourself those ideas that you would like to possibly incorporate into your teaching of writing. Also, again on a flip chart page, have someone record a list of the best practices that come out in the sharing. Post this flip chart page on the meeting room wall. As you listen to others,

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record for yourself, in space below, the best practices you would like to know more about.

STEP 3. IDENTIFYING OTHER WIDELY-USED BEST CLASSROOM PRACTICES ACTIVITY A: Purpose: To continue the commitment to build on your experiences, and to review and then discuss widely used best practices: Task: On the list below of widely-used classroom practices in teaching writing do the following: 1. Put a check next to the practices you already use. 2. Put an asterisk next to any that you would like to know more about. ___ writing-as-process

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___ writer’s workshop ___ mini-lessons ___ portfolios ___ teacher conferencing ___ peer conferencing ___ writer’s chair ___ talk-write ___ free writing ___ speed planning ___ writer’s journal or journaling ___ demand writing ___ genre and multi-genre writing ___ writing across the curriculum ___ using handbooks ___ studying the history of language and specifically the English language STEP 4. REVIEWING KEY RESOURCES ACTIVITY A. Purpose: In the handouts at most training programs, presenters often include a list of resources. These are usually found at the back of the handout pack but are seldom reviewed in the program. However, because The Writing I.Q. Program is built from a synthesis of several key resources, and in further keeping with the commitment that the program begins with you, the list of resources is given here, early on. Task: Use this list just as you did the list of Best Practices. To do that: A. Read the list of resources below and put a check mark next to the ones with which you are familiar. B. Add an exclamation mark next to those you feel are important or good resources for your colleagues to know about. C. Put a question mark next to any resource that you would like to know more about. D. Finally, add any resources that you, or others, feel are missing but belong on this list. ON TEACHING WRITING ___K-8, after THE END: Teaching Creative Revision. Barry Lane, Heinemann

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___K-8, A Fresh Look at Writing. Donald H. Graves, Heineman ___K-8, Reviser’s Toolbox. Barry Lane, Discover Writing Press ___K-8, The Art of Teaching Writing. New Edition, Lucy Calkins, Heinemann ___K-8, How's It Going?: A Practical Guide to Conferencing. Carl Anderson, Heinemann ___8-12, Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for Teaching Writing. Dan Kirby & Tom Liner, Boynton/Cook (Heinemann) ___8-12, Beat Not The Poor Desks. Marie Ponsot & Rosemary Deen, Heinemann ___8-12, Writing With Passion. Tom Romano, Heinemann ___ 8-12, Author's Insights: Turning Teenagers Into Readers and Writer. Donald Gallo, Boynton/Cook (Heinemann) ___K-12, Writing and the Writer. Frank Smith, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston ___K-12, Drawing Your Own Conclusions. Fran Claggett, Heinemann ___K-12, Live Writing: Breathing Life Into Your Words. Ralph Fletcher, Avon Books ___K-12, Writing Workshop. Ralph Fletcher & JoAnn Portalupi, Heinemann ___ K-12, Portfolio Source Book. Vermont Portfolio Institue, discoverwriting.com ON TEACHING WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM ___Roots in the Sawdust,.Anne Ruggles Gere, National Council of Teachers of English ___Learning to Write, Writing to Learn. John Mayher, et. al., Heinemann ___Writing & Learning Across the Curriculum. Nancy Martin, et. al., Heinemann

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___Writing to Learn. Willim Zinsser, Harper and Row ___ The Journal Book. Toby Fulwiler, ed., Boynton/Cook-Heinemann ___ The Interdisciplinary Teacher’s Handbook. Stephen Tchudi & Stephen Lafer, Boynton/Cook (Heinemann) ON HANDBOOKS ___ K-12, The Write Source Series of Handbooks, Houghton Mifflin ___ K-12, The Right Handbook. Pat Belanoff, et al, Boynton/Cook (Heinemann) ON TEACHING

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DEVELOPING THE WRITING I.Q.* PROGRAM:

*(I = Impact of content, Q = Quality of language)

A Strengths-Based, Best Practices Process Journal and Resource Guide for Teachers K - 12

By Jim Evers

Dominican College Writing Project

DEVELOPING

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................1 -10 Bane of Superintendent's Day Three Principles for Teachers of Writing What You Can Expect from Using This Process Journal Why a Common Curriculum is Needed Some Classroom Issues Putting Marks on Papers Rubrics and Guides Writer's Guide and Assessment tool Back Ground of the Writing I.Q. Program Being a Writing Coach Where the Content of this Publication Came From Professional Writing Final Thoughts Suggested Structure for Seminar Charge to Teachers

PART ONE SEMINAR PROCESS AND CURRICULUM DEVLEOPMENT JOURNAL........11 Section One: EXPLORING LOCAL REALITIES.....................................................................................11 Step 1. Clarifying Your Thoughts About writing....................................................11 Step 2. Collecting Local Best Practices...................................................................14 Step 3. Identifying Other Widely-Used Best Practices...........................................16 Step 4. Reviewing Key Resources..........................................................................16 Section Two: BUILDING THE WRITING IQ GUIDE AND ASSESSMENT TOOL Step 1. Critiquing Collected Writing Samples........................................................22

Step 2. Putting it All Together in a Writing I.Q. Writers Guide and Assessment Tool....................................................................................................26

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___ The Courage to Teach. Parker J. Palmer, Jossey-Bass Publishers ON WRITING FOR ONE’S SELF AND FOR PUBLICATION ___ A Writer’s Notebook: Unlocking the Writer Within You. Ralph Fletcher, Avon ___ Accidental Genius: Revolutionize Your Thinking Through Private Writing, Mark Levy, Berrett-Koeheler ___Discovering the Writer Within. Bruce Ballenger and Barry Lane, Writer's Digest ___Writing Down the Bones. Natalie Goldberg, Shambala Press ___Writing Toward Home. Georgia Heard, Heinemann ___ Writing for Self Discovery. Barry Lane, Writer's Digest ___ How to Write the Story of Your Life. Frank P. Thomas, Writer's Digest WEB SITES: ___www.thewritesource.com (UlotsU of ideas for teaching writing. I’ve worked for them.) ___www.merlynspen.com (a magazine that publishes children’s writing) ___www.kids-space.org (place for kid’s writing) ___ www.discoverwriting.com ___www.schoolnotes.com (place for teachers and schools to post notes, free) ___www.discoverwriting.com (Barry Lane’s site) ___www3.sk.sympatico.ca/fiss/newpage1.htm (Saskatchewan’s excellent resource; note: The site address begins with www3. If you put a dot after the www, you will not reach the site.) Be sure to bookmark any of these sites. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ACTIVITY B. Purpose: To become more familiar with resources and to cross enrich each other about them. Task: Have a brief sharing session with your colleagues about the resources and their importance to your program. Keep a record of additional resources. Also, record who

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seems to be a good source person of a given resource, and who UhasU any given resource and would be willing to share it. Consider collecting your resources into a professional collection on the teaching of writing.

JOURNAL SECTION TWO:

BUILDING THE WRITING IQ WRITER'S GUIDE AND ASSESSMENT TOOL

STANDARDS: Most states now have established standards for student writing, and it is important that you know and understand these. However, it also is important that you know and understand two other sets of standards. These two may be similar to those of your state but they have a stronger effect and influence than your state's on the teaching and the assessing of writing in your classroom and in your school. They are:

1. your own personal set of standards for writing 2 the unwritten collective set of standards of all teachers in your school and in your

district for the teaching of writing After so many years of coaching teachers in how to be effective as teachers of writing, and having observed many who have been trained in the state’s standards or in holistic scoring, I’ve found that when they are assessing a piece of writing, most will resort to a personal set of standards. They make personal judgements that essentially encompass deep-seated concepts of what an effective piece of writing is and what it isn’t. It is true even of those who have participated with others in creating a rubric. This is because judgement, almost always, is a personal call.

