Professional Response #7: Conference- Learn Today, Teach Tomorrow

For my conference response I decided to go to Central Michigan Universities’ third annual Learn Today, Teach Tomorrow professional conference. Throughout the day ewe watched the keynote speaker Karl Klimek, then we got to choose four sessions to attend, and then there was a raffle and some wrap up at the end. The four sessions that I choose to attend were: Beginning Reggio Emilia Projects in the Classroom, Quick Tips and Tactics to aid in Classroom Management and Positive Student Behavior, Engaging Minds: Lifting students to Higher Levels of Thinking and Learning, and From Student to Teacher: Making the Transition.

My first session was Beginning Reggio Emilia Projects in the Classroom. Reggio Emilia is a town in Italy where they came up with a new approach to teaching where the student discovers everything themselves and is only guided with teacher questions. The presenters showed us a project about construction they did with their young students and how they documented their learning. It’s challenging to document the student’s learning in projects like these because there isn’t really formal assessment. They documented by pictures, samples of students work, audio recording of conversations between students or between a student and a teacher, and video recording as well. This session was enlightening but it wasn’t very engaging in a hands-on or discussion sort of way. It felt a bit like a lecture. However, I do appreciate being exposed to a variety of approaches to teaching, which is why I attended this session.

My second session was Quick Tips and Tactics to aid in Classroom Management and Positive Student Behavior. This session was all about being prepared so that there aren’t as many discipline problems in a classroom. The presentation covered everything from seating charts, forgetting assignments, being predictable, giving “the look,” expectations not rules, and having realistic expectations. There were a few tips I thought were really good and interesting. The first is “needing materials” like pencils for class. The presenter has a rule with his class: if a student needs to borrow a pencil they have to leave a shoe at his desk, therefore they won’t forget to return the pencil at the end of the class. I thought that method would be quite effective. Also, the presenter addressed students who blurt out answers; he said not to reinforce this sort of behavior by letting their answer be accepted. Then the teacher could raise their hand to model while giving “the look,” they could just wait until the student raises their hand, or they could call on another student and praise them for raising their hand to answer. Another tip that the presenter gave is to say a student’s name in mid-sentence if they’re not paying attention. The example he used was “As the Earth revolves around the sun ‘Tyler’ it travels on its orbit.” I felt that this session was very worthwhile for me.

My third session was Engaging Minds: Lifting students to Higher Levels of Thinking and Learning. This session was about using writing across the content areas. The presenter, Beverly Matulis, uses writing in her classroom all of the time. She says that it helps make the student’s thinking visible, so as a teacher she knows if the students really understand and know the material. She utilizes exit slips a lot in her classroom. The next day she’ll show good and bad answers so the students know what is expected of them in their writing. Students should know what you’re grading them on. On her tests Beverly gives open ended questions so that they students are less likely to get the entire questions wrong and give up. It gives them a chance to show anything that they know. She also showed how writing can make a discussion more worthwhile. If the students write questions before the discussion it’ll be less stressful to think up questions on the spot. After a discussion the students can write quick responses to give their last two cents and so the teacher can see if they understand the point of the discussion. All in all, this session presented some unique ways that a teacher of any subject can use writing in their classroom.

Lastly, my fourth session was From Student to Teacher: Making the Transition. This session goes over how to get a teaching job through what to do as a new teacher. The presenter, Carol Sliwka, talked about where to start looking for a job such as at a job fair, the school’s website, word of mouth, or cold contacts. She also went over a lot of interview questions and how to potentially answer them, which I found very helpful. Carol outlined the qualities of a good teacher such as flexibility, curiosity and eagerness to learn, content knowledge, and being a team player. It was an okay presentation, I just wish she would have went more into depth about the transition process of being a student to then being a teacher. Personally, I have a tough time calling teachers by their first names as colleagues, I still feel like a student. That is what I thought that this session would be mostly about.

Overall, my experience at the Learn Today, Teach Tomorrow conference was okay. I think I could have chosen more interesting topics. Not all of the speakers captured my interest, yet all of the material covered was good. I would definitely go to this conference again.

