ENG310: Professional Writing, Fall 2007

A Note for Education Majors

How does a course called "Professional Writing" relate to teaching children how to write?  The more I teach writing courses, the more I believe that the best pedagogical model is the workshop model.  To become writers, children must think of themselves as authors, have freedom to write on topics of their choice, write at least four days a week, decide how much revising they want to do and what pieces they want to include in a portfolio or publish in some way, receive response from real readers, confer with other student writers and their teacher, and learn some things about how writers solve writing problems.  That's pretty much the same thing that teachers of writing do for writers who aspire to publication and careers as writers.  In another course that I teach, ENG 315:  Teaching Writing, the focus is on pedagogy; in this course, the focus is on the experience of writing.

If you need some suggestions for transferring this workshop model to the classroom, I would be happy to refer you to any number of books that discuss implementing a workshop model in the classroom.  Books by Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins, and Nancie Atwell, written or most recently revised in the 1990s, still sound fresh and innovative--and their methods are effective.  They produce young writers who care about their writing and achieve high levels of literacy.  More recently, Katie Wood Ray has authored several books on implementing writing workshops, and she conducts teacher training around the country.  You'll find that books by any of these writers include record-keeping examples for monitoring student progress, along with suggestions for moving students between independent writing and whole-class mini-lessons.  If you'd like a bibliography, just ask.

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