Excerpt from A Guide to the Writing Workshop
This is the first in a series of books designed to help upper-elementary teachers teach a rigorous yearlong writing curriculum. The series stands on the shoulders of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project community. The books have, in a sense, been coauthored by the entire staff of this professional development organization and by the teachers, principals, and superintendents who have become part of the community of practice, helping develop, pilot, and revise the ideas that fill the pages of these books.
Together, all of us have passed the baton to others, helping several hundred thousand teachers become skilled at teaching writing. Word has spread. Over the years, more and more teachers have heard that the writing workshop has given children unbelievable power as readers, thinkers, and composers of meaning—and that it has given teachers new energy and joy, reminding us why we chose careers in teaching in the first place. Demand for support in the teaching of writing has skyrocketed. This series is my effort to provide that support.
The increased focus on writing comes in part from the technological revolution that has transformed our lives. As the Internet and text messaging seep into every nook and cranny of our day, all of us are writing more than ever. In today's Information Age, it has become increasingly important that all children are given an education that enables them to synthesize, organize, reflect on, and respond to the data in their world. Indeed, three years ago, a National Writing Commission called for a Writing Revolution, suggesting that children need to double the amount of time they spend writing in their classrooms.
But above all, the escalating demand for professional development in the teaching of writing comes because when teachers receive the education we deserve in the teaching of writing and are therefore able to provide children with clear, sequenced, vibrant instruction in writing (along with opportunities to write daily for their own important purposes), we make a dramatic difference in children's abilities to write. The stories and essays that children produce as a result become far more substantial and significant, revealing the young authors in ways that are often poignant.
Strong writing instruction can also power dramatic increases in scores on standardized tests. Today, students need to write well to achieve on the SAT and on advanced placement exams. More and more states have either integrated writing into their standardized reading tests or added separate assessments of writing.
Educators who wonder whether adopting a reading and writing workshop will translate into increases in standardized tests will want to notice the impressive gains New York City has made since the Chancellor held a press conference at P.S. 172, a Teachers College Reading and Writing Project stronghold, in which he said that the approach in that school needed to be taken citywide. Since adopting balanced literacy, New York City's test scores have skyrocketed, with double-digit increases in state standardized tests in grades three, four and five. The most important gains in New York City have been on the NAEP, often referred to as the "nation's report card." This assessment is mandated by Congress and administered by the US Department of Education. Last December, recent NAEP scores were released showing that New York City's fourth grade school students outperformed their peers in other cities with populations over 250,000.
Sheila Ford, Vice Chair of the National Assessment Governing Board of the NAEP was quoted in a recent Education Week article saying, "New York City had the greatest gains of any urban city setting in the country in the area of reading." In a speech to the principals and superintendents from schools across the country which are affiliated with the Project, she elaborated saying, "The important thing to realize is that over thirty years, the NAEP scores nationally have been essentially flat. Since New York City
adopted the balanced literacy approach citywide in 2002, New York City's scores have risen 7 points which is a statistically significant gain. New York City is also the largest school district in the nation with 1.1 million students, and 84 percent of its fourth graders are eligible for free or reduced lunch." New York is making progress bridging the achievement gap. New York City's Black and Hispanic low income fourth graders far outperformed similar students in large cities and in the nation as a whole on the percentage of students achieving at or above the basic level.
NAEP writing scores for major cities will be released in 2007 but even before the writing workshop was extended citywide, New York City children wrote better than children in any other major city except Charlotte. More generally, data from the NAEP assessment show clearly that children who are accustomed to writing more than one draft and who save their writing in folders—techniques that are hallmarks of a writing workshop—perform better as writers than do other students.
Although it is reassuring to realize that teaching children to write well can transfer into improved scores on standardized tests, those of us who put writing at the center of our professional lives do so for far more personal and compelling reasons. First of all, it is not only children's work that is transformed through professional development in the teaching of writing; teachers' work is also transformed. When a community of teachers embraces reform in the teaching of writing, teachers often become reinvigorated and renewed in the process. And individual teachers find that teaching writing taps new sources of energy within themselves. Over the years, teachers have continually told me that the teaching of writing has given them new energy, clarity, and compassion, reminding them why they went into teaching in the first place. I understand what these teachers mean, for writing has done all this—and more—for me.
Lifting the level of writing instruction matters because writing matters. I recently read an article that reminded me of the human need to tell and write the stories of our lives. The article was about Ivory, a man whose job had been to drive a garbage truck through New Orleans and who was, at the time of the article, living on a cot in the New Orleans Convention Center and had only a small cardboard box full of salvaged stuff left to show for his life. Sitting on that cot, bereft of all that he'd built for himself, Ivory asked to borrow a pencil and then began listing everything he'd lost in Hurricane Katrina: the framed photograph of his mother, the radio that had turned his little apartment into a pub, the table he'd found once beside the road…I'm quite sure that as Ivory recorded each precious item on his page, it was as if those items were, in some way, still a part of him: "This is me," he seemed to be saying. Writing is a way for us to hold onto the moments and the selves that could otherwise slip through our fingers.
All of us rush through our lives: we wake up, we eat our breakfast, we hurry to school, into our classroom, we hang up our coat, we wave hello to this person and that, time passes and soon one day becomes the next. Behind us, we leave what John Updike calls "a litter of old selves." Ten-year-old Geirthruder wrote:
I often think that my life is like a handful of sand, they fall, there's nothing you can do about it, it will keep falling until it's all gone, which is why I hate digital watches that count seconds.
