Voices from the Field

The Being a Writer program has two goals: supporting students’ writing and developing social skills. Academic rigor and collaborative learning are consistently integrated.

Here's what educators are saying:

Developing Voice

In the classrooms I have visited, collaboratively taught in, and from the writing samples that I have seen, the thing that strikes me is that students are developing their own voice. They see themselves now as competent writers who have the personal, academic, and intellectual resources to craft a piece of writing of which they are proud.

Building Stamina

The biggest changes I have seen when comparing the results from this program to results in other writing programs I’ve used in the past are that the students’ amount of writing has really increased as well as their writing fluency and stamina. At the beginning of the year, they wrote for maybe 10 minutes. And now, over time, I can see them writing for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. They just have that stamina now.

Believing in Themselves

At the beginning of the school year, they may say, ‘I don’t know how to write, I don’t know what to write about, I don’t know how to spell this,’ or, ‘I don’t even know how to write my last name.’ At the end of the year, they are saying, ‘I’m a writer.’ They go home; they want to write for their families. They want to read the books in the library that are published books that their friends have made. They make an emotional leap—they really, truly believe in themselves as writers now.

Selecting Topics

The kids are not constantly saying, ‘I don’t know what to write about.’ They are already expecting and knowing they are going to be writing about something. A huge, huge challenge in a classroom is having kids every day saying, ‘I don’t know what to write about.’ Now they realize, ‘I can write about my life.’

Learning Teamwork

In the fifth grade Expository Text Unit, my students had to make quite a few decisions with their partners: what topic to choose, how they were going to research their topic, what were the things they were interested in finding out about, how to split the work up during the drafting parts, how to help each other make their pieces more clear, and how to make decisions regarding publishing their piece. Every decision that the pair had to make, each person in that partnership needed to be respectful, to learn how to compromise, to learn how to share their opinions, and to share what they thought was the best. At the same time, each one needed to be open to what his or her partner had to say as well. Many teams struggled throughout the process, but I think that’s where the real learning happens. They really learned how to do work and negotiate with another person.

Becoming Better Human Beings

The partner work is very important to our district because it supports building a community of writers and parallels our district’s philosophy of human relations policies. The writing process is now an integrated part of a teacher’s classroom management system; it is an integral part of the children respectfully learning language that they can use to respond to each other; it is an integrated way students can feel comfortable that their work product is something that should be shared with a classmate and that the reciprocal learning that they receive from others is actually part of improving themselves.

The Power of Revising

The way a lot of people teach writing is kids write and then they never look at it again. You really lose a lot of purpose in that. By having them revisit their writing, we’re saying not to just put it into a folder where it could be lost or thrown away later. We’re saying look at it. What more can you add? How can you make it better?

Being Heard in the Author’s Chair

There is something very significant and important when a child sits down in front of a group of people and reads their story. This is their life story, this is what they do in the morning, this is what they want to become when they grow up. These are things that really matter to them. Especially in first grade, kids are not heard. We are taking the time to say you matter and your story matters, and we’re all listening, and we all enjoy it. And I think that does wonders for how students feel about themselves and learning.

Engaging the Reader

My students are motivated by the process of taking a draft to a published piece. Once they’ve added exciting details, pictures, and a cover, they create a finished piece of writing that they know others will enjoy. They take a lot of pride in their work because they know that they were able to give a reader what a reader wants. And that makes them feel accomplished as a writer.

Raising Expectations

I think what this has done for us more than anything is raise our conversation about the writing process, about writing instruction, about what good writing instruction looks like, and about the product that we should demand and expect from all of our learners. It doesn’t matter if a learner is a second language learner, if a student comes to us with an IEP, or if the student is white, Hispanic, or African American. The expectations are going to be high and rigorous for all of them.