Tipos o Niveles de Investigación

One of the crucial elements of the writing workshops described here is the writer’s notebook. It’s in the notebook that students will collect moments and experiment with writing craft. They’ll rehearse stories, gather research, reflect, and make plans. You’ll want to make sure that all your writers have notebooks that suit them as writers— some prefer plain, some like to decorate, some like narrow lines, some prefer wide, some prefer a digital form. You can provide composition books, which are around fifty cents when purchased in bulk at most supply stores, or students can choose, find, or make the notebook that most makes them want to write. We just want them to write— they should get to choose the surface/medium.

Your writers will really develop in stamina, fluency, and skill when you conceive of the notebook as the place where we write a lot, we write often, and we use our newest skills. That is, tell your students that the notebook in October should look profoundly differ- ent than it did in September. All the writing craft we work on in drafting and revising in September we incorporate on-the-run in our notebook entries in October, and from then on. So the notebook is the place where we are changing as a writer. It’s also where we get the most volume of writing. Just as runners get better by running and piano play- ers by practicing, writing becomes easier the more we do it. Every professional writer

A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE6, 2011–2012 3

A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE6, 2011–2012 4

© 2011 by Lucy Calkins. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.

says that it takes discipline, not just a natural gift, to write. So you’ll want to decide how much you want your students to write outside of school and then help students to meet these goals. If students have to write even ten or fifteen minutes a night, that’s between one and two pages of writing. If they do that five days a week, that’s ten to twenty pages a week, which is hundreds of pages across the school year. The student who has been held to this standard will be a profoundly different writer than one who writes only in class.

You’ll also want to decide what students write in the notebook. In class, they’ll often be immersed in a genre study, such as memoir or realistic fiction or essay. Sometimes, they’ll want to continue this work at home. Sometimes they’ll want to experiment with craft lessons you’ve taught, for homework. All this continuation work is good. It’s also important, though, that students conceive of themselves as independent writers and decide what kind of writing they want to do in their notebooks—and then do a lot of it. Encourage your students to continue writing anecdotes, vignettes from their lives, all year, so that they keep learning how to use writing to make sense of their lives and get lots of practice in telling their own stories with purpose, craft, and power. You may find that some of your writers really want to experiment with fiction as well. You’ll have secret graphic novelists, fantasy writers, gossip girls, narrative poets, and so on. Others will want to write nonfiction, including articles and books. If you do decide to open up the genre choices for their independent writing homework, you’ll often get lots of writing volume. Here’s the thing—you also have to make some time in the cur- riculum for kids to come out of their notebooks and publish some of this independent writing. When writers know that they’ll be able to publish some pages of their graphic novel (or the whole novel across the year), or scenes from their fantasy story, or a series of small books that are ghost stories, they write more, and they hold themselves to higher levels of craft.

We do recommend, therefore, that you find some time to help students work on independent writing for homework. Teach some lessons on “going on” as a writer and on “pursuing the writing you’re passionate about.” Show them how to collaborate if they wish and how to find mentor texts to raise their craft up. Give some time in class toward growing as an independent writer, and you’ll find that your students have rea- sons to incorporate the craft and structure lessons they’re learning in their genre studies. Then make some publishing opportunities, a few times a year. You can either publish all at the same time, or you can have a rotating schedule and a publishing wall that students are in charge of. Hold your kids to high standards. Have your poets cre- ate anthologies, themed chapbooks, or poetic novels. Have your graphic novelists make versions of books that already exist as well as originals. Have your fiction writers cre- ate series. Encourage them to write a lot; instill a sense that their independent writing lives matter.

You may find Colleen Cruz’s Independent Writinghelpful as you plan independent writing as a strand of the curriculum. You may also want to meet with colleagues and decide on how much time you can protect for independent writing, how many pub- lishing cycles you might offer, and what publishing celebrations you can organize. You’ll get volume, engagement, independence, and trust from your adolescents.

Assessment

Who was it who said, “We inspect what we respect”? It will be important for you to assess your students’ growth in writing using a number of different lenses to notice what students can do. As part of this, we encourage you to start off the year by giv- ing students Donald Bear’s spelling inventory; we describe this in the section below on conventions of written language. We also recommend you use the assessment tool that TCRWP has developed and piloted to track student growth in narrative writing, argument writing, and informational writing. These tools continues to be a work in progress. The newest versions are available on the TCRWP website, www.readingandwritingproject.com. We invite you and your colleagues to tweak and alter the instrument to fit your purposes. We especially recognize that it would be helpful to add more levels so that growth in writing can become more apparent, and you are invited to work with your colleagues to do so—and to share what you cre- ate with our organization! Whether or not you add your own levels, though, the tool will help you be accountable for supporting growth in writing. It especially clarifies the pathways along which developing writers travel as they become proficient. It allows you to identify where a student is in a sequence of writing development and to imagine realistic, doable next steps for each student. This will make your confer- ring much more valuable and your teaching clearer. What began as an assessment

tool has become an extraordinarily important teachingtool!

That said, be aware that there are instances where we have seen the assessment tool make teaching lessresponsive to writers’ intentions. If when using the tool, you approach a student in the midst of writing and you bypass listening and responding to the student, looking only at the draft and using only the narrative continuum as your resource, then the continuum will have made your teaching worse, not better. Conferring always needs to begin with a teacher pulling alongside a writer and asking, “What are you working on as a writer?” and “What are you trying to do?” and “What are you planning to do next?” Always, the teacher needs to help the writer reach toward his or her intentions. When we draw on all we know, not only about good writing but also about how narrative or non-narrative writers tend to develop, the assessment tool can be a resource.

It is absolutely crucial that your first assessments occur at the very start of your year, or even arrive already drafted in the spring of the prior year. Your students come to you with competencies and histories as writers, especially from their grade school experi- ence. You cannot teach well unless you take the time to learn what they already know and can do. Then, too, if you capture and compare the data representing what students can do at the very start of the year with what emerges after a few months of working with you, you will be in a good position to show parents and others all the ways in which stu- dents have grown as writers over the course of the year. In autumn parent-teacher conferences, you’ll want to bring the writing a student did on the first day of school and contrast it with the writing the student did just before the conference. To do this, of course, it is crucial that you capture the “before” picture for comparison to the “after.” Adolescents strongly benefit from this type of reflection and self-evaluation of growth.

A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE6, 2011–2012 5

A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE6, 2011–2012 6

© 2011 by Lucy Calkins. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.

Your students may bring a portfolio with them to the grade, or you may want to give a quick on-demand task in narrative writing so that you can see their independent writing levels. When you look over students’ work, take note of whether they have been taught and are using rudimentary concepts. For example, look for evidence that students are writing focusednarratives. You will want to see if they are writing struc- tured pieces (for now this will usually mean chronological). Can these pieces be described as stories? That is, does the main character (the writer, in this instance) proceed through a plotline of actions and reactions? Are students storytellingrather than summarizing and commenting on events? Are they using dialogue and details? Writing with con- sistent end punctuation? Developing their characters? Angling the story to highlight their focal point? Do they seem to care not only about whatthey write but also about

howthey write it?

From the beginning of the year, a system that will be helpful to set up is a folder for each student containing their on-demand pieces, published pieces, and other samples of their writing from each unit of study. This system is important not only for ongoing assessment, developing a system where adolescents can reflect on their growth, and reporting to families at report card time but also because some units of study (such as the revision study in June) will require students to draw from their previous work.