Making Writer's Workshop Possible: Conferencing

Your students' writing will improve through regular opportunities to write.  The Writer's Workshop (WW) model allows students to work on an Independent Project (IP) of their choice, while focusing on goals set specifically for them. Effective writing instruction is a scaffolded collaboration between the teacher and student. Feedback is a crucial part of that instruction.  Students can benefit from a variety of feedback.  Once your WW routines have been established, add conferencing to maximize your results (see previous post on setting up a WW).  In this post, I will focus on the four types of conferencing I use in my Writer's Workshop:

1. Teacher-Small Group
2. Teacher-Student
3. Student-Student Partnership
4. Student Small Group (no teacher)

When I conference with students, I use these forms to keep anecdotal records, set goals, and monitor progress.  I use these records during the conference or right after a conference to document what occurred.

Teacher-Student Conferencing

Teacher-Student Conferences are specific to an individual need.  I begin each WW by walking around the room and "leaning in" on students writing.  My normal practice is to have 4-5 T-S conferences before I do any small groups.  During these conferences I provide feedback on what they've written, as well as provide "feed forward".  Feedback evaluates what a student has already written.  "Feed forward" focuses on what strategies to use next.  For example, if a student has developed their thesis statement, I would ask them what their plan would be for using the thesis statement to set up their body paragraphs.  It is important to know what all your students are doing during WW and the only way to do this is to "lean in" on their writing regularly.

Teacher-Small Group Conferencing

I meet with a small group to discuss reasons for their opinions.

There are two types of Teacher-Small Group (T-SG) Conferences that take place in my room.  The first focuses on helping students help each other. At any given time during my WW, there are 6-8 different IPs being completed by students.  I meet with at least 2 groups each day to check progress.  If several students start a project together, I may meet with them to discuss their organization using the TIDE graphic organizer, or to discuss some possible reasons to support their claim for an opinion essay. During this type of meeting, I am the facilitator.  I direct students, based on the needs of the group, to work together to help the collective group.  The second type of T-SG focuses on teaching a mini-lesson to teach or remediate skills needed to be successful on independent project.  For example, if I see five students who are struggling to develop a strong thesis statement, I would call them back to reteach the concept.  It makes no difference which IP they are working on because it is the skill they are struggling with.  

Student-Student Partnerships

Hannah offers her partner advice on his introduction paragraph.

This is my first year using Partnerships in my room. When students have a partnership with another student, they "have each others back".  They are not only concerned with making sure their writing is the best possible job they can do, but they are responsible for making sure their partners is too.  They work together to organize, ensure evidence supports the writing, revise, and edit.  They are one another's lifeline.  Partners do not have to be working on the same IP, and in fact, it is better if they are not. Partners may meet at any time during Independent Writing Time in WW.  Using this type of conferencing relieves the teacher of being the primary source of information during WW.  The students begin to rely on each other.  When this happens, the students become the facilitators.  

Student Small Group

Student Small Group occurs when students are in a variety of phases.  They could be looking for reasons to support their claim to an opinion essay.  They could be organizing an essay.  One of the most successful uses I've had so far was a revision train.  I had them edit each others essay and offer feedback on possible edits to improve sentence fluency and word choice.  I usually instigate the SSG by forming them and giving them a goal, but I've also had students form them as well.  Once your routine for conferencing are in place, students will start to take the reigns and work together to improve one anothers' writing.

Students work to edit their essays

Conferencing is an integral part of any WW.  When implemented strategically and regularly, it will improve the writing of all who take part.

My next post will focus on the third part of WW: share time.  

 

Making Writer's Workshop Possible: The Set-Up

It is understood that to improve in any area, you must practice. This adage is especially true of writing.  If we expect our students to become independent writers, then we must provide them with time to practice.  Up until this year, I taught reading.  I used the Reader's Workshop as a way for my students to improve the skills necessary to be a successful reader.  When I was moved to exclusively teaching writing this year, I knew I wanted to maintain the workshop method in my classroom, so I began researching the Writer's Workshop.  

This past summer, I worked my way through most of the writing all-stars: Ruth Culham, Lucy Calkins, Kelly Gallagher,  and M. Colleen Cruz. I quickly realized WW was going to provide my students with a choice about what they wrote, while simultaneously allowing me to teach the standards that would help them develop good writing technique.  I developed an action plan. I am going to spend the next few weeks blogging about my experience as a newbie implementing my first WW.

The strongest writing classrooms have independent writing projects at their heart.  That is, students are following the whole-class curriculum, but they are also working on their own piece of writing on a topic of their choice (Cruz, 2015).  This is the beauty of the workshop method: students spend time every day independently working on improving their skills.  I am sure I was like many of you.  I was just not sure how to make it work for me in my classroom. I believe I've come up with a manageable way to successfully start a writer's workshop into the classroom.  

Before you begin any workshop routine, you must spend some time explicitly teaching writing.  I spent the first five weeks of school teaching Ruth Culham's 6+1 Traits of Writing.  Once we worked our way through the traits, I began explicitly teaching opinion writing using the POW TIDE strategy. I am about a week into teaching opinion writing and we are ready to begin WW so students can independently practice what they are learning in whole group.

