I began supporting teachers with developing their writing workshops in the 80’s.  Don Graves had written his famous book, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Lucy Calkins, Shelley Harwayne, Joanne Hindley and Nancie Atwell visited our county or state conferences and talked about their early work. Before long, their books were on my shelves too. I read it all, soaking it all in, sharing with the teachers at my school, modeling lessons for them, and so on.  As the years went by, I added new writing gurus, like Ralph Fletcher, Carl Anderson, Georgia Heard, and eventually Katie Wood Ray (really enjoyed In Pictures and in Words this summer.) As a Reading Teacher and Coach for elementary school teachers for most of my career, I never tired of reading about writing workshop and how to support students in becoming lifelong writers.  I bet many of you could say that you, too, learned so much from all the names I just mentioned.

Now there are a few new names on the writing front.  And I still find the topic exciting although I’m near the point of fully retiring (which I keep saying will happen “next school year” but my husband doesn’t believe me.) I continue to learn with Rose Cappelli and Lynn Dorfman with all their mentor texts books. Jeff Anderson and Aimee Buckner are also two of my new favorites.  I just finished Aimee’s recent publication called Nonfiction Notebooks (this is her third book on how she uses notebooks.)

Buckner’s latest book includes her work with upper elementary students as they learn to use their writers’ notebooks to flush out ideas for informational writing topics, narrow their topic to find an angle or focus, try out different leads, experiment with organizational ideas, expand and dig deeper, make decisions about what’s important, and so forth.  She tells you right up front that this book will not include revising and editing of final drafts. It’s Buckner’s belief that the students’ first drafts will be a much better quality if they use some of these prewriting strategies in their notebooks first.  But she cautions us against these scenarios:

1. The student who begins a first draft way too soon and then there is too much revision work to be done. This can frustrate a student.
2. The teacher who uses far too many prewriting ideas so that by the time the students begin their drafts, they are tired of their topic.

Some ideas I gathered from Buckner’s new book:

• On pages 72 and 82 when she is doing a shared demonstration with the kids, she has them glue the excerpt into their notebooks.  So simple, yet why didn’t I think of that?  I usually have the excerpt large enough for all to see and then we might create an anchor chart from the lesson.  When I want to refer back, I’d tell the kids, “Remember when we noticed what so and so did with her description in her NF piece…” It makes more sense to let the kids have the actual excerpt to refer to (with their jottings, things they noticed, and ideas around it.)
• Using boxes and bullets for organizing ideas (p. 42).  This is something I heard about many years ago, and yet had totally forgotten about.  That’s why we need to keep reading articles, books, and blogs on teaching writing. There’s just too much information out there and sometimes we need reminders.
• Since the teachers at my school use Readers’ Statements to open their mini-lessons, I appreciated the fact that Aimee began her lessons in a similar way.  Examples of a few: “Writers read informational texts and notice what the authors do”; “Writers write all they know about a topic and then they look for what they don’t know”; “Writers use specific nouns and active verbs to keep their informational writing interesting.”
• P. 80 – chart of possible leads and the nonfiction books where she found them.
• Although I don’t have to do report cards, Buckner has included a final chapter on assessment for those teachers who want answers to evaluation questions.

Buckner’s book will mostly be helpful to teachers who already have a strong writing workshop in place.  What saddens me most is that even though my county in Virginia (which has 145+ elementary schools) began introducing writing workshop to our teachers in the 80’s, there are still schools where it is just not happening. And that’s a very sad thing for students of all grades.

Recently I was doing some storytelling in my grand nephew’s third grade class.  Prior to arriving, the teacher emailed me and said, “The timing is perfect for storytelling.  We are working in writing on telling a good story.” I wondered if my storytelling would really connect with her writing lessons.  But the more I thought about it, the more I could see the relationships the teacher would be able to draw from my telling of tales to the students’ writing.

I knew that the story “Tinderbox” had some great descriptions, for example, the dogs that sat on top of the treasure chests – “one with eyes as big as saucers, another with eyes as big as dinner plates, and a third with eyes as big as cartwheels.” A good storytelling has plenty of descriptive passages because there is no book with pictures to show the kids. The kids create the pictures in their minds as the words flow from the teller.

