All of us at Empowering Writers believe that writing well is not simply an innate gift or talent. Every student, when provided with concepts, skills, and practice opportunities, can become an empowered writer.
In order to nurture students’ growth, we must:
- Understand that student responses are only as good as the quality of the questions we ask.
- Recognize that since children know more than they can articulate we must model vocabulary that empowers self-expression.
- Teach the underlying structure and framework on which good writing is built, and into which creativity is poured.
- Provide them with consistent, assured writing experiences, building upon one another in a logical, sequential fashion.
- Offer whole class instruction, teacher modeling, guided practice opportunities, a logical scope and sequence for instruction, and clear, measurable expectations.
- Establish consistency across and between grade levels in regard to specific writing skills, common vocabulary, and learning outcomes.
Benefits
FACT: Most teachers have never had formal narrative, expository, or persuasive writing instruction in their college or graduate-level teacher preparation courses. Writing is often the only area of the curriculum that teachers are expected to teach without the benefit of training and resource materials to support instruction.
BENEFIT: Empowering Writers first empowers teachers with the concepts, skills, and hands-on techniques necessary to write well, and then provides the vehicles for passing on that information to their students in proven, age-appropriate lessons.
FACT: Most teachers find the traditional writer’s workshop model difficult to manage and implement. How can you conference with individual students while keeping the rest of the class on task working independently? How can you move students through the writing process in a timely way?
BENEFIT: Our methodology (whole class instruction/modeling/guided practice/application) along with our fully annotated resource materials make the writing process realistic, manageable, and practical while optimizing instructional time. Together, the K-1 guide and the Comprehensive Narrative, Expository, and Persuasive Collection of Resource Books provide enough lessons and materials for eight years of valuable instruction and guided practice.
FACT: Most teachers can distinguish good writing from weak writing but have few specific strategies for moving students forward.
BENEFIT: Our materials guarantee assured experiences and consistency in instruction for all students. We offer clear expectations, prescriptive strategies, and definitive outcomes. These strategies are enhanced through a scope and sequence, instructional timelines, and a guide for coordinating the use of resource materials between grade levels.
FACT: Many writing workshops are inspirational, fun, and entertaining, but implementing the ideas can be challenging. Therefore some districts purchase a basic writing textbook which is prohibitively expensive and often geared to an extremely broad audience, making it much less effective for the specific needs of a school or district.
BENEFIT: Our materials are economical. Empowering Writers gives the purchaser of most resource books the right to reproduce student pages for use within the purchaser’s individual classroom year after year. The scope of our materials allows the teacher to choose the specific genre they want to address. We have materials geared to students in grades K through 8.
FACT: Experts feel that essay writing will become a far more important criterion than the SAT in the college admission process.
BENEFIT: By providing consistent instruction in writing from kindergarten on, Empowering Writers prepares students for the many real life-writing challenges they will encounter.
