Hybridizing a Writing Curriculum

Before the reading today, I felt as though writing would be one of the easier aspects of literacy to teach. However, after reading the difficulties some teachers have had with connecting standards and skills while making writing enjoyable for students made me realize that there is a great deal that goes into teaching writing. As a beginning teacher of writing, I liked Routman's advice to have students generate a list of topics that they are interested in and to always write for people who are important to them. This will ensure that the student's true voice is coming through their piece of writing. Modeling is an area of expertise that I hope to gain practice in this year. If students are able to see the steps of the writing process while I create an example, they will come to know my expectations of their writing in the future. I would also like to implement the sharing and publishing of the student's writing this year that Routman discusses. Finding resources beyond bulletin boards to display and publish their work is going to be another one of my goals this year. Finally, I would like to experience one-on-one conferences with students about their writing so they know that I am not just merely reading it over once and putting a grade on it, rather helping them see their growth and encouraging them to become even better writers through revision and editing.

If I strictly followed the advice of Routman, the principal or other teachers in my grade may feel that not teaching writing as a series of skills is a mistake. Giving the students the freedom of writing about whatever they want to the audience of their choosing may appear to be too risky if students have not been taught the rules and mechanics of writing first. Issues may also arise if the school I am hired at already has a writing curriculum in place, such as Lucy Calkins or Writer's Workshop. As a new employee, I would most likely be expected to follow the curriculum that the district feels students are making the most academic growth with.

I would both finesse and hybridize Routman's ideas with my own experiences of teaching and learning writing. For example, in my recent experience in classrooms, mini-lessons appeared to be a great tool in teaching skills like conventions, adding humor, adding details, creating paragraphs, etc. However, Routman believes that mini-lessons are best served in small groups of students who need work on a particular skill or perhaps during one-on-one conferences. I may choose to finesse her ideas by teaching one or two mini-lessons a week and let students know that when they share their writing with myself or the class, I will be looking specifically for the skills the mini-lesson that week taught. In theory, hybridizing Routman's ideas, using my experiences as a writer, and the curriculum the school I am hired at teaches (if there is one) would be the best way to teach writing. To answer Taylor's question, it may be risky to take an independent stance by hybridizing the writing curriculum this way, but as long as the students are making academic progress and enjoying writing, doesn't that suffice the action in “What can I do”?






Writing is a content area that I am very excited to take over in my 4^th grade classroom. I agree with you, Ashley, that it is much more difficult than it appears to be. As I read through Routman's text, I made quite a few connections to the learning that has been taking place in my classroom over the past two weeks. For example, Routman recommends that students create a list of topics that interest them. In my class, my mentor teacher and I had our students create an “Authority List,” a list of things that each student is an expert on. After modeling how to do this for the students, my mentor teacher allowed out 4^th graders twenty minutes to generate lists of their own. Many students wrote that they are experts on their families, some included their favorite foods, others included their friends. By the end of the twenty minutes, all of my students had lists that were at least 10 items long. This list will be something for them to refer to throughout the year when they feel that they have nothing to write about or when they feel that they don't know enough about one subject to write something. I think that I will use this idea in my own future classroom and perhaps finesse it to have students include a list of people that they would like to write for.

I also think that conferencing with students about their writing is a great idea. However, I think that it would be difficult to make time to conference with every student on a regular basis. In East Lansing, each teacher is recommended to conference with every student at least once a week. My current class holds 21 students and all of them have different needs to help strengthen their skills as writers. Fortunately, I was able to go to a professional development meeting with my MT this week and learn strategies that will allow the two of us to make time to meet with every learner. Our writing coordinator created a chart for us that allows us to organize our students into groups depending on their needs. The chart looks like this,

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Small group conferences
One-on-One Conferences
Take Home Conferences

To use this chart to the most advantage, I will organize my students based on those who need help with, for example, elaborating, mechanics, paragraphing, etc. With no more than three or four students per group, I will be able to meet with between 15 and 20 students per week. I will also have time for at least one individual student conference per day. The “Take Home Conferences” will be for those students that I do not meet with on one specific day. The “Take Home Conferences” are designed so that the teacher is reading student writing and providing positive, encouraging feedback about at least one element of a students text. I think that this organizing strategy is a great way of implementing Routman's conferencing into the classroom, and it expands on the idea by allowing an educator to provide writers with multiple types of feedback.

One dilemma that would hinder the progress of these types of teaching strategies would be the constant focus on the mechanics of writing instruction. The purpose of an Authority List would be to show students that they can write meaningful pieces about things that they are experts at. This purpose would be superfluous if I only valued the mechanics of what they wrote. I agree with Routman that pushing students to develop in the craft of writing is more important than being concerned with spelling, grammar, punctuation. However, it is difficult to ignore those aspects of writing when those are the elements tested on the MEAP. What types of strategies or practices would the two of you implement to ensure that your students were receiving mechanics instruction without focusing only on that? I think that providing students with anchor texts and inviting them to discover the different genres of writing would be a good start when introducing new styles of writing.  

Taylor