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Let me illustrate how this is so. Most of us would agree that editors of publishing companies who make decisions about selecting a manuscript for publication would all have similar standards for what constitutes a publishable manuscript and what does not. However, every editor will tell you that on more than one occasion, they have turned down a manuscript which they judged not worthy of being published, and then discovered later that an editor in another publishing company found the same manuscript to be worthy of publication. Worse, some of these turned-down pieces have become highly successful publications. One contemporary example is that of the popular (and quite ubiquitous) Chicken Soup series of books. It is said that over U100U editors turned down the first manuscript before the current publisher chose to publish the first book.

. A Principle of this Publication: UAssessing writing is a judgement call, and it is so because writing is an art that requires but goes far beyond the strictures of standards and rubricsU. Standards and rubrics can be used to guide instruction and assessment without locking either into a rigid system, and in keeping with the commitment of this journal and guide, you will begin the process that leads to effective teaching of writing by first focusing on you and your strengths. The writer's guide/assessment tool that you build will come from your personal set of standards and from your colleagues' collective personal sets of standards. Once you create a guide for your grade level, you should give it to your students, along with an understanding of, and training in, applying it. Having done this, you will eventually discover that your guides will equip your students with writing skills that will do them well regardless of who reads or assesses their writing, including the state's readers. A WRITING REALITY: Anytime you (or anyone else) read something that has been written, you are making mental judgements about the content and about the language. You judge the content by the impact it makes on you, and you judge the language by the quality of it as used by the author. Even though the two work together to create the whole, most likely there are certain characteristics and standards that you look for in each.

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TWO KEY POINTS: 1. The characteristics and standards you look for in any writing represent your personal internal rubric. 2. You have both an obligation and a responsibility to let any writers whom you teach and whose work you assess know UandU understand your rubric before they begin doing any writing for you.

Suggestion: 1. It would be best if the lowest of all grades did its guide/assessment tool first so that the next grade level can build on that and so on up the grade levels. Developmental learning works best when it builds that way. 2. Do not assume that once the guide/assessment tool is filled in it is finished. It should be revised and adjusted regularly based on actual classroom experiences using it. And students, once they become experienced in using the guide/assessment tool, can/should be involved in the revisions of it, at least for their classroom and possibly for their grade level. The tool is never finished, for just as life moves and changes, and as people move and change so, too, must the Writing I.Q. Writer's Guide and Assessment Tool move and change.

STEP 1. CRITIQUING COLLECTED WRITING SAMPLES It's time now to turn to the writing samples you have brought to the workshop. You should have with you enough unmarked copies of your three writing samples (a weak, an average, and a strong paper) to eventually give each of your grade level colleagues an unmarked set of your three.

NOTE: IF THIS SESSION SHOULD END BEFORE GOING ON TO THE REST OF THE ACTIVITES IN THE JOURNAL, BE SURE TO SAVE ALL POSTED FLIP CHART PAGES FOR LATER ACTIVITIES. ACTIVITY A. Purpose: To have, for yourself, three samples of how you critique a weak, average, and strong piece of writing at your grade level.

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Task: Working alone, read or re-read each sample that you’ve brought and write on them UanyU comments that you normally would make if you were going to return this paper to the writer. ACTIVITY B. Purpose: For everyone, at a given grade level or at your table, to have several samples of how they critique the three levels of writing at this grade level. Task: Have everyone read and mark all three unmarked copies of everyone else's three samples. ACTIVITY C. Working with Weak Papers Purpose: To collect generalized criteria used for weak papers at your grade level Task: A. Have a recording person at the flip chart record generalizations each of you have about the characteristics of UweakU papers at your grade level. B. Post this page. C. Record any notes to yourself below.

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ACTIVITY D. Working with Average Papers Purpose: To collect generalized criteria used for average papers at your grade level Task: A. Do the same for UaverageU papers as you did for the weak papers. B. Post this page. C. Record any notes to yourself below:

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ACTIVITY E. Working with Strong Papers Purpose: To collect generalized criteria used for strong papers at your grade level. Task: A. Do it one more time for the UstrongU papers. B. Post this page. C. Record any notes to yourself below:

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STEP 2. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER INTO A GUIDE/ASSESSMENT TOOL When you look at most writing rubrics and writing guides, you find that the criteria on these can be divided into two categories: content and language. And because we know that assessing any writing is a judgement call, the Writing I.Q. Program takes the position that one’s judgement centers on the UIMPACT of the contentU and the UQUALITY of the languageU. Therein lies the title: The Writing I.Q. Program and you are going to create a guide built around these two categories: Impact of the Content and Quality of the language. In this section, you are going to create a writer's guide, similar in some ways to others that already exist, but different in that it is created by you and your colleagues. But first: UWhy use a writer's guide? Here's the key reason: it's the fairest thing to do for your students because even if you don't have a guide, you still have one hidden in your mind and it surfaces whenever you read a student's piece of writingU. The journaling you've been doing so far has been to help you bring your mental writer's guide or assessment rubric to the surface. Once you've done that, you can share it with your students and more consciously use it when you do assess their writing. Further, if you give a copy of it to

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each student, and you teach them how to use it, you have moved away from the old approach of having the students play "guess what the teacher wants." Most, if not all, writing guides and rubrics usually rate writing at four levels, from weak to strong. Some even have six. Simply by looking visually at most guides, one can sense that they are far too complex to be of meaningful value to writers as well as to most teachers who assess the writing. Therefore, it is the position of the Writing I.Q. Program that, if you are going to use a rubric or a guide, it should have no more than three levels. That's why you were asked to work on weak, average, and strong level papers, and now you have a collection of criteria posted on flip chart pages for these three levels of papers. Because the terms weak, average, and strong, are too judgmental, especially for young writers, the Writing I.Q. Program is calling these Beginning, Developing, and Advanced. Also, we are calling this a writing tool UandU an assessment tool because it is to be used for both: first as a guide for writers as they are working on an assignment and second as an assessment tool for anyone who works with the writer in assessing the assignment. Your students will need to know the following: 1. what constitutes a weak, a developing, and advanced level paper at your grade level, 2. how to use the guide/assessment tool for self-help and peer help 3. that any assessment of the piece will be about the piece not about the writer (e.g. a

teacher might say to a writer, "I feel that your piece certainly is underway and is at a beginning level [giving specific ways you see that it is underway]. Now, what might you do to move it into a developing level or an advanced level?)

