The environment of the classroom impacts how students feel, how they think, how they express themselves, how they take risks, and how they accept and apply feedback. Writing is deeply personal, and because of that, requires a classroom where everyone is encouraged, supported, and empowered to share their ideas. An effective writing environment supports the concept that writing is important, valued, and rewarding for all students.
Establishing and maintaining a supportive writing community starts with the teacher. This teacher establishes the environment with expectations and routines, models how to be a writer, provides effective process-centered feedback to guide each writer, and acknowledges each individual student as a writer.
Developing a community of writers is essential to the confidence, growth, and achievement of each student. Any teacher can establish a positive writing environment with choice and collaboration.
#1 Writing Choice
Offering students choice in writing invites the ideas of all writers. When we box students into the same prompt, we unintentionally exclude writers who are not able to develop ideas about that prompt. One day I was observing a classroom of third grade writers. The teacher shared with me that the student can write, he was just choosing not to write. We watched as he dropped his pencil, turned around in his seat, and shuffled through his desk. I approached the student and asked, "What are you working on as a writer today?" He hesitated for a moment before replying, "Nothing today. I've never been on a vacation." I looked up to read the prompt on the board Tell about your favorite vacation. The student was unintentionally excluded from the writing task because he had never been on a vacation.
Providing choice for writers means giving them options about the topic they are writing about. Providing choice engages students and motivates them to tell their ideas, and/or research topics that interest them. When students are engaged and motivated to write, they are more confident and excited to apply what they are being taught to do independently!
When beginning a new genre of writing (ie. fictional narrative, opinion, informative), expose students to multiple texts of that genre. Then, have students develop their own topic list that would match that genre. A topic list provides students a list of ideas they can write about when it's time to work on their own process writing pieces. After practicing writing with you, they can choose their own topics to develop with their own ideas and details!
Ideas for Creating Topic Lists
READ! Explore all kinds of books within the genre. Place books of that genre all around the room - in bins, on tables, along the board. Allow students to write down ideas they find in books.
Take a walk inside and outside of the school to collect ideas in picture and/or word form.
Talk to peers about their ideas. Engage in discourse about ideas, thoughts, and interests.
Watch short films and informational clips - collect, discuss, and record ideas.
#2 Collaboration
From a sociocultural view, writing is collaborative. The sociocultural theory emphasizes motivation, affect, and social influences as components of writing (Vygotsky, 1980). The sociocultural theory asserts that writing extends beyond the classroom to include prior knowledge, understanding of language, multiple genres, and motivation. The sociocultural lens on writing prioritizes the interaction between teachers and peers, rather than the writing product.
Writing extends beyond the classroom to include prior knowledge, understanding of language, multiple genres, and motivation.
Collaboration in Pre-Writing
Students can collaborate when brainstorming ideas about topics and details of their writing. To do this, students can think first independently about their topic by writing and/or drawing ideas. Then, students can partner with 1-2 peers to share their thoughts and ideas. Students would also benefit from participating in collaboration with you to discuss their ideas. This allows you to ask questions and support the idea generating process for students before they write.
After thinking and discussing, students may also benefit from collaboratively completing a graphic organizer to capture their ideas. Graphic organizers serve as a scaffold in the writing process and may include sentence starters and/or sentence frames to support sentence generation. Graphic organizers can be completed with your assistance and guidance, as well as from peers. If some students are writing about the same topic, they may benefit from this collaborative approach to planning.
Collaboration in Drafting
As students begin drafting, offer them opportunities to tell about what they will write for the day. After the mini-lesson, invite students to engage in a think-pair-share. First, students will think about what they will write, then they partner with a friend to share their ideas, and then students are invited to share their ideas with the group. During this time, you can capture their ideas on chart paper to celebrate their thinking and make their ideas visible for all to see. The strategy of thinking aloud before writing can be supported throughout writing time. This way students feel encouraged to say their ideas out loud or read their words aloud to make sense of their thoughts.
Students may also benefit from writing with a partner. This alleviates some of the pressure of doing the complex work of writing. Consider offering students opportunities to write books together as co-authors of a topic or story.
Collaboration in Revising and Editing
Students must be taught how to revise and edit just as they must be explicitly taught how to implement skills into their writing. When teaching strategies for revising and editing, model how they can do this collaboratively. Consider the language you use and how you would expect them to try it with one another. If you are offering a rubric and/or checklist, let them practice with their own work and you, before offering feedback on revisions to peers. The collaboration of revising and editing with you first will provide them the language and practice they will use with their peers.
Because writing is deeply personal, it is essential that you model the language you want students to use. Stay positive, use language related to writing skills and strategies, and encourage students to practice one thing at a time. With a focus first on ideas and organization, students will stress less about spelling and perfect grammar. Collaboration should be supportive and encouraging, as we want to develop the confidence of our writers in a positive environment.
Writing Should Be Rewarding
While writing is complex and time-consuming, it should also be rewarding. Allowing students to engage in writing with choice and collaboration helps them view writing as a form of expression; a means to sharing their ideas and thoughts with others.
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