Questions: Calkins Chapter 24 & 25

Chapter 24:

1. How would a teacher blend a multigenre study with students writing memoirs?

2. How does we keep memoirs from sounding like a book report of our lives?

3. Which methods would be the best to help the students transition between stories in their memoirs?

Chapter 25:

1. How do we make non-fiction writing interesting for the students?

2. Is non-fiction writing kid of like mini-thematic units per student?

3. How do we teach young students how not to plagiarize their information that they’ve collected from other sources?

Professional Response #6: Newer & Multiple Literacies

The uses of technology are increasing faster than most people can learn them. It’s becoming more and more integrated into our lives and thus is becoming increasingly important for students to be fluent digital writers and have a strong hold on technology. As teachers we must prepare students with multiple literacies, weaving technology into the traditional writing workshop to have students be ready to utilize their writing within technology in the real world and for real functions and audiences. Time are changing and “teachers will need to help students develop the capacity to produce, read, and interpret spoken language, print, and multimedia texts” (Anstey 19). Multiliteracies do not stop with just integrating technology. It’s a combination of “being cognitively and socially literate with paper, live, and electronic texts” (Anstey 23). Integrating technology into the writing process has many benefits to the student. The National Council for Teacher of English asserts that:

K–12 students who write with computers produce compositions of greater length   and higher quality and are more engaged with and motivated toward writing than  their peers. College students who keep e-portfolios have a higher rate of academic  achievement and a higher overall retention rate than their peers. They also            demonstrate greater capacity for metacognition, reflection, and audience awareness. Both typical and atypical students who receive online response to writing revise better than those participating in traditional collaboration. (NCTE 2).

With all of this technology integration and multimedia uses in the writing classroom, as I mentioned above, is more realistic of a writing experience. In the real world students often have to work cooperatively at their jobs and present to a large, diverse audience. The current way of teaching writing independently does not stress writing for the real world. I also find it exciting what Richardson states that “we are in the process of connecting all of the knowledge pools in the world together” (125).

Using the Internet to research, collaborate, and write is a delicate and great tool that students need to be critical of. “Being multiliterate must also be critically literate” (Anstey 23). Teachers must teach students how to recognize what websites are authentic, up to date, and have reliable information. Students must also learn how to recognize propaganda and website’s ulterior motives when researching being as it’s so easy for everyone to publish anything they want online nowadays. As teacher we also must be careful that students don’t “passively accept [internet information] as legitimate” (Richardson 126). I remember being explicitly taught how to determine the reliability of a website during high school language arts classes. This skill has been useful in my college research as well.

As great as I see using technology in the classroom it makes me wonder if it’s all an idealistic concept. One problem I see is not all students have the same access to the Internet. If a writing curriculum centers on technology and working online outside of the classroom will students without Internet access fall further behind? Will it increase the achievement between students with a lower socioeconomic status and those with economic privilege? Some might argue that those students without Internet access can work in computer labs to make up the differences, yet in my experience I find that classes usually only get a few hours in the school’s computer lab a week. This entire concept has me worried. Another problem that I see is the student’s protection and privacy when they begin to use these social networks and blogs to post work and collaborate. These are public domains- where anyone can join and talk/collaborate with students. I wonder if there’s a secure way for young students to blog or use social networks that are not public; such as something that works within a school or a web of schools. A third interesting thing, that may become a problem, is the loss of written language. I’m referring more so to text messaging and instant messaging online. These are great social tools, but I worry what it may be doing to language. However, it may just be another language shift which is natural. I was reminded of this watching television with the commercial of the girls playing scrabble with their mother. One girl used the word ROTFL which is not an actual word, but in texting or IMing means: rolling on the floor laughing. Other acronyms are often used in this new domain of writing such as brb (be right back), qq (quit crying), pos (parents over shoulder), or lylas (love you like a sister). I have experienced instances where this type of writing has crossed over into the lexicon. I’ve said brb and jk in actual conversations. I find this shift in language, due to the change in the types of writing, interesting.

Works Cited

Anstey, Michele and Geoff Bull. Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies. Newark, DE:

IRA, 2006.