4. that the writer's guide can be changed and modified by student suggestions as well as by

teacher suggestions, throughout the school year, as the reality of using it exposes what is needed Resource: An excellent resource for conferencing is How's It Going?, by Carl Anderson

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The writing-tool and an assessment-tool that you will now develop will look like this:

STAGES OF WRITING

DEVELOPMENT GRADE____

BEGINNING

DEVELOPING

ADVANCED

UIUMPACT OF CONTENT

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Sentence structure

UQUUALITY OF LANGUAGE

Word Choice

Mechanics

STAGES OF WRITING

DEVELOPMENT GRADE____

BEGINNING

DEVELOPING

ADVANCED

UIUMPACT OF CONTENT

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Sentence structure

UQUUALITY OF LANGUAGE

Word Choice

Mechanics

ACTIVITY A. Your next activity will be to fill-in the guide by collectively agreeing on the minimal criteria that will be accepted for each of the two categories (Impact of Content and Quality of Language) in each of the three levels (Beginning, Developing, Advanced) at your grade level. Purpose: To build a Writing I.Q. Guide/Assessment Tool for your grade level that incorporates the minimal common criteria for a Beginning, Developing and Advanced level piece of writing. Task:

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Look at criteria comments you have posted on the flip chart page for the UweakU papers and, through discussion, decide for each if it is about the Impact of Content (IC) or if it is about the Quality of the language (QL). It doesn’t matter if the comments are positive or negative. Have them fit into either category. 1. On another flip chart page, draw a blank version of the Writing IQ Guide/Assessment Tool and then through discussion fill in the minimal criteria that you collectively agree belong in the Impact of Language category for a beginning (weak) paper and the minimal criteria that you collectively agree belong in the Quality of Language category. 2. Using the posted criteria/comments about average papers, fill in the guide/assessment tool sections for developing (average) papers. 3. Do the same for the advanced (strong) papers. 4. Have someone copy the now filled in guide/assessment tool and make copies of it for all teachers at your level and for the teachers at the level immediately after your level. ACTIVITY B. Purpose: To categorize all critiques as either Content or Language. Task: As a group, look at each critique on the three common critiques flip chart pages and mark each critique with an “C” or with an “L” depending on whether it is a critique of the Content or of Language (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.). You now have a collection of common critiques that you and your colleagues agree are helpful for writers at your grade level, and you’ve indicated whether each critique is a Content critique or a Language critique. What’s important to remember here is that these common critiques are what Uyou collectively have agreed onU. They reflect your local realities, not imposed ones. AN ADDITIONAL KEY POINT: You have both an obligation and a responsibility to let any writers whom you teach and whose work you assess know UandU understand your locally created writing guide/assessment tool (or rubric, if you prefer) before they begin doing any writing for you.

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Resource Note: There are plenty of guides and rubrics available these days. States have published them, testing services such as Educational Records Bureau (ERB) have them, and many schools have created them. As I said, my problem with most of these is that they are too fractional, breaking writing into too many segments that are judged apart from the total piece. I'm even worried that the Writing IQ Writer's Guide and Assessment Tool will fall into that trap. However, by keeping everyone aware of the two categories of Impact and Quality, I feel there will be less focus on segments and more on the total piece. Years ago I was trained in using the Diedrich Scale, a precursor to today's ubiquitous rubrics. In truth, I never used the Diedrich Scale in my classrooms because I found that it confused writers more than coached them. Instead, I was found that students and I preferred Dan Kirby and Tom Liner's two categories: interestingness and technical skillfulness, which became the model for the IQ Guide. STEP 3. USING THE WRITER'S GUIDE/ASSESSEMENT TOOL AND COACHING WRITERS I feel that teachers of writing have an obligation to give a writer's guide/assessment tool to their students and to teach them how to use it themselves while they write or when they do any peer coaching. Teachers should also use it when they are coaching students in a writing conference. Further, I feel that it is quite helpful to teach the parents how to use it when they are coaching their child's writing at home. Here's how other teachers and I have used it: Self Coaching/Assessing: Once each student has a copy of the grade's writer's guide/assessment tool, he/she should be taught how to use it for self-coaching. For this to make sense, you might want to make copies of a beginning, developing, and advanced paper that were written by students at this grade level (possibly saved from previous year, or from another teacher's class). The papers should not have the writers' names on them nor have content that might make it easy for some students to identify the writers. What is true of self-coaching is also true of

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self assessing: using the writer's guide to make a final assessment of a paper before handing it in. Using the sample papers, show very specifically (not abstractly) why each is at the level it is at and explain the criteria in the content and language sections of each level paper. When students feel they understand, then ask them to regularly use the guide before they submit a paper to you and/or before they work with a peer in peer coaching. Everyone should begin to use the language of the tool whenever discussing a paper. Peer Coaching/Assessing: Peer coaching is exactly what its name implies: students coaching each other. And it works quite effectively if all use the class' writer's guide/assessment tool. There are several ways peer coaching can be structured: one-on-one, a group coaching one, a group coaching all in the group, or the entire class coaching a student. For any type of peer coaching, some training is necessary. First, all who are willing to coach must be very familiar with the class' writer's guide/assessment tool. Second, the person being coached must be willing, not forced, to receive coaching, Third, and this takes a lot of practice, all coaches must be taught to make concrete rather than abstract comments about another's writing. Instead of saying, "I like all of your details.", get them to say which specific details they like and why. Further, it is best to have coaches begin with the strengths of the paper (content and language) before making any suggestions (not corrections), again being as specific and concrete as possible. I've trained students in peer coaching by having five at a time come together with their pieces during writing workshop, and each person reads his/her paper and the others coach while I facilitate, making certain that they are speaking to the writer's guide and are being concrete. A favorite metaphor that I've taught students over the years is that of the "empty wrapper." It's one that really sticks with them, as testified by many former students who come back and tell me that they regularly use it. Most school children have had the experience of another student coming to them with a stick of gum and saying, "Here, you want a stick of gum?" The recipient gladly takes the stick only to discover that the giver has removed the gum and neatly replaced the aluminum foil, making it look like a stick of gum. THAT'S AN EMPTY WRAPPER, and anytime a child makes a statement in class that is abstract but without anything concrete to back it up, THAT'S AN EMPTY WRAPPER.

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Kids love this metaphor. Teacher Coaching (conferencing)/Assessing: This is the teacher in a one-on-one conference with a student, and again, as with self- and peer coaching and assessing, the comments must be centered around the writer's guide/assessment tool, they must be strengths-based before suggestions-based, and they must be specific rather than abstract empty wrappers. Resource: Again, an excellent resource for conferencing is How's It Going?, by Carl Anderson, Heinemann Parent Coaching/Assessing: I feel it is important to teach the parents how to effectively coach their children as writers rather than being correctors of the papers. One way for doing that is to have a Write Night for parents at which you take them through writing-as-process and explain to them how to be a coach by using the class' writer's guide/assessment tool. And don't forget to have all the teachers at your grade level use the guide, let the teachers in the next grade know your guide, and train the administration to use the guide, too. ACTIVITY C. Purpose: To review your own and your peer's views on using the Writer's Guide/Assessment tool and on coaching. Task: In the space below record your thoughts about the tool and about coaching. Then share these with your peers and record any additional thoughts or ideas you may collectively have.

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JOURNAL SECTION THREE:

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EXPLORING KEY REALITES OF WRITING In this section, you will explore some key elemental realities of writing, first by doing some actual writing yourself and then by reviewing some related resource material. The writing activities are simple experiences that are used with students, but they will prove helpful to you if you do them yourself before having your students do them. ACTIVITY A. Purpose: to experience the building of fluency through free writing. Task: Free Writing: In the space below, write non-stop for three minutes about anything that comes to mind. Let your words go where your mind leads. Pay no attention to structure, spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Just write.

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A WRITING REALITY:

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Writing is a skill, and as such it must be practiced if it is to be learned.

