Workshop Overview

Student engagement is crucial for learning, especially in writing.  If we care about student engagement, then we would have to consider the significant impact student choice has on their engagement as writers. In this two-day workshop we will examine strategies that support teachers in designing highly responsive writing experiences that increase engagement for all learners.

Participants will learn:

• How to pull stacks of mentor texts to be used to generate teaching possibilities, in an immersion phase, and throughout a writing unit

• How to use standards and curriculum to create unit goals

• How to use a and modify a unit projection in mini-lessons, small groups, and conferences

• How to integrate writing units with units of inquiry while still providing children with some choice of genre

• The importance of units that allow for choice of genre (craft studies and process studies) and how to avoid the pitfalls and maximize the effectiveness of these units

• How to effectively confer with students, as well as the differences in conferring in different types of units

• How mine their own writing for process teaching possibilities

• Utilized language composition and oral rehearsal to support emergent bilingual student

• How to use a framework for language composition to more precisely notice, name and nurture children’s language composition