Help! I Don’t Know What to Teach Them!
You’ve been letting them choose their topics and write at their own pace. You have been teaching strategy lessons and seeing your writers grow in confidence. Writer’s workshop is alive and thriving in your classroom! This is fantastic!
But if you are anything like me as a novice writer’s workshop teacher, you often feel as though when you meet with your writers, you feel like you don’t quite know what you are doing.
I can definitely remember walking away from a student after a conference and saying to myself, “I have no idea if that is right,” or “What am I going to teach her next time?”.
Even though I was teaching first graders, and you would think I might know more than a first-grade writer, I did not believe I was teaching the right way or the right thing to each writer. I did not have enough experience teaching in this way to know what the next best step was or how I could help writers develop further. I also did not spend much time writing myself nor did I have any training about writing techniques-not very much any way. And as with anything else, since this way of teaching writing was new to me, I wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of “teaching the writer” or the verbiage used when speaking of writing techniques or strategies.
I wanted to be the best writing teacher and to keep moving my writers along in their development, but I felt like I didn’t quite know how.
What I know now is there are plenty of things I knew to teach my young writers and that there were ways I would develop my toolbox of writing strategies. Here are two ideas I would like to share:
1-The aspects of writing you don’t see on the page are just as important as those you do.
2-Over time, you will come to learn more and more about writing by being a writer yourself and utilizing high-quality resources.
Developing the Whole Writer
When we pull up to a student’s desk to look at their writing, it is natural to put our focus on the paper rather than the writer themselves. Their work is right there in front of us, showing the misspelled words, lack of punctuation or short, choppy sentences. We are thinking of all the things that are going wrong and feel pulled to fix them. I get it!
What is important to realize and remember-because you will need reminders along the way-is that there are other vital aspects of being a writer that need to be developed that cannot be seen on that paper. They are just as important, if not more important, than teaching students to elaborate or use proper grammar. Not only should veteran writer’s workshop teachers keep this in mind, but as a novice in this way of teaching writing, you may need to rely on those aspects of writing, for your students as well as for yourself.
It is important to keep the writer at the forefront of your instruction- the whole writer. When we only focus on what’s on the page, we neglect the things that are under the surface and have much to do with what our writers need. In order for students to be strong writers, they need to have confidence, patience, self-regulation, engagement and many other skills or characteristics.
Instead of worrying about those skills that show up in students’ writing, lean on the additional parts of being a writer of which you are certainly knowledgeable. You know how to build confidence in your writers. You know how to praise their hard work, risk-taking and make them feel good about what they are doing. You are aware of techniques your writers can use to stay focused, generate ideas or get help from a fellow writer when they are stuck. When students can feel comfortable as writers and enjoy writing time, half the battle is won. Spend time developing these aspects of writing.
Learning from Your Writers
What has been so exciting and amazing to me through the years is that the more students are able to write freely, meaning at their own pace and on their own level (not being pushed to write sentences before they are able or include four reasons for their opinion when they barely understand the concept) the more I learn about what they CAN do and what they have trouble with. When we pay attention to what is happening with our writers, not only do we learn so much about how our students work through the writing process, we also begin to pick up on the skills or strategies they need to be taught to help them improve. As we know, each classroom is filled with students on various points on the continuum of writing development and ability. This is very helpful for you in learning about writing instruction because you will see the different levels of development and begin to collect ideas for teaching points. For example, you may notice in a second-grade classroom when working on a narrative that one student is telling about an event in more of a list fashion- ‘We got on the swings. Then we went down the slide.’-but another student who is a bit more developed as a writer is sharing more about each step of their event- ‘We saw the lake and ran to the edge. Then we looked down and two fish were swimming.’ If you really look at the difference between the two pieces, you can see that the second writer is really picturing what happened and being a bit more of a storyteller, where the first writer is still just putting down the overall gist. There are at least a couple of teaching points here: 1-Writers picture every step/bit of the event and tell each part. 2-Writers say things out loud like they are telling a story before they write.
When we stay curious and attempt to learn from what our writers are doing, we build our own toolbox of writing strategies to teach.
Resources that Teach You
I have gained expertise on strategies for teaching writing by utilizing a variety of resources, reading professional books and doing some of my own writing. No one becomes a seasoned writing expert as soon as they begin. This process will take time, and that is ok!
The first resource that provided a significant bank of not only writing strategies but overall pedagogy in the teaching of writing were the Units of Study in Writing written by Lucy Calkins and colleagues and published by Heinemann. The accompanying Writing Pathways Book, which contains an assessment system as well as information on the teaching of writing and writing development serve as professional development. At the time, I did use the units for the majority of my writing instruction, however, each unit in the series are able to be used *as desired, as long as you are implementing writer’s workshop. If you are not allowing students to lead their writing, and the lessons you teach are not in your class’s zone of proximal development, the lessons will not go over as well for your writers.
Another incredible resource for learning and teaching writing strategies is, can you believe it, The Writing Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo. The tools shared in this book as well as the layout make it not only high-quality but simple to use. Each strategy is included under a larger category of writing skills. The skills are what you would look for as the goals you would identify for your writers. The process of identify goals is complex, however, it does not have to be done in order to utilize the strategies in the book. My suggestion when first trying the book would be to consider skills with which your class may be having difficulty and find one or two strategies within those skills to try. Practice teaching them with various students and utilizing different ways to demonstrate the strategy to your writers such as mentor or demonstration texts.
The last resource I want to speak on is that of doing your own writing. In a past post, Why Writing Teachers Really Should Write Too, I share how this practice can help you find what to teach your writers. Be sure to check out that post for more, but for now, just know that this does not have to be a big deal that takes too much of your time. This doesn’t mean you need to become a writer-although you may want to once you get started! You can just take a few minutes a day, possibly just as your writers are getting started with independent writing time, and try a bit of what your writers are working on. As you write, pay attention to what goes through your mind, what you do, how you feel and anything else that comes up for you. You may notice “behind the scenes” aspects of writing and will empathize more with your students. After writing, take some time to analyze strategies you may have used. This will be difficult because most of it comes naturally at this point, and also because you may not be used to the language of writing. Give yourself time and see what you find!
The last thought I would like to leave you with is this; If you are honoring your students as writers, allowing their approximations and encouraging them to write, you are already doing so much for them. Be confident in this as you take time to extend your pedagogy in the teaching of writing. Know that you are giving them so much just by having them write in authentic ways. You will continue to gain expertise and feel more confident with time.
*Side note should you look at or use the Units of Study: The “scripts” in each lesson are not meant to be read word-for-word. They are there to provide an example lesson. You can certainly use them, but it is not necessary. You can take the teaching point (which is the strategy) and find your own way to go through the mini-lesson.