I also knew I would slow down the moment in “Tailypo” when the creature finally arrives in the old man’s bedroom – “He had the kind of feeling…you know the kind of feeling you get when something’s in the room with you…. then he heard some banging around the pots and pans…then he heard some scratching at the foot of his bed (pause). He stretched his neck and saw two pointed furry ears. (pause) Then he stretched his neck a bit more and saw two big fiery eyes staring up at him…” The more connections I saw between a good storytelling and the ideas for mini-lessons in writers’ workshop, the more I missed talking about writing to teachers. Since both my first book (One Child at a Time) and my second (with Katie Keier) deal with working with struggling readers, that’s usually the topic of my workshops when I am invited to school districts. But there was a time I talked to teachers a lot about all aspects of writing workshops, and I was seriously missing that! Lo, time to write a blog!

Although I never authored a book on writing, I learned plenty from the masters.  In my early days of teaching, I read everything possible by Lucy Calkins, Donald Graves, Shelley Harwayne, Georgia Heard, Ralph Fletcher, Carl Anderson, and Barry Lane. As new authors appeared on the scene (Katie Wood Ray, Jeff Anderson, Aimee Buckner, Kate Messner, Matt Glover, and many more) I read them too. After reading, I would try out lessons in classrooms; I would model lessons for teachers; I would confer with students about their pieces. My goal (in professional development workshops) was to share with teachers the essentials of writing workshop (time, choice, response, structure, and community) as well as lesson ideas they could take back to their classrooms.

Two favorite lessons that teachers commented on were those I learned from Barry Lane’s After the End – “explode a moment” and “shrink a century.” So simple, yet such powerful revision tools. “Exploding a moment” meant teaching kids how to find a significant moment in their story and slow it down. Lane says, “the writer takes a sentence or two, and explodes it, scattering details all over the page.” When working with a student, Lane asked the child to “make the moment as long as he could, because the more he could describe that moment, the more the reader would become him and feel the impact of the story.” I remember having Lane’s words echo in my head as I worked with Ahmed, a fifth grader. Ahmed had asthma and was telling a story about an attack he had while playing with friends in his basement and couldn’t find his inhaler. He found the significant moment (when he rushed upstairs to his mom to find his extra inhaler) and he was able to slow that moment down so that his readers could feel his panic as his lungs tightened up and the pain in his chest throbbed.

“Shrinking a century” is the opposite type of tool.  It involves getting rid of extra, useless dialogue or overly drawn-out descriptions that add nothing to the story. If you need to move a story along in time, sometimes you need to take some of that boring part and shrink it down to a sentence or two. While working in the same 5th grade, the teacher and I were able to find several examples from our read aloud books of lines that exhibited this idea for our mini-lessons. After a few anchor lessons, the students were able to find places in their writing pieces (and, believe me, there were plenty.)  Many young writers often just fill space with boring dialogue like:

I met Mandy while walking to the bus stop.

“Hi, Mandy,” I said.

“Hi, how are you? Did you do all your homework?” she asked

“Yes,” I said. “But the math was hard. Was the math hard for you?”

“Yup,” Mandy told me, “but my dad helped a little.”

Blah, blah, blah. Most of this had nothing to do with the main point of her story. We were able to teach the students how to create a “shrunk-down sentence” instead.

Though I absolutely still love supporting teachers with working with reading, I have to admit that just writing this blog brought back many memories of other discussions with colleagues about the teaching of writing in elementary classrooms (and my literacy geek friends – you know who you are!) If you are a fairly new teacher, I know you are reading some of the latest on the teaching of writing, but don’t hesitate to go back to some of those early books (they are probably gaining dust in your school’s professional library.) Just thinking about some of those books gives me goosebumps because I remember how inspired I felt. I felt inspired to help students write about a topic of their own choosing AND about something that really mattered to them.

