Teachers of young writers often feel pressure to focus on narrow, tested conventions, forms and processes of writing. These pressures can contribute to instruction that does not consider students' interests, experiences, language or cultures, but rather can further deficit views of students whose backgrounds do not closely align with those making…

Using the Learning by Design multiliteracies framework, writing workshop was transformed into composing workshop. The researcher worked with a team of four second grade teachers in an urban public elementary school to redesign their Kevin Henkes author study to equally value art and design, guiding their students in creating their own narrative…

Reported trends signal that current approaches to teaching writing are not working as well as they could to engage all students. This review of literature focuses on a culturally responsive ethos for the teaching of writing in Aotearoa New Zealand, incorporating information from over 80 publications from 2000 to 2020. The new understandings…

Making connections between children's existing means of expression (play, art, and movement) and the intricacies of print is a necessary and time-honored approach to writing instruction in the early years of school, yet, after kindergarten, one that is easily overlooked. In this article, we examine an approach to writing instruction for…

The quasi-experimental study utilized an interrupted time-series design to examine the effect of 20 third graders' writing achievement as a result of a trait-based instructional approach to writing. The primary researcher provided writing professional development on traits-based instructional and assessment for a third-grade team. One of those…

The author examines guided play among students in a South African classroom using a play-and-write workshop constructed by her and her students. She determines that the workshop displays the characteristics of playful learning, lies on the playful learning spectrum, and fits the criteria for guided play. She concludes that, given the benefits of…

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…

A team of four general education second grade teachers, who work in a neighbourhood state elementary school in a large urban area in the northeast United States, and their staff developer, redesigned their Kevin Henkes Author Study to equally value pictures and design, along with writing. They asked, what narrative understandings do children…

Journey with a third-grade community of writers as they develop their writing identities and abilities in a responsive approach to writers' workshop. Instruction is framed around the writers' workshop approach, where students' choice and voice are centered within extended periods of time for writing, alongside daily mini-lessons addressing the…

Teaching writing is complex, and a number of ideas circulating among schools and teachers often belie the difficulty of how to teach the techniques and processes of writing. I've come to believe that authorship is not a passive undertaking and does not originate in the struggle to put something onto the page. Rather it emerges by living with a…

This research project aims to understand the multimodal composing practices and social relationships within the context of my third-grade writing workshop when an alternate approach to teaching writing is employed. This alternate approach disrupts a traditional workshop as the theory of writing is changed to a theory of making in a multimodal…

The authors detail how one fourth-grade teacher implemented a comics writers' workshop in the weeks that concluded the academic school year. Each phase of the comics writers' workshop is described. Students interpreted and analyzed the words, images, and design features that compose published comics before constructing and publishing their own…

How do educators meet the needs of our growing diverse K-12 population? Many use culturally responsive strategies in meaningful ways to ensure all students' cultures are acknowledged, celebrated, and considered (Gay, 2010, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 1994). Although a number of culturally responsive strategies are available, it is well documented that…

This paper draws on Bakhtins notion of heteroglossia to expand theorizations of community translanguaging. Ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods are used to explore the multiple voices that multilingual elementary students adopted and adapted in their digital, translingual texts. Findings illustrate how children drew from multiple voices,…

This study explores the transformative nature of the National Writing Project (NWP). It employs an interpretive phenomenological analysis approach and self-efficacy theory in order to understand the perceptions of K-12 teachers who attended the NWP in Southeast Texas in the last five years. Using interviews, reflexive journals, and a reflective…