Hicks, Troy. Reimagining the Writing Workshop for the 21^st Century.

National Council of Teachers of English. “21st-Century Literacies.” Urbana, Illinois:

            2007.

Richardson, Will. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Tools for Classrooms.

 Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin P, 2006.

Professional Response #5: Vicki Spandel’s “Unlocking the Door to Revision”

    For this professional response to Vicki Spandel’s chapter “Unlocking the Door to Revision” I decided to do something a little bit different. I choose to focus on Spandel’s lessons and revise my piece: “First Time.” Being as I’m a more advanced writer than someone in elementary school I had a double focus when revising.

The first thing that I focused on was Spandel’s mini lesson of “focus lesson ideas” specifically details. I tried to engrain different senses other than sight into my piece. The only sense I missed was sound because I couldn’t think of anything to put there, but my option is still open to think of something. Because “First Time” is on the shorter side I didn’t want to overwhelm the story with description. I did, however, place in excerpts of smell, taste, and feelings. My smell line is: “The scent of clean laundry and sweet sweat float from your dewy skin.” I also tried to convey my emotions better than saying I was nervous and amended it to this: “The room stood breathless. And like one breath taken and expelled the room falls silent again. Yet my mind sped up so I couldn’t grasp one sane thought, like trying to see the drivers of cars speeding past on the expressway when you’re standing still on the shoulder.” I think the aforementioned line is much better than just saying I was nervous to say I loved my boyfriend back for the first time, yet it stays away from the clichéd “I had butterflies fluttering in my stomach.”

            The second thing that I focused on was Spandel’s mini lesson “focus lessons for word choice” specifically strong verbs and fresh lively words and phrases. I have an addiction to using weak verbs and modifiers- especially in my first drafts. I probably even use them a lot in these responses. I went back to my piece and underlined all of my weak verbs and modifiers and tried to change them. Some examples are “were up” to “traveled,” “say” to “utter” and “streams” to “tangos.” Using strong verbs helped my piece be better because it shows the situation more concisely and I think helps the reader get a better understanding of what I felt in that moment. It is really how Spandel describes verbs that they “give writing energy” (190). They definitely did that with my piece.

            Spandel’s ideas for mini lesson align with Calkins’ and Graves’ thoughts on them. Calkins shows that mini lessons can help guide writing or revision. Spandel is just going down the revision avenue in depth, while Calkins went more down the writing boulevard. Even though this is not a topic that I used in my revision this time both Graves and Spandel address that students should write honestly. Graves even goes as far as to say “dishonest writing is not good writing” (107).

All in all, I think this experience did help me become a better writer because it focused my attention on a few things in a revision session instead of looking at the whole daunting task of making my piece perfect. I think that this would work very well with students. Sometimes it’s only writing conventions that get revised. I admit that the first time I revise that’s mainly what I look at. However, just fixing grammar or spelling doesn’t make the piece necessarily better or give it any more potential to be something great. So mini lessons like Spandel’s would work at students revising their pieces- one doable step at a time.

Works Cited

Calkins, Lucy M. The Art of Teaching Writing. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994.

Graves, Donald. A Fresh Look At Writing. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994.

Spandel, Vicki. Creating Writers Through 6 Trait Writing Assessment and Instruction.4^th

edition. Boston: Pearson Education, 2005.

Professional Response #4: Atwell’s “Responding to Writers and Writing” and Lucy Calkins Chapter 14

            Conferencing is not a time to be criticizing a student’s work. It is a time to listen to them in a variety of ways. Calkins says that the purpose of a conference is to respond and extend the student’s work by content, design, process, and evaluation conferences. I’ve always felt conferencing was a waste of time for me, but the way Calkins explains it would not be. Focusing on design for example let’s the student examine the sequence of their stories and helps them “learn to focus as a writer” on the important action (Calkins 240). Content conferences focuses on the subject, design conferences focus on the sequence of events, process conferences focus on how the students write and how they problem solve in their writing, and evaluation conferences have the students evaluate their own work. Even though all of these types of conferences are unique I see the purpose of using each one to help a student become a self-sufficient, great writer. Also, having a lot of little conferences with the students to see how they’re doing, yet making the focus of these conferences different is good. Calkins could have called them mini-conferences.

