The traditional writer’s workshop involves a sequence of brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Publishing student work can be extremely gratifying for you and your students. It can also be frustrating when the expectation is always a complete, fully elaborated story, especially when students have not yet learned, practiced, and applied the skills necessary for a holistically successful piece of work.

The good news is that publishing student work need not always involve a complete story, essay, or report. Since skills are learned and practiced in isolation, discrete sections of a piece can often stand alone and be shared, displayed, and celebrated – in other words, published! For example:

• a segment of elaborative detail from a narrative story with a related illustration ex. A description of a story critical character such as a pirate, queen, or knight, a story critical setting such as a rain forest or a cave, or interesting object such as a crown, space ship, or flower –
• a well-developed paragraph about a single main idea from an expository piece accompanied by some graphs or charts – ex. A paragraph providing information about the appearance of some kind of creature, an interesting habitat or ecosystem.

STUDENT SAMPLES

These can be well-honed, revised, edited, and published. This kind of publishing can be extremely gratifying to students, as they can clearly see a particular learned skill in successful application. In this way a greater number of shorter student pieces can be published.

The revising and editing process can frustrate students in a number of ways. Of course, by breaking the process into manageable parts and/or publishing discrete sections of a piece, students are less overwhelmed. Also, learning specific skills makes the revision process more manageable because students have had guided practice experience in these skill areas. Most Empowering Writers lessons are designed as “revision” activities in which students are presented with a weak excerpt that represents some common student pitfall, and the guided practice activity involves improving or revising it, based on teacher modeling. In this way students learn the skill while practicing the art of revision.

Sometimes resistance to revision is of a more practical nature - students recognize that a revision is needed but are reticent to approach it because they aren’t sure how to squeeze changes onto the page. Some teachers suggest students leave every other line blank to accommodate any rewriting or additions. Students often forget and then, still struggle to squeeze in their changes. Sometimes the limited space actually discourages revising, and implying that any edits or revisions must be limited to a word or two.

One helpful revising and editing tip is the use of “tails”. Cut lined paper into strips and have these on hand as students write. When you locate a spot in a story in which elaborative detail or some other skill is needed, mark the spot on the page with a caret or an asterisk and have students tape a “tail” to the edge of the page. Students can easily write their changes on the tail, eliminating the frustration of squeezing in the text between existing writing. Your students will begin to brag about how many “tails” they have on their papers!

Publishing involves preparing work for an audience of others. Below are some Creative Publishing Ideas: 

• Bulletin Boards – create a bulletin board around a theme and display your short, skill-specific student work. Ex. Students create haunted houses with a lift-the-flap element. Their suspenseful segment is written on the outside of the door or window flap, the revelation drawn in behind the flap.
• Class Books – imagine that everyone in the class has written a paragraph describing the appearance of an animal of their choice that lives in the desert (or whatever theme works for you). Children publish their well-developed paragraph on a large single piece of construction or oak tag paper along with an illustration. Collect one description from each student and bind them into a class “field guide”.
• Class Collaborative Work – gather the class and model a particular skill with them, using and embellishing their responses into a cohesive whole.  As a group, with you as editor-in-chief, revise and edit your work. Copy onto chart paper, laminate, and display. You might also type this up, photocopy it, and provide each student with her/his own copy.
• Parent Typing Teams – sometimes the most challenging thing about publishing student work is “copying it over”. For students with fine motor issues, or underdeveloped eye-hand coordination, this copying over process can become a huge challenge. Work with your PTA or PTO to establish a typing team. The team should provide a bin or file in the office in which teachers place their own folders of publication-ready, legible student work along with a CD or a disk. Parent volunteers check the bin frequently, taking home any publication folders, returning them in a timely way filled with hard copies of each student piece and the class set on disk or CD for your files.

Assessing and Grading Student Writing

You’ve taught all the skills and now it’s time to assess how well students are doing.

In grades K and 1 we suggest you look at student writing with an eye for the particular developmental stage in which the writing falls. See page 7 in Getting Ready to Write for descriptions of these developmental stages. You can also use the Writing Awareness Assessment Form, p. 173 in Getting Ready to Write. These tools will not only allow you to look at “product”, but to begin to identify students along their developmental journey and look for evidence of their awareness of a variety of pre-writing concepts.