Supportive Resource Material: Those of you who have been teaching writing for some time may remember the works of Ken Macrorie and the works of Peter Elbow, the early promoters of free writing/speed writing. We all owe a huge debt to Macrorie and Elbow. They got us out of the role of being grammar and spelling police and into the role of being writers and coaches of writers. A contemporary resource you may want to turn to in your own personal use of free writing comes from outside of education. It is ACCIDENTAL GENIUS: Revolutionize Your Thinking Through Private Writing, by Mark Levy (Berrett-Koeheler). What Macrorie and Elbow called free writing, Levy calls "private writing," and his book shows it as a way for stimulating thinking skills and finding ideas, as well as for improving one's writing skills. To get the most out of Levy's book, you must do the exercises. Powerful stuff. In their book, Learning to Write/Writing to Learn (Boynton/Cook Heinemann), Meyer, Lester, and Pradl, say that “Research indicates that the only way one learns to write is by writing...there is no substitute for extensive experience with writing itself” (page 1). Further, authors Ponsot and Deen (two authors who greatly influenced me; you will meet them shortly), call "prolificness" an elemental skill of writing that needs to be regularly practiced. Free writing is one of the quickest ways to begin building "prolificness" and fluency. As children do free writing, they begin to become familiar with and comfortable with putting words on page. Meyer, Lester, and Pradl refer to writing as “...a personally engaging transaction through which the learner makes her own connections and builds her own meaning.” Free writing is a good process for getting the transactions and meanings flowing.

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ACTIVITY B. Purpose: To experience the minimal elements of an essay Task: A. Think of several opinions you have about any thing you know you could support with key facts. Select one of your opinions and write this opinion as a simple sentence at the dot below. Then go to “B."

. B. Above, underneath the opinion sentence you’ve written, write UoneU sentence of UoneU factual proof to support your opinion. You now have two elements: an opinion and a supportive fact. A WRITING-REALITY: UThere are two minimal content elements in any essay: an abstract (opinion) element and a concrete (supportive fact) elementU. If these two elements, and only these two elements appear in a student’s writing, you have what could be called a “weak” paper. Anything less should be considered an incomplete paper.

Supportive Resource Material: The work on minimal elements of writing comes from two excellent resources written by Rosemary Deen and Marie Ponsot: Beat Not The Poor Desk, Boynton Cook (now Heinemann), 1998 and The Common Sense: What to Write, How to Write It, and Why, Boynton/Cook (now Heinemann), 1985. Their work is based on experiences they’ve had teaching writing seminars at Queens College, New York and in various public high schools in the New York City area. It is their point of view that once students of any age begin, through practice, to learn that all writing is built around the two elements, an abstract statement and a concrete element, their writing begins to take on shape. Yes, at first the shape may be repetitious and even

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stilted (as in the “sandwich" structure that elementary schools like to use or in the standard five paragraph essay that high schools often encourage), but through progressive developmental writing experiences, students begin to realize that the effective writing is really a dance between these two elements. To help students build writing that is shaped around the abstract and the concrete, Ponsott and Deen begin by encouraging students to practice two key genres: fables and family parables. A fable, as most children know, is built around a concrete story and its abstract aphorism (moral). Family parables are the personal narratives or family stories often told in families and that carry a deeper message. Parables are also built around a concrete story and its abstract moral (often implied rather than stated). More about elemental writing can be found in Ponsot and Deen’s books, centering on what they believe writing is: “an ordering of what the writer has in mind” (Common Sense, 6). The key word here is “ordering,” and since most of the writing required in schools is either a narrative or an expository essay, Ponsot and Deen give a lot of direction in teaching the "orderings" of these two forms. And to all of this, they conclude that the key to doing well in writing ("ordering") is to do it often and to work from the elemental forms that already lie deep within us, particularly in our oral language experiences: fables, parables, sermons, anecdotes, and even riddles, epitaphs, and prayers...all covering an abstract and a concrete whole (See Beat Not The Poor Desk).

ACTIVTY C. Purpose: to experience the "elementalness" of a fable Task: Try writing a fable of your own about some animals whose words and actions point to a moral. For example, a cat has been stalking a mouse's nest, and when the mouse comes out, the cat traps him. Have a converstaion between the mouse and cat that leads to an aphorism, moral, adage, or maxim.

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A WRITING REALITY: A fable nicely shows the interactions of the concrete and the abstract. ACTIVITY D. Purpose: to experience the elementalness of a family parable. Task: Think of three or four family stories that are/were often told in your family. Select one that you’d like to write as a parable that carries a deeper meaning and write the story here:

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A WRITING REALITY: A family parable nicely shows the interactions of the concrete and the abstract.

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ACTIVITY E. Purpose: To experience the "elementalness" of an opinion essay Task: Using the opinion/fact statement that you wrote earlier, or using any other opinion that you’d like to write about, write a short, fact-packed essay about your opinion.

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A WRITING REALITY: A fact-packed opinion-based essay nicely shows the interactions of the concrete and the abstract. Now that you have some samples of your own writing, look at each and decide (privately) how well you did in the impact of the content and the quality of the language. A WRITING REALITY: Anytime you (or anyone else) read something that has been written, you are making mental judgements about the content and about the language. You judge the content by the impact it makes on you, and you judge the language by the quality of it as used by the author. Even though the two work together to create the whole, most likely there are certain characteristics and standards that you look for in each. TWO KEY POINTS: 1. The characteristics and standards you look for in any writing represent your personal internal rubric. 2. You have both an obligation and a responsibility to let any writers whom you teach and whose work you assess know UandU understand your rubric before they begin doing any writing for you.

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PART TWO:

A REVIEW OF BEST CLASSROOM PRACTICES AND KEY RESOURCES

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Review Section One: WIDELY-USED BEST CLASSROOM PRACTICES A. Writing-As-Process (Process Writing) Simply put, coaching writing-as-process, also called process writing, means that you guide the students through phases of the composing process. The phases have come to be called prewriting, drafting (or first draft), revising, editing, and publishing. Though writing-as-process is practiced in many elementary schools, it is an important practice for writers in any grade. Writing-as-process (process writing) is a practice that honors both the process and the product, not one at the expense of the other. However, the phases of writing-as-process are not meant to be rigidly linear but rather a guide to, and an understanding of, the flow that leads from idea to product. Some writers often move back and forth in the phases, and some occasionally even skip or quickly pass through one of the phases when they feel the piece is ready for going on. BACKGROUND of WRITING-AS-PROCESS Teaching writing as a process is not a new practice. Good teachers of writing have long taught that there is more to writing an assignment than just sitting down and beginning to write. Some of us were taught that before writing, we had to do some planning (In my day, the planning had to be a formal outline.), then we were to write the piece, and finally we were to give it some careful editing before we handed in a clean copy. (And this was before computers and word processors existed.) The practice of teaching writing-as-process began to grow slowly in the 1960s, as articles on it appeared in the various publications, especially those of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Then in the late 1970s, writing-as-process got a great push from the San Francisco area by the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California, Berkeley. As the practice spread, it gained significant momentum from the work of Don Graves, and his associates, at the University of New Hampshire and the National Institute of Education (NIE).

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Graves' seminal and widely influential book, WRITING: Teachers & Children at Work (Heinemann, 1983), helped to revolutionize the way writing is taught in schools throughout the English speaking world. Another of Graves' books, A Fresh Look at Writing (Heinemann, 1994), is a comprehensive resource of classroom practices for teaching of writing. Lucy Mc Cormick Calkins, one of Graves' associates at the University of New Hampshire, has also become a major voice in revitalizing (awakening would be a better word) the teaching of writing in the elementary grades. In her best selling book The Art of Teaching Writing and her Writing Project at Teacher's College, Columbia University, NY, Calkins shows writing workshop to be one of the key best practices in the teaching of writing. (See Writer's Workshop that follows.) There are good resources for activities and practices related to coaching writing-as-process, but in keeping with the premise that there are some good practices already in place in your classroom and in your school, you should review these local practices first. For this, you might want to return to page xx to review your notes on Best Practices. A caveat: Not all students like to make written plans before they write. Some will strongly resist doing so. They prefer to jump right in and write. Peter Elbow in his book, Writing Without Teachers, likes this approach. He calls this early draft a form of planning from which several drafts may yet come leading to a strong piece of writing. Rather than insist that all students do written plans for every piece of writing, it may be more beneficial for the resistant writer to come to realize that an unplanned draft is but a rehearsal. It needs to be carefully reviewed for revisions before writing a final draft. Actually, many writers, myself included, find they do a lot more mental planning and rehearsing that goes beyond any written plans. And, yes, on occasion, there will be writers who write an exceptional or relatively exceptional piece on the first draft without planning. Some reluctant planners may find that they enjoy doing their plans visually as an art piece. For help in encouraging this, see Drawing Your Own Conclusions by Fran Claggett. (See also Beat Not The Poor Desks, by Ponsot and Deen.)

