Identifying what kids can do and placing them in heterogenous editing groups is the first step. Determining each student’s editing strengths is a piece of cake. Using previous writing samples or surveying students provides good information about their capabilities. Some students may know how to find and correct more complex errors, while others may know that the first letter in each sentence must be capitalized and that paragraphing is necessary.

Once heterogenous groups are established, each editor can be assigned tasks that match his or her expertise. As writers meet in groups of 4 or 5, writers may pass their papers round-robin fashion around the group to receive targeted support from their peers that will improve their use of conventions. Conversations might also take place around word choice and sentence fluency at this time as well, although these traits should be introduced by teachers and considered by writers during the drafting phase of the writer’s process.

As you begin building your student’s understandings of conventions, you might find the resources provided by the Purdue University Online Writing Lab helpful. Teachers I know also enjoy sharing these videos with their students.

This post was the fifth in a series focusing on writing and the 6+1 Traits. You may find the others here:

What IS Good Writing?

Ideas Inspire Prewriting Inspires Ideas

Drafting: Giving Voice and Shape to Our Ideas

Introducing Young Writers to the Peer Review Process

Students Seeking Publication

When they came in this morning, we used Lookybook to study how writers use word choice with intention. I know that Theresa recommended it sometime back, and when Mike Fisher recommended it on Twitter yesterday, I decided to poke around in their archives and see what I could find. This interpretation of Jabberwocky had my morning group chatting up a storm. The word “infer” was tossed around without any heavy-handed direction from me whatsoever…..and there was much to infer in that interpretation.

I asked the kids to reflect on the time we spent in the woods yesterday and to resurrect the clippings and artifacts that they gathered while they were there. Once these independent pieces were completed, I helped them copy their “best lines” on to separate sentence strips….one per statement. I collected them, and this is what we did:

Every writer’s set of “best lines” was cut into pieces so that each word stood alone. Next, I mixed all of their words together in one jumbled pile, and I asked them to play around with the placement of the words as a group until they were able to find a poem within it:

They created and recreated and debated and revised until they reached an agreement. Several important conversations about poetry took place throughout this entire exercise, driven by arguments over whether or not specific words should be elimated (“an”, “the”, “that”), or whether the poem should possess complete sentences. At first, some of the kids had a hard time seeing how the words they chose and the order they created within their first thoughts could be changed around. It was really kinda cool watching some of them discover how new meaning could be made in the process. I said very little as they messed around with all of this…..it was a lot of fun to watch their thinking unfold. And though it took time and a concerted effort on my part to remain silent, they emerged with something wonderful. Today, I remembered how hard it can be to remain patient and keep your teacherly fingers off of the controls. I hardly believe that I managed this, but in the end, I did all right.

And so did they.

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“What makes someone a good writer?” I asked (leading with the “what”, naturally).

“Great ideas!”

“Knowing who your audience is!”

“Writing fluently, and with good spelling and grammar!”

All good responses, of course. All of them informed by some of the work that we did yesterday, too. But then, someone shared a bit of insight that knocked me off my feet.

“People make us good writers,” someone shared, and I was more than happy to go down that road.

“What do you mean?” I asked (whatwhatwhat).

“I mean, like…..sharing our work with other people. That makes us better writers.”

Another girl nodded. “I like how we get to interview people to get more ideas about things we may not know about.”

She was referring to an exercise that we began yesterday and carried forward today. Two weeks ago, at our Communities for Learning retreat, we began our work together by defining our passions, our experiences, and our areas of expertise. We posted all of our work on sticky notes and shared them with the community so that we could connect with those who we were interested in learning from throughout the week. This was really helpful to me as a learner, and I replicated it for my studio kids this week.

Yesterday, they began to view each other as resources that could lend tremendous credibility to the work that they were doing. For instance? Read is a vegetarian. Sarah plays violin. Erika has been to Vermont. Andrew is a techie, and Chris has an incredible vocabulary. When they shared their strengths on posterboards that lined the back of the room, they began to realize how the collective expertise, passion, and experience of their group could inform their writing. Today, as kids began to develop characters, conflicts, and settings, they set appointments with other writers who had the information that they needed in order to include accurate details in their writing.

Julie has just begun babysitting, and she is in the beginning phase of developing a blog for other young sitters. As she is new to blogging as well, she was uncertain what to put on her page. Without any guidance from me, she went directly to the Post-It wall and started scanning through all that her fellow writers had shared there. Then, she started asking everyone in the group what they would find most useful as a reader of this sort of blog. An hour later, she returned to me with several pages of ideas and a huge smile on her face.

“I’m going to start babysitting this year,” Read told her. “I can’t wait to see your site! I’ll definitely be visiting it!” In that moment, a bit of a bond was formed.

By day’s end, I definitely felt a sort of cohesion between the members of each session, and it is showing up in their writing in ways I woudn’t have imagined.

“You can be a really good writer, but you can’t get better unless you get to know other people and learn things from them. If you don’t do that, you just sort of stay the same. You don’t learn anything at all,” one particularly gifted writer reflected this morning, and this blew my mind, to tell you the truth. It’s pretty easy to coast when you know that you are able to write well. It’s also pretty easy to dismiss the lessons that you might learn from those who are weaker writers than you may be.

“What makes someone a good writer?” I asked at the end of the day, when it came time to pen a written reflection. “What have you learned about growing as a writer?”

Here’s my favorite response:

I can become a better writer by listening to and learning from everyone around me. Even kids who don’t necessarily write as fluently as I do. Good writing ideas come from our experiences and our feelings and what we know. Everybody has experiences and knowledge that is different from mine. That’s how they can help me become a better writer.

In all honesty, that particular big idea never framed my writing workshop plans in the past. But this year, it is the common thread that runs throughout our days. It’s having a tremendous effect on the quality of every exchange that these writers have. It’s making me believe that it isn’t enough to write well. Maybe good writing is about more than ideas and content and fluency and organization. Maybe it has much more to do with community than I even guessed.

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“The edublogosphere seems like it’s huge,” she smiled, “but I don’t think it is.”

I must admit: there seems to be about six degrees of separation (or less) on the net as well. This realization led to a conversation about the web and how it truly has leveled hierarchies that once separated expert voices from those that belong to novices. Nicki commented on the approachability that even the most well-known and highly regarded writers and educators exhibit online, and I echoed her sentiments completely. Networked learning is a phenomenal thing. Sit and get is done and over.

So much of this has to do with role of authorship as well. The internet is changing what it means to be published. It’s also changing the process of writing in dramatic ways as well. This is what I’ve been thinking of often lately. Writing is no longer simply about the author’s individual purpose, and reading is no longer a sit and get proposition either. Blogging alone has changed that entire dynamic. The audience plays a role in informing what writer’s think and do and say. When people comment and create their own posts in response to what we’ve blogged about, it shapes our purposes and adds dimension to our original message. All of this has tremendous implications for classroom instruction and what we truly need to be teaching our students about what it means to “be a writer.”

As a teacher of writing, these new realities are leaving me with much to think about lately. It’s a whole new world.