When I first started teaching elementary school 20 years ago, I was terrible at writing instruction. Two facts dawned on me: my teacher preparation courses did not show me how to teach writing, and secondly, the old basal program in place at my inner city school was outdated and consisted mainly of writing prompts for kids along the lines of: "What would you do if you had a pet dinosaur?" Offering crazy prompts does not equal instruction.
In my second year of teaching, I entered the Literacy Coordinator program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's purpose was to train educators to teach reading and writing more effectively, without a basal, and without worksheets. It was the beginning of "Reading Workshop" and "Writing Workshop." Irene Fountas was my instructor.
I fell in love with this method of teaching. It was so wonderful, I thought. Let kids write what they want to write about! Give kids the freedom to express themselves without formulas! They will love to write once they have choice! I was genuinely enthused about giving my students blank notebooks and the freedom to write about their lives and what mattered to them.
I was so sold on this approach and on Literacy Collaborative that it took me a while to face the outcomes. After a couple of years, I realized that my students were not learning how to write clearly and in complete sentences. Not only that, most of the time, they didn't know what to write. I had thought they would willingly write about their lives, but they found no inspiration there. To many of them, their lives were boring.
Soon, I applied to our local branch of The National Writing Project and participated in their summer institute. The foundational tenet of The National Writing Project is that to teach writing, teachers of writing must first be writers themselves. It makes perfect sense that to teach something - anything - you must know how to do it in the first place. So, at the National Writing Project Summer Institute, I learned how to become a writer and practice my skills.
In addition, the National Writing Project provides a forum for teachers to teach teachers effective methods and best practices for writing instruction in grades K through 12. In the years that I participated (2004 to 2015), I learned and implemented numerous strategies and activities to motivate, encourage, and instruct my students on how to develop their writing skills. These methods include the "Write Around" and the "R.A.F.T.", among many other interesting learning activities. I will explain the two above-mentioned activities in other blog posts.
And yet, for all I learned by participating in The National Writing Project, and becoming a writer myself, I still did not possess a clear set of sequential steps for showing students how to write clearly and effectively. Our school did not have a writing curriculum, either. We tried Empowering Writers for a few years. All I will say about it, in this post, is that it's not terrible.
When our school district adopted a reading and writing basal program called ReadyGen, this program inspired me with ways to improve my teaching of writing. Ah, if only publishers created writing curricula that showed students how to write step-by-step, used age-appropriate models, and offered a streamlined teachers' guide! I mean - less is more. I mean - way less verbiage is what we busy teachers need.
However, one of the strengths of the program consists of the direct connection between what the students were reading, and what the students were asked to write. This approach not only provides them with a salient topic to write about, it strengthens their reading comprehension as well. ReadyGen contains many important writing skills, and it has a helpful guide for teaching English Learners that is also useful for many native English-speaking students. Most of the writing lessons are appealing to me and my students. When some weren't engaging or age appropriate, I invented my own lessons.
It was with ReadyGen that I came into my own. I utilized my past training and experiences to create models and supports for my students that the program lacked. I adjusted some of the expectations, and broke some of the lessons over multiple days. I introduced variations in the tasks and in my methods.
In my last decade of teaching, I was producing and implementing writing lessons that took the mystery out of the blank page, and showed my students exactly how to write clearly. As I was creating my lessons, I began to include three levels of challenge to accommodate advanced as well as struggling writers.
I don't want other teachers to wade through the excess verbiage in school basals, and I don't want their students to muddle through the year with random writing lessons. I want you all to instruct writing effectively and get right to the point with your students - without having to spend hours of your free time writing models, paragraph frames, and step-by-step guides for every lesson.
Here is a free, downloadable lesson that is an example of the caliber of my instruction. Download it so you can see how I taught writing, and how my lessons will save you prep time.
My goal is to help you help your students.
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