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Helping Students Become Highly-Proficient Self-Directed Writers is Our Goal
Writing Products:
Why Can't Our Kids Write Well? (PDF)
Teachers as Writers Impact on Student
Achievement
Writing Services:
Seminar Package:
Implementing Successful Writing Goals
Faculty Meeting Packages:
Developing Expertise In Six Trait Writing
Moving from Emergent to Convention Writing
Program Monitoring Package:
Writing Program Monitoring and Evaluation
Just When You Need it In-Services:
For More Information Contact Us
Overview of Services
Implementing Successful Writing Goals, a Seminar Package
This set of 8 seminar sessions given throughout the year along with a mutually agreed-upon number of days of onsite team coaching is perfect for any team that wants to increase their students’ writing competency. It guides the team through the inquiry-based data-driven decision making process, from action planning, to implementation, to program evaluation and back to action planning for next year.
Learn More (PDF) Page Menu Contact UsTeachers as Writers, a Faculty Meeting Package
The Teachers as Writers professional development package includes one to two full-staff in-services a month and ongoing onsite coaching sessions that focus on developing the staff's efficacy and craftsmanship in writing and writing instruction by providing an in-depth interactive study of the writer's workshop, the traits of writing, the writing process, and portfolio assessment.
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Developing Expertise in the Six Traits Writing Instruction, a Faculty Meeting Package
This professional development package includes one to two full-staff in-services a month and ongoing onsite coaching sessions that focus on developing your school’s instructional expertise and writing proficiency through an in-depth exploration and application of the writing process, six traits of writing, and writer's workshop.
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Moving from Emergent to Conventional Writing, a Faculty Meeting Package
This professional development package includes one to two full-staff in-services a month and ongoing onsite coaching sessions that focus on developing an in-depth instructional expertise around emergent literacy and formative assessment strategies.
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Writing in the Content Areas, a Faculty Meeting Package
This professional development package includes one to two full-staff in-services a month and ongoing onsite coaching sessions that focus on helping students to learn how to write well in content area classes. Most content areas have a set of explicit standards, benchmarks, and Grade Level Content Expectations that deal with writing in that specific area. While each type of writing is a little different, students employ similar writing strategies and thinking processes that are applicable in all content area writing situations. To help this happen, TEP has put together this professional development package.
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Writing to Learn Faculty Meeting Package
This professional development package includes one to two full-staff in-services a month and ongoing onsite coaching sessions that focus on selecting and implementing school-wide writing to learn strategies that are selected to help raise content area learning and student achievement in your content area classes.
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Monitoring and Evaluation of Writing Goals, An Evaluation Package
With the federal and state focus on all students making AYP, none of us in education can afford to wait until the end of the year to evaluate the success of the school improvement/student achievement goals we have put in place in our districts or schools. We need our goals to be written as SMART Goals with specific, multiple, ongoing ways to measure and monitor their success in increasing student achievement, but even more than that, the results need to used immediately to impact student learning.
TEP understands this need and can help you implement effective ways to monitor and evaluate the writing goals and instructional strategies and process that you are putting in place in your district or building. To do this, our team utilizes the inquiry-based data-driven decision making process, which is an ongoing process that utilizes SMART Goals, Action Steps, and data collection and analysis to provide ongoing evaluation of your writing program’s success at increasing student learning in your school.
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Just When You Need It In-Services
Click on the category to see the in-services that are listed under that strand.
If you do not see the in-serve you need, please contact us. We design in-services to meet your needs.
Teachers as Writers Strand (PDF)
Six Traits of Writing Strand (PDF)
Using the Recursive Nature Writing Process (PDF)
Moving from Emergent to Conventional Writing (PDF)
“To provide effective instruction in writing for learners at any age and at all academic levels, teachers need, first of all, experience in writing…”
Therefore “programs for the preparation and continuing education of teachers of English and language arts, at all levels, should include opportunities for prospective and active teachers:
Ø To write… in a variety of forms… in response to a variety of authentic…situations in which our work will be read and responded to by others…
Ø To read and respond to the writings of students, classmates, and colleagues, (by) making supportive comments that express respect for others' ideas and feelings and encourage writers to use writing as a means of personal, academic, and professional growth, (and by) asking probing questions that help writers see what they have not expressed clearly and convincingly…
Ø To become perceptive readers of our own writing, so that we can ask questions about, clarify, and reshape what we are trying to express…
Ø To study and teach writing as a process
Ø To experience writing as a way of learning which engages us in intellectual operations…
Ø To learn to assess the progress of individual writers by responding to complete pieces of their writing and studying changes in their writing (over time)…
Ø To study research...in the teaching of writing...