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Activity 1. Best Practices for Coaching Writing-As-Process Discuss with your colleagues key activities for helping students do prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. Have someone record these activities on a flip chart and then post the chart. Next to each activity, write the names of teachers willing to mentor others in using the activity. Record, below, activities that you already use and ones you intend to use from your colleagues. Be sure to include the mentors' names.

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SAMPLE PRACTICE FOR COACHING WRITING AS PROCESS To make this practice clear to her middle school children, Rosemary Faucette, a teacher in Arkansas, used a very creative idea. She gave each student a container of multi-colored Play-Doh and told them that they were going to sculpt a pencil holder for their pens and pencils by following a process similar to the writing process: planning the pencil holder, making a first form, revising the first form, and then polishing it into its final state.

As she led them through the sculpting process, Faucette constantly compared the sculpting process to the writing process. After the students had completed their pencil holders, Ms. Faucette guided the students in noting in their journals how the two processes were similar and what they had learned about the writing process from the sculpting experience. The next day, she asked the students to write a letter to her explaining the writing process, without using their notes. She got wonderful pieces of writing, showing that the students learned well from this hands-on activity. One student told her that he was now going to be a sculptor with words. (From the article,"Using Play-Doh to Teach the Writing Process,"

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Rosemary Faucette, in NCTE's Ideas Plus, Book 15, 1997. See www.ncte.org/notesplus/ideas_classroom/play-doh.shtml)

SAMPLE PRACTICE FOR SHOWING THE NEED FOR DETAILS THAT FIT AND FLOW Here 's a successful activity I learned from Barry Lane, author of after THE END (Heinemann 1995), and to whom I am indebted for many of my successful classroom practices in coaching writing.

I am frequently invited into schools to model the coaching process. In one of my modeling sessions, I do the following Barry Lane activity: I begin by asking the students if they want to hear a story from my life when I was their age. "Yes," they collectively shout. "Okay, do you want to hear about when I was scared or when I was naughty?" "Tell us the naughty story," they most often say. (I have both ready.) "Well, once, when I was your age, I disobeyed one of my parents' rules and got in trouble." I wait a few seconds, looking at the expectant students (This is exactly how Barry does it!) and then say, "Wasn't that a good story?"

Immediately, the students say, "That's not a story." So I say, "Why not?" One of them will say, "You didn't give any details." (Barry calls this the magic "D" word.)

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"Oh," I say, "you want details? Well here are some." I then proceed to give details about Chicago where I grew up...lots of details, but they are all extraneous, ones that do not speak to my naughty experience.

Eventually, someone's going to say, "What about being naughty?" To which, I say, "You just said you wanted details, and so I gave you lots of details. You didn't say details about my naughtiness." And then I add (and this is very important to get across) "I can see that you understand that a story has to have details and that the details have to fit the story. That's good, so here goes..." I begin to tell the story, with details that fit, but this time I give the details in a disjointed way (obviously out of sequence) and eventually some one's going to say, 'Your story is out of order." And after probing about what that means, I eventually say, "Oh you want details to be in sequence." And then add (again very important), "I'm impressed that you know and understand that a story needs details that both FIT and FLOW." (A content catch phrase that students quickly take to!)

Finally, I apologize for being playful with them and say, "Now I will tell the story, as you have explained to me, with details that FIT and FLOW. I then proceed to tell the story, and when I get to the key moment of the story, I use another Barry Lane goodie: I "explode the moment," with lots of sensory details. (See page 65 in Barry's after THE END.)

After the story, I have the students recall details and the flow of the story. I further explain (to 3P

rdP graders and up, including middle school, high school, and adults) the

concept of "exploded moments." (In expository essays, the term becomes "exploded idea.")

There's much more that a creative teacher can do with this activity, depending on the age and attention level of the students. My favorite follow-up activity is to have the students pair off and tell each other stories from their lives. While one tells the other listens for FIT and FLOW. The listener shares what he/she heard and then the students switch roles. Eventually, the activity leads to a cluster (web) of their story and a writing of a first draft. I try to keep my modeling lesson and the follow-up activity within the allotted time for Writing Workshop.

Activity 2. Key Resources of Coaching Writing-as-Process Have a discussion with your colleagues about key UresourcesU each is familiar with for helping in the coaching of writing-as-process. Record your notes here.

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Other Key Resources for Coaching Writing-as-Process In addition to the resources already mentioned of Don Graves, Lucy Calkins, the Saskatchewan web site, the NCTE web site, and Barry Lane, teachers will find good stuff in Lane's Reviser's Toolbox (Discover Writing Press, 1999) and his web site. Teachers will also find good stuff in Ralph Fletcher's Live Writing (Avon Books, 1999), and in his

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A Writer's Notebook (Avon Books, 1996). Most of these resources are used by elementary teachers, but I've found them quite helpful in working with upper grade students as well. Specifically for the upper grades (but good for any writing coach), I often turn to Ponsot and Dean's Beat Not the Poor Desks (Boynton-Heinemann 1982), Kirby and Liner's Inside Out (Boynton-Heinemann 1981), Peter Elbow's Writing With Power (Oxford University Press, 1981), John Mayher, Nancy Lester, and Gordon Pradl's Learning to Write; Writing to Learn (Boynton-Heinemann 1983), and Tom Romano's Writing with Passion (Boynton-Heinemann 1993.)

B. The Writing Workshop Simply put, the writing workshop is a dedicated classroom time-period set aside for students to work on writing and includes a variety of practices. In the opening chapter of their book, Writing Workshop (Heinemann 2001), Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi, say it well:

Teaching kids how to write is hard. That's because writing is not so much one skill as a bundle of skills that includes sequencing, spelling, rereading, and supporting big ideas with examples. But these skills are teachable. And we believe that a writing workshop creates an environment where students can acquire these skills, along with fluency, confidence, and desire to see themselves as writers (1).

Fletcher and Portalupi compare the writing workshop to a classroom of industrial arts students in which each student or possibly group of students is busy working on a personal project. The instructor may take a little time to show the whole class a specific tool or a specific skill before the students go to their work area to work on the project. The instructor usually moves about the room, checking how each project is going or conducts a longer conference with a given student or project group. In an hour's writing workshop, the little lesson is called the mini-lesson; it lasts usually no more than ten minutes. The bulk of the time, say 40 minutes, is used for individuals or groups working on a personal writing project or doing peer coaching or peer editing. There is usually time saved for sharing some individual writing with the group. Many

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teachers, as part of the sharing process, have a chair designated as the writer's chair. The student who is sharing his/her paper sits in the writer's chair and reads to the group. The important point of the writing workshop is that it is a dedicated time for everyone to be working on writing. (Key Resource: Lucy Calkin's The Art of Teaching Writing) ADDITIONAL NOTES FOR WRITING WORKSHOP

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C. The Mini-Lesson

Usually given at the beginning of a writing workshop, a mini-lesson is a short -- ten

minutes, maximum -- lesson by the teacher on a very specific point or issue such as a

punctuation need, a grammar issue, a procedural issue, a writing technique (e.g. using

strong verbs, creating catchy leads, building transitions), or whatever specific item the

teacher feels would benefit the whole class. When the mini-lesson ends, the students go

to their own on-going writing project. The power of the mini-lesson comes from its well-

focused succinctness and the encouragement of the teacher for the students to apply what

they have learned into their writing. Children, parents, and other guests may be

encourged to give a mini-lesson, too. (Key resources for mini-lessons: Lucy Caulkin's

The Art of Teaching Writing, and Don Graves' A Fresh Look at Writing.)

