Contents
Introduction
1. "I'm not a good writer."
2. "My hand hurts."
3. "I don't know how to spell."
4. "I don't have anything to write about."
5. "I never get to write anything I want to write"
6. "I'm done."
Works Cited

Sample Chapter: "I'm not a good writer."
Bibliography of Cited and Recommended Titles

Introduction
Kids get stuck all the time while writing. Truthfully, we do, too. This book is not about those temporary sputters and stalls that happen to all of us. This book is about those students who are stuck all the time. Students we frequently see sitting for several minutes, sometimes the whole class period, with nary a word scratched upon the page. Students whose notebooks we flip through hopefully, only to find oodles of blank pages hidden between a few written upon ones. Students who suddenly have to go to the bathroom, sharpen their pencils, or visit the nurse every time writing is on the agenda. Mild-mannered students who suddenly start cracking jokes and talking back. Tough ones who burst into tears.

This book is intended to help those of us who have students in our classrooms who don't write.

In other words, this book is for every teacher who has a writing workshop. We all know that no two students are alike. So it stands to reason that no two struggling students will need exactly the same kind of teaching.

Before we explore what each student comes to us knowing and believing about writing, we must first try to leave all of our misconceptions at the proverbial door. It is only then that we can best find the right strategies that will fit each student.

There are, of course, as many different kinds of struggles as there are faces of students. However, for the purposes of this book, I have explored the six most common things students say to us while shooting up the flare to let us know they are in trouble:

• "I'm not a good writer."
• "My hand hurts."
• "I don't know how to spell."
• "I don't have anything to write about."
• "I never get to write anything I want to write"
• "I'm done."

Some students may never have said these things, but you can almost see the thought bubbles above their heads. Some students' struggles fit into more than one category. Some students' struggles fall firmly into one. You will also notice that sometimes one struggle can affect another.

My hope is that you will flip directly to the chapters that address the struggles most urgently uttered in your classroom right now. Each chapter is organized into three major sections meant to be of practical help right away:

• researching in order to understand what's going on with the student
• choosing strategies we can put into action
• planning for next steps

The work in this book comes from my experiences as a classroom teacher in New York City, working with both general education and special education populations. The students discussed in this book are composites created from the hundreds of students I've worked with and learned from over the years. My rehearsal for this book has spanned years and has included not only the days I spent teaching but also the evenings I spent torturing myself over a garbled notebook or over the realization that the student I'd dismissed the day before had been pleading for help.

I've also culled a bulk of these ideas from my current colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, where I work as a literacy consultant in New York City schools and across the country. Lucy Calkins, the founding director of the Project, in addition to being one of my primary mentors, was instrumental in pushing me to think and rethink my ideas about how to best help all students learn to write better. My other main influences for this book were Mel Levine, Donald Graves, Katie Wood Ray, Carl Anderson, Lev Vygotsky, and Katherine Bomer. Countless teachers, administrators, service providers, and students have offered up suggestions, crystallized my thinking, and challenged me in ways that you will see over and over again in the pages of this book.

It is also worth noting that I am working from the assumption that you either have a writing workshop up and going in your classroom or plan to have one very soon. I am assuming that you teach your students writing on a daily basis. You teach students to think of writing as a process, and your students have choice of topics, voice, and sometimes of structure in their writing. You teach units across the year that focus on process and genre-for example, one unit might invite students to write poetry and another might spotlight revision. Writing workshop is the teaching method I was raised in and immersed in since I first entered this profession and I embrace it in the book. It is challenging for me to think outside of its boundaries. That said, even if you do not have a writing workshop, with a little interpretation, you will probably find that many of the strategies I propose in this book will work for your classroom as well.