Conference on College Composition and Communication 1982 full text online
Research shows that “students learn to write by writing. Guidance in the writing process and discussion of the students' own work should be the central means of writing instruction. Students should be encouraged to comment on each other's writing, as well as (receive) frequent, prompt, individualized attention from the teacher…Textbooks and other instructional resources should be of secondary importance” (Commission on Composition, National Council of Teachers of English 1985). In fact, the National Commission on Writing found that “standardization and scripting of instruction threaten to undermine (effective) writing…” (National Commission on Writing 2006), so textbooks must be seen as only resources that are meant to be used in a flexible way. They can not teach students how to write well—only a highly qualified writing teacher can teach a student how to do that.
To help students learn how to write well, “teachers should attend to the process that students might follow to produce texts—and not only specify criteria for evaluating finished products, in form or content. Students should become comfortable with pre-writing techniques, multiple strategies for developing and organizing a message, a variety of strategies for revising and editing, and strategies for preparing products for public audiences and for deadlines…(In addition), writing instruction must provide opportunities for students to identify the processes that work best for themselves as they move from one writing situation to another” (Writing Study Group of the NCTE Executive Committee 2004).
The last point is the most important. We have to remember we are here, as educators, to help student writers learn what techniques and strategies work best for them on an individual basis.
Therefore, we cannot focus all of our efforts on following a pacing chart, on moving our writing classes lockstep through a set of prescribed activities, or on implementing a specific model of writing instruction because individual students within the same class will have highly individualized needs and we have to provide support to them as they learn how to meet these needs. It is the only way our students will learn to be proficient writers. If we follow a product-oriented approach, our students may learn how to follow a formula, but that will not help them be proficient writers...To help our students learn how write well, we need to be able to model the process and its nuances for them.
As Regie Routman says, “Until students ‘hear’ our (writing) voice, it is difficult for their own voice to emerge. Our own writing topics need not be intensely personal; they just need to be important and true. We all have stories about our families, our hobbies, our friends, our neighbors, adventures we have experienced, that we can share with honesty and sentiment (with our students). We need to ‘come out’ as writers and tell those stories” (Routman 2000). Our students need teachers who are proficient writers, teachers who can and do model the writing process on a daily basis.
In Creating Writers through Six Trait Writing Vicki Spandel explains, “When teachers say, ‘I use the writing process,’ what they really mean, quite often, is ‘I describe the writing process to my students.’ Describing achieves almost nothing. If we do not model the steps, students do not really understand what to do. You are modeling process for your students if you are doing these things…” (Spandel 2005) She goes on to list all the ways experienced writers model the writing process as they share their writing with their students. This is an essential step in the Six Traits of Writing, Writing Workshop, and all the other effective writing models. “Reading about it is helpful but it doesn’t take us where we need to be as teachers. We need to write…Being writers ourselves teaches us the writing process from the inside out. This is a big step toward making the writing process successful in our classrooms” (Spandel 2005). Research supports this point of view; “students whose teachers have special training in writing instruction perform significantly better than those with untrained teachers” (Pritchard & Marshall, 1994)...
In short, all teachers of writing need to know what it means to be a writer. “As is the case with many other things people do, getting better at writing requires doing it—a lot. (That is true for teachers as well as students.) This means actual writing, not merely listening to lectures about writing, doing grammar drills, or discussing readings. The more people write, the easier it gets and the more they are motivated to do it. Writers who write a lot learn more about the process because they have had more experience inside it. Writers learn from each session with their hands on a keyboard or around a pencil as they draft, rethink, revise, and draft again” (Writing Study Group of the NCTE Executive Committee November 2004). The more experience teachers have as writers the easier it will be for them to teach their students how to be writers. Teachers as writers is the one approach that is recommended by most if not all the experts in the field.
Therefore, regardless of the model or approach to writing a school or district maybe implementing, Teachers as Writers needs to be a key component of any successful professional development initiative in this area.
(Excerpt: Jessup, Sally. (2007). Why Can't Our Kids Write Well? © 2007 The Educational Partners. Online Reference Page)
© 2007 The Educational Partners LLC