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON MINI-LESSONS

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D. Portfolios

In the same way that artists collect their work into a portfolio, so also writers in a writing

workshop classroom keep their writing in a portfolio. Some teachers and some schools

use the portfolio for assessing individual progress; others use it as a collection of work

that encourages the young writer to become aware of his/her personal efforts. Much has

been written about what should and should not go into a writer's portfolio, what should or

what should not be used for evaluating a given writer, and whether or not the portfolio is

the main source of a student's grade. The key here, as in all best practices, is that it is up

to you and your colleagues to determine how portfolios are to be used. (Key resources on

using portfolios: Don Graves' A Fresh Look at Teaching Writing, Graves' Portfolio

Portraits (with Bonnie Sunstein) and Barry Lane's Portfolio Source Book)

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON PORTFOLIOS

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E. Self/Peer/Teacher/Parent Coaching/Conferencing

For all forms of coaching/conferencing, it is best to do some training in how to make a

session work well. They will work well if the participants use a writer's guide/assessment

tool and if the session is focused on specific strengths before focusing on specific

suggestions (Call them suggestions rather than weaknesses.). In making suggestions, the

responsibility of the coach is to let the piece remain the work of the writer, not the coach.

In other words, the coach should not rewrite the piece but instead coach the writer into

making revisions that the writer feels would improve the piece. (Key Resources on

Conferencing: Lucy Calkin's The Art of Teaching Writing, Don Grave's A Fresh Look at

Writing, and Carl Anderson's How's It Going?)

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON CONFERENCING

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F. Talk-Write

There are several versions of this practice; here are two:

Put students into groups of two or three and have each group go to a section of the

blackboard or to a posted sheet of newsprint or oak tag, to do some writing as a team.

Either with a free choice of topic or with an assigned topic, have each team plan their

writing by talking it out while one member of the team writes what the group wants

written -- crossing out and changing as they progress towards a draft that will be shared

with the rest of the class.

Another version of this is to pair students and have each member of the pair tell the other

a story from his/her personal life (personal narrative), taking about three or four minutes

to do so. The listener listens, especially for details: are there enough, are there too many,

do they fit, and do they flow? The listener shares reactions with the speaker, and then the

roles switch so that the other member tells and the first one listens for details. After the

talk part comes the write part: each member then writes her/his story based on the oral

telling and on the suggestions of the listener.

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON TALK-WRITE

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G. Free Writing/Speed Writing

In their journals, have students write for about five minutes, non-stop, either about an

open topic or a given topic. Let them know that the purpose of this is to give them

experience in being fluent, in putting thoughts on paper, and that correctness of grammar,

punctuation, and such will not be checked. Some teachers have students share what

they've written; others do not. If comments are made by listeners, stress that they must be

specific (concrete) rather than empty wrappers (abstract).

Speed writing is a variation of free writing. The writer's objective in speed writing is to

produce a high number of words about a given topic in a three minute time period.

After the time expires, the students each count the number of words they've written and

record that on the journal page. The next day, their objective is to write more words than

the day before, and so on until a comfortable flow is established for each individual.

Some students, just to gain a high word count will keep repeating a single word such as

the, the, the, or and, and, and. Instruct them that the words have to be written as thoughts

that flow and that "word stutters" don't count.

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON FREE WRITING/SPEED WRITING

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H. Demand Writing

When students have to write an essay or any other genre within a set time limit for an in-

class test or for a standardized test, this writing is called demand writing. It is very

helpful to give students frequent practice experiences in doing demand writing. They

need to practice understanding the prompts of a demand assignment, and the doing of the

planning, the writing, and the revising all within the allotted time. Suggest to students

that in the allotted time, they use about 1/4 of the time for planning, 1/2 for writing, and

one 1/4 for revision. (Resources: Bookstores carry books for students preparing to take

national standardized tests. Most of these include demand-writing help. Also, in the

Appendix see "How to Write Effective Timed Essays [Demand-Writing].")

I. Speed Planning

As practice for demand writing, frequently give students a demand assignment for which

they must just do the planning within five minutes (or 1/4 of the allotted time for the full

demand writing). Share the critiquing of these so that students become competent and

comfortable in planning a demand piece of writing.

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ADDITIONAL NOTES ON DEMAND WRITING AND SPEED PLANNING

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J. Journal, Writer's Notebook, Journaling

"Journal" and "writer's notebook" are terms that both refer to an item in which a student

records thoughts, reactions, ideas, or anything else. "Journaling" refers to the specific use

of the journal. Journaling should be encouraged both in class and elsewhere. Some

teachers have students write responses to a piece of literature in their journals or

responses to the work of the day, and the teacher reads and responds to these entries.

Other teachers use it as a way for students to record their thinking without having to

share this with the teacher. A writer's notebook is used for recording ideas for and about

writing, in much the same way professional writers use a writer's notebook.

It is best to distinguish the journal and writer's notebook from a diary, which is very

personal and is not necessarily a storehouse of a writer's ideas and such like. (Most of the

key resources include something on journaling. The Key resource for writer's notebook is

Ralph Fletcher's A Writer's Notebook.)

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON JOURNALS, NOTEBOOKS AND JOURNALING

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K. Genres

As more states are now requiring students to write demand essays of various genres, it is

important to give students experience and training in writing various genres. It is best to

find which genres your state usually uses. The various genres can include: personal

narrative, a report, autobiography, biography, creative story, journalistic piece; and

various types of essays such as expository/opinion, persuasion essay, problem solving,

cause and effect, compare and contrast, description, definition, discussion, reflection, and

review. Each has specific prompts that let the writer know which genre is expected.

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON GENRES

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L. Multi-Genre Writing

In the upper grades, particularly, but also in all grades, some teachers are encouraging

students to mix various genres. Let a poem come into an essay, or a creative piece of

description or even a dramatic scene or dialog come into a report. In journalism, this is

called creative-non-fiction, a genre that has been in use for many years by writers. Some

students take well to it. (Key resource for multi-genre writing is Tom Romano's Writing

with Passion: Life Stories, Multiple Genres)

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON MULTI-GENRE WRITING

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M. Writing Across The Curriculum

Writing across the curriculum has become a significant development in recent years as

more and more teachers are discovering the value of using writing in every subject. In

math, science, social studies, music, art, even physical education, teachers use journaling,

topical free writing, summary notes, reports, logs, demand-writing, and multi-genre

writing. And some standardized tests are now asking for writing in subject areas. (Key

Resources: John Mayher's Learning to Write; Writing to Learn, and Ann Gere's Roots in

the Sawdust)

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

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N. Handbooks

As language quality issues such as grammar, usage, and punctuation arise, teachers may

need to turn to sources such as handbooks for guidance. Handbooks are most helpful for

presenting mini-lessons on a given concept or convention of Standard English. (Key

Resources: any of the Write Source Series of handbooks for various grades through

college, and The Right Handbook by Pat Belanoff, et. al. Also, try creating a booklet of

the key conventions for your grade level. See the Appendix for "Common Errors and

Mistakes to Avoid in Using English.")