            Like Calkins, Atwell also states that it’s very important to first and foremost listen to your students. Atwell has a set of conferences called content, craft, and conventions conferences. The content conference is like Calkins’ and talks about the subject. Craft conferences are how to make the writing better and about the sequence, so it kind of combines Calkins’s purpose and design conferences in one. The conventions conference is where the writer and possibly an outside reader, like a teacher or a peer, look at the piece and amend the mistakes. This is often the type of conference that I got in school. All though convention conferences are good, to truly be useful they need to be coupled with other types of conferences. Grammatical and punctuation mistakes are important to avoid, but story subject and design are equally, if not more, essential. Atwell makes sure to mention that it’s “our job to help students understand that content, craft, and conventions all matter” (Atwell 250).

            I think all too often conferences end up being editing sessions, where the teachers are the evaluators and the students just idly sit by. However, we’re not paid to be editors; we’re paid to be teachers. A teacher’s job is to “help kids develop as writers, not to assign sink-or-swim tests of writing performance” (Atwell 220). Teachers should be scaffolding students to work cooperatively with a teacher or peer but eventually wean them off to be able to conference alone. It’s like the cliché: give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. Calkins also mentions this: that it should be a progression of teacher conference, peer conference, then self conference. This also connects with Calkins’ idea of an evaluation conference- making the student accountable for if they’ve written a good piece. I really like the suggestion of having the student mark their good passages with a smiley face and their rough sections with an X, it’s just another way to help the student self-monitor their progress of their piece and as a writer.

            Reading about how conferences should be makes me disappointed in some of my teachers growing up. Generally, students would have a one-on-one formal conference with the teacher, but personally I never got much out of it. My ninth grade language arts teacher would just tell me I was on the right track and leave it at that, asking if I had any questions or needed any advice to continue. I wanted to be critiqued! I wanted to become a better writer, but my teacher wasn’t helping me accomplish that. I feel as if my writing has been stagnant, especially as I’ve gotten older. I also feel like my teachers never gave me real reactions to my writing. In tenth grade I wrote about a girl with an eating disorder and my teacher didn’t even ask me about it. The story wasn’t about me but as a teacher I would be concerned enough to at least ask. I just never felt like my stories matter to anyone but me.

            As I look at my midtier experience in a first and second grade split it makes me wonder: how should conferences be with really young students? How should it differ from older students? What should we expect from young emerging writers? Also, how sloppy should sloppy copies be? I know Calkins didn’t mention it but Atwell addresses it. Students shouldn’t ignore basic writing conventions for the sake of getting something down on paper, it reinforces bad habits. I also realize the reason for not needing a first copy to be perfect, but where’s the happy medium? I also wonder: should we ever have longer conferences with our students? I think mini-conferences are important to see the overall status of the class and to see what problems need to be addressed in mini-lessons. Yet, I also think that students should have longer conferences to really work with their teacher occasionally. Overall, conferencing is a very important step in the writing process that can be utilized in a variety of ways to help our students become better writers.

Works Cited

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading and

Learning. Portsmouth, Nh: Heinemann, 1998.

Calkins, Lucy M. The Art of Teaching Writing. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994.

Professional Response #3: Lucy Calkins chapters 1-4 and Spandel chapter 1

Everyone can be an author. Lives are full of stories-even if at first they seem bland. It’s looking for the details in life that is the real interesting part. Calkins mentions that writing should be a “journey toward insight” (7). I believe this often cannot be achieved in one draft, nor should it be. Writing takes a dose of divergent thinking; an author must look at their life in new, unique ways- taking the old and making it new. “Life is full of possible stories” (Calkins 27). The last short story I wrote was a memory about the first time a significant other told me they loved me. It was a special moment that someday I will share with an audience. My tiny tidbit transformed into a story about first loves because I “identify[ied] and wr[o]te on a topic of personal importance” (Spandel 13). The actual words of “I love you” would not be as powerful if I didn’t set the scene, the heart racing, the lump in my throat, his tight embrace. “The magic is never in the material alone but the artist’s ability to reimagine it” (Calkins 49).