One hallmark of the WW is choice.  Three weeks ago, I put up an anchor chart titled "What I Want to Write About".  It quickly filled up with a variety of topics.  Over the last several weeks, I've gathered as many paired texts on those topics as I could.  Some came from Teachers Pay Teachers, some from newsela.com, and others I had to adapt and modify from newspaper and magazines articles I found.  As I found articles, I filed them by topics.

Last week, I chose texts for our first independent project.  Since we are focusing on opinion writing in whole group, I found paired texts that would fit opinion writing. Since this is my first time giving the students an independent project, I decided to start with six choices.  I didn't want there to be too many texts because I need to be familiar with all of the texts they are writing about.  Yes, this means I had to read all of the paired texts so I can help students when I'm conferencing with them.  The topics my students will choose from for their first project are: Football Heroes (Manning or Newton), Basketball Starts (James or Curry), Presidential Candidates (Clinton or Trump), Self-Driving Cars (banned or not), Pokemon Go! (banned or not), and Abolitionists (Douglass or Garrison).

Next, I copied 15 copies of each of the paired texts and prompts. I have 75 students in my three classes.  I set them up on a table. I put a sign-up sheet by each project so I can keep up with who is writing on which topic. This will help when I conference or have peer groups meet together.  

Monday morning, I will establish clear guidelines when I introduce WW.   Mine are simple.  Since this will be the beginning our WW, students are only allowed to work on skills I've already explicitly taught in whole group through our class model write.  I have already taught the POW in POW TIDE and writing a thesis statement.  This means, when we start next week, students can only work on skills such as tearing the prompts apart, reading their texts, and writing a thesis statement.   I will continue next week teaching mini-lessons on organizing an essay and an introduction paragraph.  Once I've taught the skills and we've practiced it on our class model, students can start on that part of their writing.

Finally, as part of the set-up for WW, I've created a board to help me keep track of where students are in the writing process. When students move to another part of the process, they move their name.  Not only does this let me know where they are, it encourages students to think about the writing process and ensures they don't skip steps, such as organizing their essays, which students are notorious for trying to skip.

I have high hopes for my WW. I believe this strategy will grow all writers in my classroom.  I can offer remediation in small groups or individually to students who need help organizing an essay or citing evidence. I can push my high fliers, who often get overlooked, to add sophistication to their writing by including metaphors or symbolism. WW has the potential to meet the needs of all students in our classrooms.  It is a time that should be valued and protected.

Next week, I will blog about conferencing with students, both individually and in small groups, during WW. 

Using Articles of the Week to Improve Writing

Are you maximizing your bell ringer time?  Today, teaching has become a race against the clock.  There's never enough time! This is why we must be deliberate about the bell ringers we choose to use in our classrooms.  Carefully planned bell ringers provide students with opportunities to work authentically with both reading and writing.  Articles of the Week (AoW) is an important strategy teachers can use to support readers and writers during this time.

A large problem with students today is they don't understand texts well enough to write about them, especially informational texts.  As teachers of writing, we often have students dive right in and start writing, without taking this into account.  This explains why students' writing often lacks focus and clarity. Writing is thinking.  If students don't understand the text, they are unable to write about it.  

In practicing writing, we must give students multiple opportunities to work with a text before they write about it. One way to do this is to create Articles of the Week, or find existing Articles of the Week, in your classrooms.  Kelly Gallagher, a leading expert on building deeper readers and writers, suggests using Articles of the Week to help students gain access to the text.

Where Can I Find Articles of the Week?

The good news is, if you teach grades 5-12, there are already a lot of pre-made materials out there! Vale Middle School, Holmes Middle School, and Riverside Middle School offer a full archive of ready-to-use AoWs.  Other sites, such as Brooks Middle School and Scholastic, provide texts to use for middle-schoolers.  There are numerous resources available for High School students too.  Gallagher, Stuart, and Schotz offer paired texts to create your own AoWs activities. Springville High School and Avon High School offer articles with text-based questions.  I have created my own materials for 5th grade students using a variety of Scholastic articles.  I've uploaded week 1 in Scribd for your benefit.

5th Grade, Article of the Week #1

Making Your Own Articles of the Week

If you are like me and you wanted to tailor your AoWs to your classes specific needs, you need to create your own.  It's easy.

1. Choose an article on an appropriate lexile for your students.  If you know you are going to use an article for an upcoming writing assignment, using it as an AoW provides students with an opportunity to work with the text before they write about it.  I use the snipit tool to capture images and insert them in my document.
2. Identify reading and writing skills you want students to practice.
3. Chunk skills by days of the week, keeping in mind you want them to accomplish the daily bell ringer in 5-7 minutes. 
4. Create text-dependent questions and skills questions for each day of the week.  

AoWs are an ideal way to provide students with multiple opportunities to work with informational texts.  The more students work with texts, the more successful experiences they will have with writing.