ADDITIONAL NOTES ON HANDBOOKS

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O. History of English Language English is a complex language that is often complicated for both native and non-native speakers. Its rules and its exceptions to the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling confuse many people. English became a complex language over the centuries because it is an amalgamation of several other languages that have impacted its root as a Germanic language. It has especially been influenced by French and Latin. When students learn the fascinating history of English, they usually gain a deeper appreciation of English and its complexities and a deeper appreciation of all languages. (Resources: See the Appendix for "Brief History of English." Also, most libraries have books on the history of languages, including English.) ADDITIONAL NOTES ON HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

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P. Suggested Supportive Practices 1. Build a database of best practices to which all teachers contribute. 2. Create a colleague mentoring program for working with new teachers. 3. Train the parents in how to be writing coaches rather than judges or editors. ADDITIONAL NOTES ON SUPPORTIVE PRACTICES

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SUMMARY OF KEY RESOURCES

BOOKS ON TEACHING WRITING (K-12) after THE END: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision. Barry Lane. Heinemann, 1993. When children in the lower grades finish writing, they like to write in very large letters at the bottom the words THE END. Building on that, Barry delightfully shows how to help students of any grade level go back and revise what they've written. He gives lots of practical activities and some excellent metaphors that help students understand how to

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add more impact in their writing. One is his "exploded moment" metaphor in which he helps the writer find the key moment of an experience and then explode it with sensory details. Another is his suggestion to use mental binoculars to focus more tightly and more clearly on a scene or on an idea one is writing about. After reading and learning from this book, teachers will be much better equipped to get students to know that revision is an ongoing, creative process, not just a clean-up process. (K-8) A Fresh Look at Writing. Donald H. Graves. Heineman, 1994. This book expands on Graves' 1983 seminal work, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, the book that gave so many teachers guidance in teaching writing and in the craft of writing. In Fresh Look, Graves revisits in new ways many of the practices that have now become widely incorporated in effective teaching of writing: conferencing, portfolios, mini-lessons, record keeping, writing as process, and so much more. It's a treasure-trove resource that inspires teachers to bring the joys of writing into their own lives as well as into the lives of students. (K-8) Reviser’s Toolbox. Barry Lane. Discover Writing Press, discoverwriting.com., 1999. As an in-demand speaker and workshop leader, Lane travels a lot and in so doing he has collected hundreds of activities from teachers for making revision both fun and effective. He literally has given us a toolbox loaded with tools. (K-8) The Art of Teaching Writing. New Edition, Lucy McCormick Calkins. Heinemann, 1994. Along with Don Graves, Lucy Calkins has had a profound influence on the teaching of writing. More than anyone else, Calkins has championed the writing workshop as the foundation of a school's language arts program. The first edition, published in 1986 and widely used, put Calkins in the forefront of teaching writing in most of the English speaking parts of the world. In this new eddition, she keeps all of the richness, wisdom, and practicality of the original as she tells how she herself has grown as a teacher of writing, as a parent, and as a writer since the first edition. It's a very honest and important book; one that should be used by all teachers of writing. (K-8) How's It Going?: A Practical Guide to Conferencing. Carl Anderson. Heinemann, 2000.

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Carl Anderson, as part of Lucy Calkins' Writing Project at Columbia University, has given us an insider's perspective on having a writer's conference with a student. He allows us to look over his shoulder as he works with young writers, and he gives us the language to use and other important advice on how to make these conferences more effective. (8-12) Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for Teaching Writing. Dan Kirby & Tom Liner. Boynton/Cook (Heinemann), 1981. In this "goodie," the two authors show respect for the learner and for the craft of teaching writing as a process that moves from the inside out rather than being pushed in on the learner. Conferencing, writer's guides, free writing, journaling, voice, revision, and genres are just some of the topics they cover, and they cover these well. Though this book is more for class work in the upper grades, all teachers would highly benefit from reading it. (8-12) Beat Not The Poor Desks: Writing: What to Teach, How to Teach it and Why. Marie Ponsot & Rosemary Deen. Heinemann, 1982. If you want mental stimulation that will awaken your thinking along with giving you some profound insights about the teaching of writing, then this is the book to read regardless of what grade you teach. It will not only change your thinking about the teaching of writing, but it will change your habits of doing so. Based on work at Queens College, New York and in various New York high schools, the authors take us deep inside the art and skill of writing and the art and skill of teaching writing. They begin with what they call elemental realities of writing, and move from there to a deepened understanding of the roots of the fable, the parable, and other literary structures that can and should impact student writing. (8-12) Writing With Passion: Life Stories, Multiple Genres. Tom Romano. Heinemann, 1995. Shortly before I retired, one of my former students came to visit. She had completed her MA work for becoming an English teacher. In talking with her about the teaching of writing, she said, "Get Romano's book." I did, and I discovered why she wanted me to. Romano practices what he preaches; he writes with definite passion as he shares his personal life stories, his practical suggestions for teaching writing, and his long years as a high school English teacher. And, as an advocate of multi-genre writing (creative-non-

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fiction), he intersperses his writing with mixed genre. It's a joy to read as well as a practical guide to have. (K-12) Writing and the Writer. Frank Smith. Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1982. Many teachers of reading and writing credit Frank Smith for opening their minds to the consequences of a more effective way of teaching than that of the negative "drill and kill" method. Graves and Calkins certainly do. All of us, teachers, administrators, and parents can learn a great deal from reading anything Frank Smith has written, including this book. (K-12) Drawing Your Own Conclusions: Graphic Strategies for Reading, Writing, Thinking. Fran Claggett. Heinenman, 1992. Fran Claggett, with the help of Joan Brown, shows how graphics can help students make meaning of what they read, write, or think. Filled with visuals done by students, the book makes a clear case for making connections visually. It shows the strategies for doing so, based on years of working with high school students. (K-12) Live Writing: Breathing Life Into Your Words. Ralph Fletcher. Avon Books, 1999. This little book is a gem for helping young writers make their writing come alive, or as Ralph Fletcher puts it, "the kind of writing that has a current running through it -- energy, electricity, juice." He shows writers how to do that; he gives them a toolbox filled with practical suggestions. Teachers will also want to get Fletcher's companion book, A Writer's Notebook, in which he encourages writers of all ages to lead a writerly life. (K-12) A Writer's Notebook: Unlocking the Writer Within You. Ralph Fletcher, Avon Books, 1996. Fletcher, a writer of books for adults and children, calls the writer's notebook the place where one can live like a writer, recording thoughts, ideas, reactions, creations any time and anywhere, not just in school. Encouraging young writers to do this is encouraging them, to live the "writerly life." And living the "writerly life" is something teachers of writing can benefit from doing too. (K-12) Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide. Ralph Fletcher & JoAnn Portalupi.

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Heinemann, 2001. For teachers who want to make writing a central focus of their classrooms rather than sandwiching in a little time for it, this is the guidebook. It give us the essentials of a dedicated time called writing workshop. In a writing workshop, students go beyond just producing a product for the teacher; instead, say the authors, they are like apprentices learning the craft of writing in an environment that encourages learning guided by a master, the teacher. (K-12) Portfolio Source Book. Vermont Portfolio Institute. discoverwriting.com, 1994. What goes into a student's writing portfolio and how is the portfolio integrated into the reading and writing curriculum? That's what is answered here, along with lots of samples and suggestions.