As teachers of writing we should be avid writers ourselves. It’s only when teachers truly love writing that they’ll be authentically modeling their passion of reading and writing to their students. Writing workshops should never be a chore or something to be dreaded. A teacher sets the tone for the classroom. I really valued that my 11^th grade AP composition teacher shared her writing journal with us in class every once in a while. She showed us the loose format and even read us some of her thoughts and poems. It really set a tone in our classroom to all be fearless writers. In a writing workshop Spandel’s 6 traits for writing can be implemented. “Trait-based instruction enhances a process-based approach to writing instruction; it does not replace it” (Spandel 8). I think this statement rings true. The traits give a writing workshop a clear voice, purpose, and structure, especially through revision and assessment.

Revision for me as an adult still alludes. It is essential to have “purposeful revision and editing” (Spandel 8). It’s difficult to get past just fixing surface mechanical errors to really start working with the meat of a piece. I found this especially evident in my writing before high school. In elementary school I loved and excelled at writing, but I had so many little stories I never worked with one for a long period of time. In middle school I had almost the opposite problem. I would procrastinate about writing, sitting stagnant staring at a wall, or with drafts barely changing at all. Sometimes I would find myself adding huge sections that did make sense just so I could delete them during the second draft so it looked like I was “revising” my paper and creating a more concise story. I was a terrific fraud with revision. Calkins is careful to say that revising does not equal repairing but instead helps an author write more realistically by seeing, feeling, learning, thinking, and discovering more. I didn’t know what good writing was, I didn’t know how to make my writing better, yet by learning proper revision techniques in school I could have.

One important way to make students writing better is to link rubrics with revision as well as assessment. Spandel suggests that “what you can assess, you can revise” (6). Rubrics give students a clear set of guidelines to suggest what is good writing. Writing is like problem solving where the tools are a rubric and mini lessons while the solution is a moving piece. The point of assessment is not for teachers to be editors and critics of a student’s work, but rather a professional audience that can give feedback. If assessments are clear and interjected within the entire writing process I think it would yield better writing from the students.

After reading these pieces I do have some questions. Neither author mentions standards, testing such as the MEAP, or any sort of standard testing. It is very realistic that a teacher is judged how well they’re teaching by their student’s scores on standardized testing. Standardized tests don’t let students have free choice of topic, unlimited time, peer conferencing, and tools within the classroom. How do we, as teachers, help students succeed in this rigid testing environment, while keeping consistent with the great ideas and values of a writing workshop? I also don’t know how I cultivated a love of writing with just writing with prompts when I was young? Does it matter with all students that you don’t give topics? Is it okay to use prompts sometimes? I also am surprised that no articles we have read thus talk about writing across the content areas. There’s such an opportunity to integrate subjects to “sneak” in more writing, albeit a little more guided. Practice pays.

Works Cited

Calkins, Lucy M. The Art of Teaching Writing. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994.

Spandel, Vicki. Creating Writers Through 6-Trait Writing Assessment and Instruction. 4^th

ed. Boston: Pearson Education, 2005.

Siblings to Trees

There are four of us.

My older sister, me, and my younger twin brothers. When we grew out of our home on Bogey Lake Road we moved into the green monster. Across from Crosby Lake that was nothing more than a marsh. Our parents planted four plants on the side of our house, two evergreen trees on either end and two juniper bushes in the middle. They all looked the same at the beginning. Each plant grew with us and we named them after ourselves. Eric and I are the middle children and grew out short and fat with needles that are flattened out by a sledgehammer and a fragrance that leaps into your nose. Alicia is right under the rain gutter and gets the extra run off of a sudden rain storm. She grows tall and straight (how ironic) and overshadows the other three in pure height. She was a home to many bird nests at eye level for curious children but cloaked enough from curious cats.

Then there was the baby, three minutes younger than his twin-but that’s all it takes. Kevin, who came butt first into this world. Kevin’s tree was always the smallest. It was the neighbor’s dog, Spankys’, favorite spot to pee on. So Kevin was stunted with brown, brittle branches and as all good siblings should do we never let him forget it. After Spanky died Kevin’s tree blossomed and became strong.

