There can be many moving parts in the writing workshop. Partnerships can be a driving force in the growth and goal setting of writers within your classroom. In my experience, there are three areas I work to strengthen within my writers to ensure partnerships foster this growth and development across the year.
In my previous November post about partnerships, three ideas were shared: (1) Study existing partnerships to assess current and potential effectiveness; (2) Teach a replicable process for meaningful revision; and (3) Teach writers how to create process pages. Today I will share just a few more strategies for supporting and strengthening writing partnerships…
A writing partner provides a sounding board and creates a social opportunity for feedback, criticism, and notions of what improvement could look like or sound like. The problem with partnerships, however, is that left to their own devices kids are not very good at being partners. How can we help kids get better? Here are a few strategies…
All writers seek feedback. All writers write for an audience. All writers question themselves. And for these reasons, writers long to bring their work to another person– another set of eyes, another pair of ears. Hence, the writing partner in writing workshop. When working well, partnerships can help grow the confidence of each writer in our classes by providing support, authentic peer feedback, and a sounding board for ideas. Here are a few ingredients to consider when creating a community of writers…
Welcome to a crash course in setting up partnerships for your writing workshop. You’ll find actionable steps to get started with room to grow and make partnerships a seamless part of your workshop environment.
Someone once told me: You can’t write well about something you don’t care about. One day, I listened in on two first grade partners, Jennifer and Marco, sharing their pieces of writing. I stood… Continue reading
Elevate the experience of using talk within your workshop with some tools.
Like so many routines and procedures, the investment of time to establish successful, productive, independent partnerships is incredibly worthwhile!
Do you ever have the feeling that every time you come near a partnership, they stop what they were really doing? Here are ten tips for coaching into partnerships, without taking over.
I attended Kathleen Tolan’s “Once You Have Taught Workshops for Years, How Do You Go from Good to Great? Tap the Power of Peer Conferring and Supporting Student Independence and Goal-Setting.” Workshop at… Continue reading
Our blog series kicks off with a post on creating space in your classroom to get writing partnerships up and running right away.
Writing partners can be an important source of inspiration and support for your kids. It’s the rare kid who truly wants to work alone all the time. Writing requires an audience, someone to give… Continue reading
We’ve all been there. Reading your own writing to somebody else can be scary. Even when I am teaching adults in writing institutes and graduate courses I often have to say, “Please don’t… Continue reading
I’m in the midst of creating writing partnerships for my students based off of a questionnaire I gave them today. It is HARD WORK trying to match kids up with partners that will… Continue reading
One of the greatest benefits I have had in my classroom, that encompasses all things literacy, has been the addition of purposeful talk. When it comes to inviting students to think and learn… Continue reading
How do we reach our writers who come to us from traumatic backgrounds? How do we help writers who have painful stories they don’t feel comfortable sharing? How do we help children feel safe to write something when they prefer to sit and write nothing? Please share your ideas and experiences in the comments so we can learn from each other and reach more of our writers.
It’s time to celebrate the progress writers have made!
Working within a tightly segmented middle school schedule (or any pre-planned schedule) can sometimes pose a challenge to “fit in” an opportunity for closure. With this special challenge in mind, how can we perhaps be more intentional about this important time in our workshops?
There are some routines that are more important to teach than others during the first six weeks of school. In the midst of building classroom community and starting to teach curriculum, there are a dozen routines one can model with students so writing workshop runs efficiently.
In this post, I’ll describe how four parts of writing workshop can foster independence: Minilessons, Independent Writing Time, Partner Time, and the Reflection/Closing.
