Response to Sheryl Lain's Article: Reaffirming the Writing Workshop for Young Adolescents

Lain’s article offered me some good information on the structure of a writing workshop, writing modes, conferencing, and journals & folders. I think her comment that skills need to be taught in the context of the students’ own writing is an important one. Skills taught in isolation and randomly really don’t get processed well. The implication for my classroom is that I need a better plan for the educational assistants that I work during writing. At this point I can see some sort of collaborative model. We have talked about it before, but I can see it happening with the writing workshop. It would be an effective way to work side by side with the EA’s so that I could model effective teaching and they could help with the conferencing. The only obstacle I can think of with this change is the scheduling issues with our students.
Another implication of this article was the section on poetic writing. My district uses Step-Up to writing at the elementary level. After reviewing the teacher’s manual I was reminded that it does not include any poetic writing. Poetry offers the structure and “word play” that I think would be important for my students to experience. The patterns of poetry just lend themselves to scaffolding beginning writing skills. Many of my students lack confidence in their ability to produce good writing. Poetry is manageable and would allow them to produce finished pieces within a shorter amount of time. I do agree with Lain’s requirement that her students produce one poem and one other piece of writing per day.
The sections on journals, writing folders and publishing gave me more to think about. I have traditionally furnished a journal for each student but I am not sure that they were always used as I would have liked. I currently do not teach all the students writing, so with the Writers Workshop model I can make this happen. I currently do have folders to keep examples of student work, but they are not accessible to the students because they have sample of all the subjects they are served for in them plus assessments and notes. Next fall I plan to have student writing folders so that they can look at their writing whenever they want. Publishing happens in the form of final drafts and they are displayed in the classroom. I want to see more sharing of writing, but will have to work on a protocol for this. My students will need to learn how sharing looks and practice sharing for this to be a productive and effective experience. I can see that sharing will help with their self confidence in writing but also in the area of social skills.
My last thought is that we just need to do more writing. I need to establish a routine for writing fluency complete with word count. Reading fluency has been monitored with my students, but I hadn’t thought of writing fluency. I think the students will enjoy keeping a graph of the number of words they write and it will motivate them to write more.