And we were all healthy again.

Professional Response #2: Lucy Calkins Chapter 12 & Graves Chapters 7 & 8

In her book, The Art of Teaching Writing, Lucy Calkins discusses how to utilize teaching mini lessons in a writing workshop environment. The title “mini lesson” is deceiving. The point of a mini lesson is not to lecture or force the students to use the content in the mini lesson right afterward. Mini lessons are context based and have to be in a balance between “nudg[ing] students to experiment” and letting them “follow where their work led[s] them” (Calkins 195). Mini lessons help guide the students during the writing workshop, giving them ideas or suggestions for writing and revision. It’s important for mini lessons to not break the rhythm, continuity and fun of a writing workshop. Yet, a mini lesson is a great way for a teacher to deliver, discuss, and show a variety of writing techniques with their students.

A successful writing workshop works like a well oiled machine but may look a bit chaotic. Students need to know what’s expected of them during a writing workshop but students also need to take responsibility for it to truly run without much teacher involvement. Graves says that “choice” and “time” are important for students to have good writing (103, 106). Katie Wood Ray and Nancie Atwell also agree that time and choices are integral parts of a successful writing workshop. Students have to write everyday to keep their minds on “productive thought” (Graves 104). The structure of a writing workshop comes from the students being responsible for their writing and the teaching overseeing, smoothing out any bumps along the way. If there are certain problem solving procedures and a basic structure of a writing workshop there should be few major problems. A basic structure of a writing workshop could be 1. get writing folders 2. find a spot in the room and start writing 3. teacher mini conferences 4. mini lesson 5. more writing 6. sharing; this is only a loose example the structure of a writing workshop.

I plan on using writing workshops in my classroom. I want to have writing time in the morning practically everyday. Like Graves suggests I may integrate other common sense subjects into writing block such as language arts, spelling, and reading (105). I also plan on structuring my mini lessons in the form of discussion with me modeling my writing. As a teacher I can use my time during writing workshop to observe and conference with the students. Graves gives many explicit classroom management strategies in chapter 8 of his book, but I realize there is no magical set of procedures for all classrooms. I will tweak them as I go along. I do plan on making the writing workshop’s “action mechanical” and “predictable” everyday (Graves 120).

Some helpful mini lesson that Calkins recommends are to use environmental print or labeling, stretch out words, use literature, show techniques to experiment with (complete with teacher modeling the technique), and discuss writing workshop procedures (200-203). In my classroom I want to try to avoid “group think” with my students (Graves 123). With group thinking students begin to have a theme of certain topics or genres in a classroom and I want to have a positive environment where thinking outside of the box is encouraged. Writing isn’t all about writing for yourself either, writers often write for an audience. Some ways that Graves suggest for writing to others in using pen pals, writing to senior citizens, having a class newspaper, and sharing with younger classes/writing buddies (123). I think all of these are great ideas which I will try in my own classroom.

I didn’t begin really participating in writing workshops until I was in middle school. Even then they were peppered with sayings that became clichés of “specific is terrific” in my 7^th grade language arts class and “show-not-tell” in my 10^th grade language arts class. These are great suggestions from my teachers however they were pounded into all of our heads and lost their meaning in the shuffle. I despised writing about given topics that I didn’t care about especially in the 10^th grade. Every once in a while the teacher would pick a topic that worked for me but mainly they were just duds and I was a student who was self motivated to write, imagine my peers who weren’t. I think many of my teachers shied away from writing workshops because of the perceived chaos of a badly managed writing workshop. Maybe their experiences with writing workshops failed miserably so they went back to how they were taught to write. I really could never know unless I went back and asked my former teachers. It is a real shame though, I would have liked to explore through my writing more in school.

There are some questions that I have pertaining to using writing workshops. I wonder; what sort of discipline procedures should I put into place during a writing workshop? What if all the students aren’t participating? How do I give a final evaluation for students who are producing different amounts and quality of writing for their own ability? How do I stay an objective grader when all of the genres and topics are chosen by the student and thus are all different? A lot of these questions I’m sure will be answered by actually teaching, but for now remain as questions that I have about implementing a successful writing workshop in my classroom.

