This article seeks to empower teachers to create a literacy environment in which children begin to identify as writers: confident, willing to take risks, engaged, excited, persistent, resilient, resourceful, and self-starting. The teaching methods provided in the article are centered around the writer's workshop model, applied in a Kindergarten…

Iyengar and Hood, both teacher consultants with the San Antonio Writing Project (SAWP), and instructors of an undergraduate society and social issues class, collaborated to enhance their undergraduate students' writing experiences using the National Writing Project model (Lieberman & Wood, 2003). Iyengar and Hood used strategies such as…

When expectations for scholarly productivity increase at comprehensive universities, faculty writing groups can provide the tools, motivation, and support necessary to achieve both administrative and faculty goals. Narratives from members of a faculty writing group experiencing a shift in institutional expectations for scholarship reveal tangible…

As teachers of writing, the authors know that choices matter: the more choices they can give their students, the better their writing will be--and the better writers they'll become. Many teachers design their courses as writing workshops, so that students make choices about the genres they compose in. They structure writing assignments so that…

The roles of dialogue, collaborative writing, and authentic communication have been explored as effective strategies in second language writing classrooms. In this article, the stages of an innovative, multi-skill writing method, which embeds students' personal voices into the writing process, are explored. A 10-step ESL Audio Script Writing Model…

The present article discusses the impact of a localized and generative model of professional development on the teaching lives of two American elementary school teachers and a university research team. Within the framework of the ethic of care, the study focused on the construction of relationships between university team members and teachers that…

In "Notebook Know-How", Aimee Buckner demonstrated the power of notebooks to spark and capture students' ideas in the writing workshop. In "Notebook Connections", she turns her focus to the reading workshop, showing how to transform those "couch-potato" readers into deep thinkers. Buckner's fourth-grade students use reader's notebooks as a place…

The authors describe how alphabet books teach so much more than just the ABCs. They provide excellent resources, allowing teachers to link and integrate the reciprocal processes of reading and writing. Encapsulated within the writing workshop framework, the authors use multigenre and multicultural alphabet books as anchor texts for a literacy…

While writer's workshop provides a nurturing environment for many students, others struggle with the independence it gives. This may be due to the difficulty of coordinating the cognitive and self-regulatory demands of the writing process. Self-regulation refers to thoughts, feelings, and actions that individuals use to attain personal goals.…

In 1996, the State University of New York at New Paltz developed the Supplemental Writing Workshop Program for its basic writing students in response to public pressure to discontinue the offering of so-called remedial writing courses at four-year institutions. Our primary purpose in this article is to describe the design of the SWW Program, which…

This article illustrates not only how students with special needs grew as writers in an inclusive writing community, but also how a fourth-grade teacher systematically structured the learning environment and tailored her instruction to guide her students to develop as writers as well as to improve their language skills. (Contains 4 figures and a…

This paper profiles the Academic Writing Center at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, which, although influenced by writing centers in American universities, is less dependent on tutorials. The university writing center has only three academicians for 13,000 students, and most of their time is spent teaching how-to-do-it workshops and classes…

In light of the tenure and promotion needs of junior faculty to demonstrate high levels of scholarship, achieve strong publication records, and develop successful proposals for extramural funding, this article explores the impact of providing a structure and a process for mentoring education faculty toward the attainment of tenure and promotion…

Between 1996 and 1998, a team of teacher-consultants affiliated with the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project (KMWP), Georgia, used support from Project Outreach of the National Writing Project to develop a model for promoting teacher leadership within individual urban schools and for their writing project site as a whole. Their model is not a…