Thoughts on the Being a Writer™ Program: Kate Morris, Sixth Grade

We wanted to highlight this post from Kate Morris of Forrest Elementary in Philadelphia. Her whole school is implementing the Being a Writer™ program for the first time (lots more implementation stories here) and we feel her thoughts on the first weeks of the program are inspiring.

As a veteran teacher of middle-school years, I was formerly teaching a writing prep class at two schools. Fortunately, I was hired full-time at Forrest Elementary as the sixth grade writing/reading/social studies teacher. Due to the school’s good fortune of having one of our teachers named Teacher of the Year, we were presented with a new writing series for the entire student body, accompanied with professional development to help facilitate the curriculum.

I was apprehensive about beginning an entirely new series that I was generally unfamiliar with, particularly as a new full-time employee of the school. Putting my uncertainties aside, I, as well as many other colleagues, began the process. This process was introduced to us at a professional development in early September prior to the students’ arrival. We were shown the series and a mini lesson on the implementation of the writing method. We were assured that the development would be supported through future professional trainings throughout the year as well as online support from the advisors from the publishing company. So with my mini-lesson development, my curriculum guide, my class set of student writing handbooks, and children’s literature books from distinguished authors, I began the daily presentation of our new writing curriculum.

The introduction of the writing program through the teacher’s manual is presented in an understandable format. Each lesson is divided into sections that inform the instructor precisely how to orchestrate the classroom in movement, interaction, and engagement. Students are afforded the opportunity to listen to acclaimed authors share their talents and ambitions to promote the inner writer in all of them. After a specific reading is shared, students are given the opportunity to write through their own voice. Students are given a choice to write on a similar topic that was previously read by the instructor or to simply choose their own writing piece as a starting block.

Many observations have been noted in the first four weeks of introducing this series. Most of my students have enjoyed the literature that has been shared. The series promotes an orderly way of documenting the ideas for writing that have been shown to be helpful to many struggling writers. Students have become trained to listen to their peers' ideas and shared writing pieces through strategies such as "Think, Pair, Share" and peer conferencing. Oftentimes students have enjoyed the ideas of their peers and have added those ideas to their own writing table of contents. As a result, many students want to share their writing samples with the class. Many times, due to time constraints, I need to limit the amount of shared writing as a class review. Students are given the opportunity to share their ideas during teacher-student conferencing.

Coincidentally, I informed the students that I would be sharing my thoughts about the writing program on a blog. Many were interested in sharing their thoughts as well:

• Daniel writes that he likes to give his point of view of the story.
• Marquese writes that he likes that he gets to express his feelings and his thinking. He also states he likes the program because it is productive and fun.
• Matthew states the program is fun. Matthew and Cheyanne like expressing their ideas.
• John states he likes to write about his favorite parts of the story.

As a whole, I have seen many reluctant students prepared and willing to share their thoughts in the writing community of our classroom. If this is an early indicator of the students’ progress in writing for the coming year, I am certainly optimistic that more of my students will become more confident in their writing capabilities.