To support my students in teaching writing, I will share flipped learning materials I offer through the course I teach at the University of Michigan – Dearborn: EXPS 298, Writing to Communicate, Learn, and Teach.
Teacher-Writers: Even though writing is hard, teaching writing is even harder. If you choose to develop your teacher-writer voice and write with your students, teaching writing becomes easier within the community of writers you create. PowerPoint; Authority List; Norton Juster’s Interview; Cynthia Lord’s Interview.
Writing Workshop: The following sessions focus on writing workshop components.
- Framework: The writing workshop framework includes a focus lesson, independent writing time, conferencing, and sharing. The framework will support you in creating your classroom’s writing community. PowerPoint; Focus Lessons
- Conferencing: The heart of writing workshop, conferencing allows you to teach to the individual needs of writers one-on-one or in small groups. PowerPoint; Conferencing Data Sheet
- Authentic Writing: Writing for specific audiences and purposes increase students’ motivation to write. PowerPoint; Developing Interest . . . Detroit Billboard Project (DeFauw, Taylor, Iroha, 2017); Writing for an Authentic Audience (DeFauw & Smith, 2016); Other articles addressed in the lecture may be requested or viewed through Research Gate or requested via email.
- Supporting Unmotivated Writers: Despite our best efforts, some students will not write. I continue to seek strategies to support unmotivated writers to help them discover themselves through their writing voices. PowerPoint
Writing Process: The recursive writing process includes prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. These steps do not occur on different days of the week, but are intricately connected on an individual basis for each writer and often for each writing task.
- Revision: Teaching writers to revise empowers them to do what only a writer can do. Only a writer can transform a piece. Revision is not editing, which anyone can do. Revision requires reseeing a piece, organizing a piece, and ensuring each word, sentence, and paragraph propels the reader into the author’s message and purpose. PowerPoint
- RRLC: The acronym RRLC stands for Read, Reread, List, Compose. Developed by Dr. Raymond Kettel, this strategy is useful in teaching students how to create a list of notes as they read and compose a summary of a fiction or nonfiction text from the list they created. When they create more than one list from multiple sources, they learn to use all of the lists to synthesize the content as they write about the topic. PowerPoint
Writer’s Craft: We need to provide writers concrete tools they can use to explore writer’s craft as readers and then apply writer’s craft as writers. I do not know how to teach reading and writing without high-quality children’s literature. I love to use mentor texts, or texts writers choose to emulate in their own writing.
- Fiction Mentor Texts: Mentor texts are the pieces we read (e.g., picture books, magazine entries, winning contest entries, novel excerpts, students’ writing, teacher’s writing, etc.) that we wish to emulate in our own writing. PowerPoint
- Nonfiction Mentor Texts: Just like fiction mentor texts, we can read nonfiction text to comprehend and to emulate in our own writing. We learn to read with a writer’s eye. PowerPoint
- Grammar: Too often, teachers and parents focus on grammar and spelling; they are the only concrete components of writing. I believe in teaching grammar, but I believe the focus should be on developing sentences. Sentences require appropriate punctuation since punctuation speaks just as powerfully as words. Through mentor texts, writers can study sentence variety and write sentences like the authors. PowerPoint
Writing Curriculum and Assessment: We need to follow a scope and sequence of instruction when teaching others how to write. We also need to use formative assessment as we review our students’ writing to inform our next steps with teaching writers as individuals.
Writing Rubrics Inform Your Teaching: Writing assessment can be a hot topic, especially when discussing high-stakes writing assessment. Yet, writing rubrics are powerful tools for teachers to use not only to assess and evaluate writing but to use the information to support their next pedagogical steps with individual writers. PowerPoint
Early Childhood Teachers: The following topics, although important for all writers, are especially crucial for young children’s writing development.
Interactive Writing K-2: I believe every K-2 writing teacher should implement interactive writing. Even as a third-grade teacher, I used interactive writing daily. No other pedagogical practice will allow you to meet so many varied needs in a whole-group context. PowerPoint; Articles: Interactive Writing in the Primary Grades Article by Button, Johnson, & Furgerson (1996); A Closer Look at Interactive Writing by Patterson Schaller, and Clemens (2011); Videos: Interactive Writing Video Example;Behr’s Strengthening Students’ Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Skills; Online Resources: Hankinson’s Teaching Audience Through Interactive Writing (readwritethink.org); Choice Literacy; Phonological Awareness Resources: Optional lecture on phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics and PowerPoint
Handwriting: Like spelling and grammar, the other primary focus many parents attend to includes handwriting. I have researched this topic extensively to see what we can do as teachers to support students’ handwriting. Early childhood teachers must focus on handwriting. PowerPoint; Drawing Children into Reading Curriculum by Wendy Anderson Halperin; DeFauw’s (2016) Qualitative Research Study on Drawing Children into Reading may be requested or viewed through Research Gate or requested via email; Center on Accelerating Student Learning (CASL) Handwriting Program (Graham & Harris)