Works Cited

Atwell, Nancie. Lessons That Change Writers. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Calkins, Lucy M. The Art of Teaching Writing. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994.

Graves, Donald. A Fresh Look At Writing. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994.

Ray, Katie W. Writing Workshop, the: Working Through the Hard Parts (and They’re
All Hard Parts). Urbana, Il: National Council of Teachers, 2001.

Professional Response #1: Katie Wood Ray

In her article, “Understanding the Essential Characteristics of the Writing Workshop” Katie Wood Ray explains how to utilize a writing workshop in a classroom. Ray shows how to “use” the writing process and not just “do” it by solely using the steps of pre-writing, draft, revision, editing, and publication. That rigid step-format is not realistic for real writers. She shows that it’s important to give the students a lot of time to get a vast array of topics, genres, and ideas down to draw from or revise later. A writing workshop is more about having the students “explore [their] interests through writing” (Ray 3). Through a writing workshop the goal is that the students “write with purpose and intention first- to enrich their lives in significant ways- and that out of this they learn to write well” (Ray 3). Ray also mentions that a student should be praised and assessed for their “best” work, which varies from student to student.

Ray’s approach to writing workshop can be compared to Nancie Atwell’s approach in the article “Conditions of a Writing Workshop.” They both specifically mention the word “passion” when having the student’s choose their own content to write upon. It’s all about choices. Both women also encourage having a lot of time for students to write, around 45 minutes, so that they can get a large quantity written. Neither Ray nor Atwell beliefs are trying to imply that a writing workshop is ever a free for all, but rather is guided with mini lessons and demonstrations to guide the students and facilitate their writing.

As often as Ray and Atwell agree about how to implement a writing workshop they have their fair share of disagreements. The most obvious contradiction between the writing workshops of Ray and Atwell is the amount and use of talking within a classroom. Ray believes that talking should be common place by conferencing between teacher-student, conferencing between student-student, students writing collaboratively, or even students bouncing ideas off of one another. Ray does make sure to mention that this talking should be a “productive talk.” On the other hand Atwell believes writing should be a mostly silent task, where the only people whispering are teacher-student conferences and peer-to-peer conferences in designated areas.

As I think back to my own experiences in elementary school I realize that many of my teachers didn’t implement writing workshops. I never felt like I had enough time to just write. I remember seeing the brown poster explaining pre-writing, drafting, revision, editing, and publication. I also remember filling out worksheets with each of these sections together as a class. For example Mondays would be pre-writing days, Tuesdays for drafting, etc. I felt like I never got enough time to simply explore through my writing. In my own teacher I hope to first and foremost give my students time. I did enjoy being guided into writing in different genres when I was younger, because if they weren’t assigned I may have never stepped out of my comfort zone and discovered my love for writing poetry.

While reading this article I find myself thinking that this type of classroom seems idealistic. How does a teacher deal with students who are off task or unmotivated? What about students who are disrupting others? Ray failed to mention any concrete classroom management techniques that may offset potential problems before they begin. I think adding classroom management techniques and how to get a classroom to run fluidly with a writers workshop would be very helpful to me as a new teacher.

In my classroom I would put Ray’s advice to good use. All though I don’t agree with everything she says, I agree with the general idea that students should learn to write by doing it. I also would tie it closely with reading because I think students learn a lot about writing by reading good literature of differing genres and sentence structures. In my classroom I would make the writers workshops much more structured to begin with and slowly give the students their working independence when they know how the writers workshops run. I think it would run more smoothly that way. Also, having some sort of discipline plan or alternative when students are not on task for long periods of time. I agree whole-heartedly with Atwell when she says that “writing is thinking” (Atwell XXI). Yet, I do also believe that students can work things out by thinking aloud with each other. So overall I find writers workshops to be a balance of all things. The writers workshop should not be too loud, but not too quiet, it should have students in all sorts of controlled chaos in different parts of their own writing process, and students should get a lot of time to do this wonderful thing that we call writing.