The Art of Teaching Writing, Lucy Calkins

Living Between the Lines, Calkins with Shelley Harwayne

Lasting Impressions, by Shelley Harwayne

For the Good of the Earth and Sun and The Revision Toolbox, G. Heard

What a Writer Needs, Ralph Fletcher

In the Company of Children, J. Hindley

What You Know by Heart, Katie Wood Ray

At the recent NCTE conference in Boston, I heard Tom Newkirk say, “My original ideas are those for which I’ve forgotten the source” (and he may have even been quoting someone else!)  But it made me think about how much we all learn from each other.  In all my presentations for teachers, I always feel like I’m building on the works of others. Teachers are so willing to share ideas, thoughts, reflections about their practice, and when we listen to each other we are building our own understandings.

So, in the spirit of sharing, I’ll post some things I heard and learned about in three particular sessions at NCTE.

In a session called “Reimagining Literacy Workshop in the Digital Age” I listened with my not-so-techy-ear to the thoughts of three of my favorite teachers – Bill Blass, Ann Marie Corgill, and Franki Sibberson.  Bill built his talk around this question, “What does it mean to be literate in the digital age?” which switches our thinking from “What is digital literacy?”  We all want kids to become literate, but we need to add options to their repertoire. Kids can respond to texts using many digital tools like voicethread, educreations, making videos, etc. In addition to response logs or other old favorites, they can have conversations about texts by posting blogs and commenting on each other’s posts. Franki and Ann Marie were very clear in saying that we need to teach kids about the tools, i. e., how to post, how to consider your audience, how to comment, and so on. “Possibilities invite intentionality.” They shared charts they brainstorm with their students, such as, “Making comments to writers on their blogs” or “Possible blog posts.”  To me, the bottom line from this session was that the internet and new digital tools are not going away; they are not a fad; they are here to stay.  As teachers we need to make the best use of them without giving up what we know constitutes best practice for a literacy workshop – authenticity, choice, and ownership.

In another session (with Ralph Fletcher, Tom Newkirk, and Becky Rule), Ralph shared his concern that narrative writing is getting pushed to the back burner by the Common Core.  Of the 24 samples that CCSS gives at the 5^th grade level, only two are narratives. The CCSS emphasis is heavy on argument and non-fiction writing.  Fletcher talked about how story is the way people think and view the world.  We retain information better if it is embedded in story. So much of informational text is composed of stories. Aren’t the best history teachers the ones who teach it with stories? Newkirk continued the talk saying that CCSS compartmentalizes writing into narrative, argument, and informational writing.  He felt that was a “category error” in that narrative is foundational to the other two. Newkirk read the Gettysburg Address and asked us to listen to it for the story it tells – the story of our country from the Declaration of Independence (all men equal), through the war, and on into the future. This session was concluded with entertainment from a most wonderful storyteller, Becky Rule, whose books I will be checking out soon!

The third session that got me thinking a lot featured Martha Horn and two first grade teachers she worked with on implementing writers’ workshop in their classrooms.  Martha showed a video clip of her modeling how to listen as a first grader told his story to the class. She encourages us to “listen with your eyes, ears, heart, and whole self” and she showed how to do just that.  This telling of stories that the children do is a rehearsal, a kind of planning, for the writing that they will soon do.  She’s there to help them “talk their way into writing.” She would retell parts of the story to give the child an opportunity to clarify.  She often said, “and then what happened?”  She didn’t assume to know what he meant or intended to mean, but rather gave him back his words in the language of books, so that he could confirm them or change them or add to them.  The two classroom teachers then shared their learning journeys of going from the whole class doing the same kind of writing to a true writer’s workshop with time, choice, opportunity, support, response and feedback.

I loved Martha Horn’s idea of bringing classroom teachers with her to share their growth stories.  I hope that many reading teachers and literacy coaches who are reading this are thinking about encouraging their teachers to put in proposals for next year’s NCTE.  AHEM, I’m especially talking to my local friends who work in the DC/Virginia/Maryland area (where NCTE will be held in 2014.) I know I’ll be nudging a few young teachers!