In grades 2 and up we begin to assess student work through a dual lens. A rubric is used to help identify key characteristics of writing at a variety of levels. Most states provide their own rubric, and teachers will administer timed (or untimed) assessments according to state guidelines. Student writing is then compared to an anchor set of sample papers, which have already been scored in relation to the characteristics outlined in the rubric. Papers are scored holistically, meaning that all aspects of the work are compared against the characteristics of the desired outcome, or a goal piece. (Rubrics and anchor set pieces are included in the Empowering Writers Comprehensive Narrative and Expository Writing Guides.) Often, before students have learned all key skills, reaching the goal is difficult, if not impossible. This should not be concerning. Just as we would never expect a student, a quarter of the way into the school year, to pass the “end of book” math or reading test, we cannot expect a student who has not received instruction in all skill areas to demonstrate these skills in a writing task.

A student who scores below the goal can still receive a good grade in writing. How is this possible? The second lens through which we assess student writing is through the lens of instruction. Student work is assessed against skills taught. For example, in narrative writing, if the teacher has modeled the creation of elaborative detail, suspense, and extended story endings and students have had opportunities for guided practice in these skill areas, student writing is evaluated around those criteria – is there evidence of elaboration, suspense and a satisfying story ending? The story may lack an entertaining beginning and a fully elaborated main event (which would, if scored holistically, result in a below-goal piece), but if skills taught are present, the child has been successful and should be graded accordingly.

Another pitfall in writing instruction and assessment is that assessments often take place too frequently. With the pressure of testing districts sometimes feel that administering frequent assessments will improve student performance. The purpose of assessment is to drive instruction. Teachers need to look at assessment as a tool for directing instruction. Teachers should use assessment to identify areas of weakness and direct instruction to address these specific weaknesses. This takes time. In order to look at growth over time and in order to drive instruction in meaningful ways, assessments must be scheduled to allow plenty of time for sufficient directed instruction in between. See our Timeline/Scope and Sequence of Basic Assured Experiences for instruction grades K – 8 for our suggested Timed Assessment Schedule. The Scope and Sequence document also includes suggestions for portfolio pieces that document and display the application of skills in student work.

In addition, students need to be instructed in best practice strategies for approaching timed assessments. Understanding how to analyze a prompt for given and variable elements and learning timing and pacing strategies empowers students to test well. We never want the assessment tool itself to interfere with students’ ability to best demonstrate their skills. We highly recommend the use of our Empowering Writers Narrative and Expository Writing Assessment Review manuals for this purpose.

The Role of Grammar, Mechanics, and Conventions

The whole language era provided many benefits to our young writers and readers in terms of nurturing a love of the written word, an appreciation of the power of literature, and an openness and freedom of expression in their own writing.

However, inadvertently, the traditional, intentional teaching of phonics, grammar, mechanics, and conventions often suffered. Without a doubt, a strong grasp of grammar, mechanics, and conventions enhances writing, allowing the author to convey meaning powerfully. Nothing is more frustrating than to look at a piece of creative student work and not be able to read it because of a lack of accurate punctuation, capitalization, and basic good grammar.

How can teachers deliver this instruction? Often times, daily oral exercises are not enough to successfully teach these skills. Reading anthologies address some skills on an as-needed basis, but instruction may not be directed enough for students to apply the skills in consistent, meaningful ways.

Empowering Writers believes that these critical skills must be taught in interesting, logical, sequential ways, with clear lesson plans and objectives. Empowering Writers Editing and Revising/Grammar and Mechanics resource books address the skills so often assessed on state tests in this way. Each lesson includes a creative writing connection so that the skill can be practiced and applied, while reinforcing previously learned, genre-specific writing skills.

The other benefit of direct instruction in grammar, mechanics, and conventions is that once taught, students can and should be held accountable for the application of these skills in their writing. The Empowering Writers process writing timeline and techniques and the author’s group revision model allows the teacher, during guided practice, to emphasize and insist on the consistent application of these skills. Often times, in the traditional writer’s workshop model, the teacher, during conferencing, attempts to teach the grammar skills on an as-needed basis, resulting in a hit or miss approach. It is also overwhelming for students to attempt to learn and apply skills at the same time. By teaching and practicing these critical skills separately, students are better able to apply them comfortably as they write.