OTHER RESOURCES

TEACHING WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM Roots in the Sawdust. Anne Ruggles Gere. National Council of Teachers of English Learning to Write, Writing to Learn. John Mayher, et. al., Heinemann Writing & Learning Across the Curriculum. Nancy Martin, et. al., Heinemann Writing to Learn. William Zinsser. Harper and Row The Journal Book. Toby Fulwiler, ed., Boynton/Cook-Heinemann The Interdisciplinary Teacher’s Handbook. Stephen Tchudi & Stephen Lafer. Boynton/Cook (Heinemann) HANDBOOKS The Write Source Series of Handbooks, Houghton Mifflin The Right Handbook, Belanoff, et. al., Boyton/Cook (Heinemann) ON TEACHING The Courage to Teach. Parker J. Palmer. Jossey-Bass Publishers Learning by Teaching. Donald M. Murray, Boyton/Cook (Heinemann) ON WRITING FOR ONE’S SELF AND FOR PUBLICATION

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A Writer’s Notebook: Unlocking the Writer Within You. Ralph Fletcher. Avon Accidental Genius: Revolutionize Your Thinking Through Private Writing. Mark Levy Berrett-Koeheler Discovering the Writer Within. Bruce Ballenger and Barry Lane. Writer's Digest Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg, Shambala Press Writing Toward Home. Georgia Heard. Heinemann Writing for Self Discovery. Barry Lane. Writer's Digest How to Write the Story of Your Life. Frank P. Thomas. Writer's Digest WEB SITES: www.thewritesource.com (UlotsU of ideas for teaching writing.) www.merlynspen.com (a magazine that publishes children’s writing) www.kids-space.org (place for kid’s writing) www.schoolnotes.com (place for teachers and schools to post notes, free) www.discoverwriting.com (Barry Lane’s site) www3.sk.sympatico.ca/fiss/newpage1.htm (Saskatchewan’s excellent resource; note: The site address begins with www3. If you put a dot after the www, you will not reach the site.) Be sure to bookmark any of these sites. ADDITIONAL NOTES ON RESOURCES

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PART THREE:

WHAT NEXT

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WHAT NEXT

EXPLORING THE STEPS NEEDED TO SUSTAIN

AN EFFECTIVE WRITING PROGRAM

As you think through all of the work you've done in this process journal to mine the best

practices already in place in your school, your school district and in wider use elsewhere,

it's important now to build-in and maintain a future's perspective. You'll need to explore

the steps you collaboratively see as necessary for assuring that your program will have a

sustained future.

ACTIVITY A.

Purpose: To articulate your personal vision for the future of the writing program in your

classroom, your school, and your district

Task: Below, write the vision of the writing program you have for both the short and

long-term future of the writing program in your classroom, your school, and your district.

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ACTIVITY B.

Purpose: To share the visions your colleagues have for the short and long-term future of

the writing program

Task: Discuss with your colleagues and record here as well as on a posted flipchart sheet

the common vision you collaboratively have for the short and long-term future of the

writing program.

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ACTIVITY C.

Purpose: To discuss and record the steps that you collaboratively see as necessary for

sustaining your writing program both short and long-term

Task: Discuss these steps and record them on a posted flipchart sheet. For yourself,

record these steps below.

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APPENDIX For Students: DEMAND WRITING* For Parents:

HELPING YOUR CHILD TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE AS A WRITER IN SCHOOL*

For Teachers, Students, and Parents:

COMMON ERRORS AND MISTAKES IN USING ENGLISH AND A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH* *For copies of these contact the author at: www.jamesevers.com

CASE REPORT USING THE WRITING I.Q. PROGRAM

In 1999, a school in one of the highest ranked school districts of the USA experienced a 40% failure in the writing part of the state 4th grade test. At the suggestion of the director

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of their district's teacher’s development institute, the school engaged my services as consultant in the teaching of writing. I spent two years at the school, modeling the coaching of writing and facilitating the teachers and administrators in developing a program for coaching writing at any grade level based on my Writing I.Q. Program. After the first year, the writing scores rose to a record 90% success rate. After the second year, the scores rose to 100% success rate. There was full teacher support for the program essentially because it was developed by them and because it was based on the local realities of how writing could be taught. Feedback: Here are reactions to the work done in the two years from various participants in the project: Teachers: 1. Fourth grade teacher, 30+ years of experience “The approaches modeled gave the students and the teachers a process and a focus and helped us build on the importance of continuity of previous experiences in writing and in literature. It was helpful to have the integration of all teachers in this project. We are all on the same wavelength, now, in the teaching of writing, the building of a seamless curriculum. Our children are enthusiastic about living the ‘writerly life,’ daily practicing in their writer’s notebooks and in their works in progress and understanding such elements as ‘details, details, details,’ ‘fit and flow,’ and being a ‘writing coach’.” 2. Third grade teacher, four years of experience “Our third grade team now has stronger knowledge of what to expect from third grade writers. We regularly refer to I. Q. (impact and quality), ‘fit and flow,’ and ‘sensory details.’ We regularly use mini-lessons and are putting common language on our report cards. The amount of writing that is going on and the positive feeling about writing is very high, now.” 3. Fifth grade teacher, 20+ years of experience “I loved it; it breathed new life into our school and put us on the same page. The teaching of writing begins with the kids and they now are more in control. We now have a

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consistency, a focus, a common language, and a tool (Writer's Guide and Assessment Tool) which the students and I regularly revise from experience. I feel it's been the absolute best thing that ever happened here.” 4. Librarian, member of 3rd grade team, former class room teacher, 25+ years of experience “The key strength is that the program was teacher created and developed, not from a prescription or a recipe. Teachers and kids are using the tool (Writer's Guide and Assessment Tool) and the content of it is theirs. Our team is enthusiastically sharing with each other what our students are doing.” Administrators: 1. Principal (interim) for first year of the program “Our desired outcomes included having students learn to write, do more writing, gain practical experiences in writing for the 4th grade test, and learn to do writing as a thinking process. These outcome were met through a program that made writing interesting yet kept a focus on getting a job done. It carried a design that made for permanent change through modeling, coaching, and working developmentally. Students gained in their writing skills,and teachers gained in their teaching of writing skills.” 2. District Language Arts Curriculum Coordinator “This was precisely the right expertise needed. The routines, and the modeling, harnessed energy and lit the fire that began the building of consistent terminology and practices. It was exciting to watch the teachers and the students catching the enthusiasm. The test results show very impressive growth.” 3. Principal (new), second year of the project “This got the ball rolling towards common language, practices, and expectations. We continue to revisit the work and our report cards are now reflecting the language. It was a passionate building of a solid foundation for our continuing journey.” Author's Background: For over thirty-five years, I have functioned in several roles in education -- ten as a private school teacher/administrator and board member, twenty-five as a public school classroom teacher, dozens of years as a consultant to schools and corporations and twenty

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years as an adjunct at several colleges and universities, graduate and undergraduate. I am now retired from full time teaching, but I continue to conduct teacher development programs for schools and writing development programs for corporations. Additionally, I do a lot of writing of articles and training guides, serve as a writing coach to managers, assist authors in their writing, and am a critical reader of manuscripts for a business publishing company. Acknowledgements: It would fill UmanyU pages of names if I could acknowledge all of the students I’ve coached (some who have in turn coached me), teachers who taught me, teachers with whom I’ve co-taught, teachers whom I’ve coached (and several who have in turn coached me), administrators under whom I’ve worked, the authors who influenced me, editors who’ve helped me, and the many friends who have supported my teaching of writing for so many years. I am indebed to all of them and thank them from my heart. Most of all I want to acknowledge my wife who for 45 years has been a most supportive, often constructively critical, reader of my work.

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