Of course, no one is leaving behind old selves in faster, more dramatic ways than children. It is children who know the glee, and the sadness, too, of finding they can no longer squeeze through the gap in the backyard fence. It is children who find their voices changing, their legs getting longer. It is children who constantly outgrow trousers and roles. And children, like adults, need ways to set their lives onto the page, to hold on to their past and make meaning in their present.
It is not enough simply to go from here to there, from this moment to that one. We need our moments and our days to add up, to mean something, to cumulate. As Ernst Becker has said, "What human beings fear is not growing old, but growing old without things adding up." And so we write.
We write to hold on to the moments of our lives and to make them matter. Patricia MacLachlan, the Newbery Medal-winning author of Journey, writes, "Other animals have journeys far greater than ours. The arctic tern crisscrosses the Atlantic Ocean many times. The monarch butterfly summers in the meadows of Maine and winters in the rain forests of Mexico." Then she adds, "But we are the creature that lives to tell the tale." During prehistoric times, human beings used whatever we could find-—sticks, berries, pieces of rock—to record the stories of our hunts and journeys on stony cave walls. Then, standing in the company of one another, we reread, recalled, reconsidered the hunts and journeys that we'd been on and imagined the ones still before us. I am convinced this is how we human beings became human. We live through our days, and then we turn back and say, "This is my journey, and this is what I make of it." In the end, each and every one of us is the author of a life: My Life, we each write. My Life, by me.
We've written this series because writing matters. Demand for professional development in writing has far outstripped the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project's abilities to provide this support. These books reflect our effort to hand over what we know so that more children can be given opportunities to grow strong as writers and more teachers can experience the extraordinary benefits that come from participating in a community of practice that involves a shared inquiry into the teaching of writing.
The wonderful thing about learning to teach writing well is that there are just a few teaching methods that one needs to know and be able to use. In this series, I provide crystal-clear advice on how to lead efficient and effective minilessons, conferences, and smallgroup strategy sessions. I do so knowing that as you travel through the series, encountering scores of transcripts of minilessons, conferences, small-group sessions, and shares, you will learn not only from explicit instruction but also from immersion. This first book of the series explicitly describes the architecture of all our minilessons, conferences, and small-group strategy sessions and details the management techniques that make writing workshops possible. The subsequent books show these methods and principles effecting real life in classrooms. I know from helping thousands of teachers learn to teach writing that these units will scaffold and inform your own teaching, and you will develop finesse and flexibility with the methods and information conveyed in these books.
In an ideal world, every teacher deserves the chance to learn state-ofthe- art methods for teaching writing not only by reading books but also by watching an exemplary teacher instruct her children day to day. Although we do not live in an ideal world, teachers who have relied on the Units of Study for Primary Writing (or on the binders containing very early and incomplete preliminary versions of the upper grade units) will assure you that these books can be a next-best substitute. They can give you the chance to listen in on and observe my teaching and, at times, the teaching of one of my colleagues. Each unit of study in this series contains the words of my teaching (and sometimes of a colleague's teaching) for between fifteen and twenty days, with suggested ways to extend each of those days if this seems merited. You will read the words I used to gather a class of students together on the rug for a minilesson, and then, once the children are gathered, you'll hear exactly what I said to them. You will hear me retell a harrowing moment with my dog, Tucker, and you'll see how I use that anecdote to illustrate a quality of good writing.
Ideally, you and every other teacher in the world should be able not only to observe exemplary teachers but also to do so with a coach nearby, highlighting the way the teaching illustrates a collection of guiding principles. Ideally, someone will be there at your side to point out the alternative decisions the teacher could and could not have made in any one moment. Therefore, as you witness this teaching, I will be an ever-present coach, highlighting aspects of the teaching that seem especially essential. My goal is to help you watch this teaching in ways that enable you to extrapolate guidelines and methods, so that on another day you'll invent your own teaching.
I already know, from talking with so many teachers who've used the Units of Study for Primary Writing, that sometimes you will take the wordsof my minilessons and bring them verbatim to your own children. I also know that more often you'll decide that the teaching I describe needs to be adapted or rewritten in order to fit you and your children. These books provide a detailed model; they are not meant as a script. Either way, the end goal is not the teaching that I've described here but the teaching that you, your colleagues, and your children invent together.
The most important thing for you to know is that the books are designed to put themselves out of a job. Once you have used this scaffold to support your teaching, you will find you no longer need it. You will see that your students need more help with one strategy or another, and you'll use the principles in these books to help you author minilessons, small-group work, and conferences tailored to the needs of your students. This series supports only six or seven months of teaching writing. In order to provide your children with a yearlong curriculum in writing, you will need to create your own units of study with your colleagues; these books will help you to do so.
The books are intended to be read and used in sequence, each book standing on the shoulders of the books that go before it. (The order of Fiction and Literary Essays could conceivably be flipped; other than that, they must proceed in order.) A few homemade units can be inserted between the fifth and the sixth book. I suggest one of these be a unit of study on poetry, and I will later direct you to sources of support for that unit and others. Together, these units (including the ones you author yourself) will combine to provide the curricular support necessary to take a class of upper elementary students on a learning journey. The series can also provide the backbone for a second or third year of study, as long as teachers in the succeeding years are increasingly willing to tailor their teaching to take into account what children already know and can do. That is, children profit from a spiral curriculum in writing: for example, in third grade they learn to write detailed, chronological personal narratives, but then in fourth grade, they have opportunities to deepen their knowledge of narrative writing. Because the teaching in these books is highly predictable, and because each bit of it draws on principles that are clearly articulated, you will find that these books will take not only your students but also you and your colleagues on a learning journey.
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