4.2. Resultados por dimensiones de la variable mezcla promocional
4.2.2. Resultados de la dimensión relaciones públicas
4.2.2.2. Comparación promedio de los indicadores de la dimensión relaciones
Overview
The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Donald M . Murray is credited with developing the writing process approach to writing . Murray taught college and graduate students to write, and taught journalists at places like The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, and the famous Poynter Institute . He did not teach f ive-, six-, and seven-year-olds to write . The discovery that young children could do the work that professional writers were doing was left to others . But it was Murray who turned the f ield of writing around, challenging the old norms of instruction and calling for a new emphasis on teaching the process of writing . Murray’s work always began with him telling students that they needed to live the wide-awake life of writers, experiencing their lives and then capturing those experi- ences on the page .
In order to get second graders to truly live wide awake as writers, we have decided to focus this unit on informational writing, drawing not only on what they know as writers, but also on what they know about the world . In this information age there is a greater demand for informational writing, and the Common Core State Standards call for second graders to write “organized informative/explanatory texts focused around one particular topic .” The Standards state that second-grade writers should be able to “recall information from experiences and other sources in order to answer a particular question through their writing .” By launching kids into this genre you can start by building on what your students already know about informational writing, while at the same time getting them to realize what they might do to lift their writing within this genre .
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Teachers, before you launch this unit (like any unit), you’ll want to think about your goals and to plan the general trajectory of the unit . You’ll probably begin with a week in which you launch your writing workshop, rallying youngsters to engage in the work that they know how to do of choosing topics and writing booklets . During this f irst week, your instruction will probably remind youngsters of all that they already know how to do, and help them draw on that repertoire as they do that work . That is, they’ll need to think, “What do I want to write about?” and to choose the paper on which they’ll write, and then they’ll need to write, write, write, writing fast and furiously . When they’re done writing, they’ll need to reread their writing, decide if it is done or if they have more work to do on it, and if they are done, to get started on another piece of writing . For the f irst few days of the unit you will want to allow your kids to write any kind of piece so long as they are writing! It’s not until the second part of the unit that you will get all of your kids writing informational pieces .
There are a few things that are especially essential for this year and one of these is stamina . One secret to stamina lies in the paper that you give to your children . You will almost certainly want to start the year by providing kids with booklets, not single pages . Those booklets can each contain f ive or six pages, and for most of your children, each page can contain just a small box for the picture and plenty of lines—perhaps eight—for the writing . Remember, they have been writing in booklets since kinder- garten, so they will expect this! It is impossible to overemphasize the power that the paper, itself, has for conveying expectations . Therefore you will also want to have var- ied paper choices to match the different text features that they might want to include in their informational books . Within this one unit, you should expect that second graders will write approximately eight f ive-page books . Those are very rough estimates and certainly many children can do a great deal more than this, of course, but don’t expect that second graders will write only a page a day, or a book a month!
Of course, this writing process—choose a topic, get started, write fast, reread and maybe improve the writing, get started on another piece of writing—is hardly the perfect writing process, but it is a start . During the second part of this unit, we suggest you rally your students to work in more grown-up ways with their writing partners— and those more grown-up ways of working with partners will also be more grown-up ways of engaging in the writing process . By helping students use partners to help them write really, really well, you can teach kids to engage in more extensive planning for writing, thinking about alternate ways to make the text the best that it can be, and you can teach young students to engage in more extensive revision work .
Still, even if you provide youngsters with partners and use partners to support a more ambitious writing process, this is just the very start of the year, so students will gesture toward more extensive rehearsal and revision, while for many children, their work will probably still cycle fairly quickly between rehearsal, drafting, revision, and editing . That is okay . One of your biggest goals is to launch all your writers in such a way that they can work with a lot of independence and zeal . Imagine that young writers are a bit like a group of kids who have gathered to play basketball . You are the coach . The kids are all standing around, looking at you . If you want to lift the level of kids’ skills at playing basketball, you probably will not start by teaching just one small
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group of kids a particularly tricky jump shot, or even teaching the whole group that jump shot. Instead, you’ll f irst get all the kids playing the game, running up and down the court, making shots, and only after they are all playing the game with indepen- dence and conf idence will you be in a position to lift the level of what they are doing. Similarly, at the start of the year, you’ll probably want to f irst get all your youngsters cycling through whatever version of the writing process comes easily to them.
F inally, during the last part of this unit, you will return to the topic of revision, this time focusing on teaching writers to be resourceful and ambitious revisers of their writing. Of course, this time, they’ll be revising toward the goal of publication as your unit reaches a culmination.
The minilessons that follow this write-up are “repertoire minilessons” that chan- nel second graders to draw from their full repertoire of skills. These minilessons and this write-up combined will, we hope, help you encourage writers to draw on the full array of things they already know how to do. As part of this, writers will be channeled to write f ive-page booklets from Day One, to revise from the start of the year on, and to solve their own problems as they write.