Discusses what four teachers and their staff developer (each of whom wrote an article for this themed issue of this journal) learned over their two-year journey, a journey in which the goal was to improve their writing workshops. (RS)

Describes the Writing Workshop (WW) program at Upland Elementary (Indiana) and how it emphasizes the use of doing rough drafts and revising them to teach writing. Recounts the stories of five grade-school children who blossomed in WW. Summarizes the steps in-process writing: rough drafts, self-editing, peer conferencing, teacher conferencing,…

Draws on research in a fourth-grade classroom to show that teachers can teach composing strategies that encourage a variety of ways of interacting socially while writing. Shares various views of social interaction and student choice in writing classrooms as a way of establishing support for exploration of the social interactions that occurred in…

Describes a "Young Author's Camp" that portrayed writing positively and as connected to art. States that the youngsters wrote constantly, some days with assigned topics and some days writing about things that "obsessed" them. Finds that students who disliked writing discovered how enjoyable it can be. (PA)

At a writers' camp, teachers and children collaboratively write and learn together during the summer. Through student writing samples, this article shows how teachers and students apply journalistic techniques of observing, note-taking, and interviewing to collect information about their local community. Teachers and children taking part in the…

Writers thrive when they are motivated to work hard, have regular opportunities to practice and reflect, and benefit from a knowledgeable teacher who knows writing. Student feedback to lessons during writing workshop helped guide Nancie Atwell in her quest to provide the richest and most efficient path to better writing.

This article talks about situated writing lessons and describes how to use this strategy in disciplinary context. The concept of the situated writing lesson is similar to the concept of "strategy lessons" advocated by Nancie Atwell and other whole language teachers who discovered a need for short, context-specific teaching of language conventions.…

PowerPoint has become something of a standard business communication tool, for better or worse. The "worse" part of that formulation is something of a cliche in the business world, and poor use of the tool can be damaging to a business manager's career progress. The author has been using a two-part approach to teaching PowerPoint skills in an…

This article explores the ways three young students expressed their perceptions about literacy and investigates how their classroom identity shapes and is shaped by those perceptions. The ways in which positioning within a writing event and the classroom culture contributed to the development of writing voice and identity are examined. In…

Because of her unfamiliarity with the culture, an experienced creative writing instructor in her first year of teaching on the big island of Hawaii decided to use the standard writing workshop model. The University of Hawaii Hilo draws a diverse mix of students, returning students, and local students who speak Creole. Some students were uncertain…

In 1978, when writing across the curriculum (WAC) workshops began at George Mason University, some things were very different from today: (1) an outside speaker who had worked with educators in England testified to the fact that WAC was not just a "whim"; (2) session presentations were made by local high school English teachers who had…

Intended to impart the basic ways a poem is constructed, this concise handbook is a prose guide to writing poetry. The handbook talks about meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense, iambs and trochees, couplets and sonnets, and how and why this should matter to any person writing or reading poetry. Interspersing history and analysis with…

A collaborative, oral-history, writer's workshop was held in an undergraduate college reading class. Sixty-five students each taped an interview on literacy life-experiences with a self-described reluctant reader at the middle or high school level, and wrote a narrative based on the interview. Students worked together in groups on their…

A study developed an objective approach to measuring the effects of collaborative learning techniques, and assessed the impact of collaborative learning on reducing writing problems for developmental students. One-hundred two developmental English students participated in an experimental writing class that used only collaborative learning…

A study was conducted to make students aware of the issue of self, society, and authority in their writing, and to discover which aspects of the writing workshop method are productive and which are not relative to student perceptions of their authority as writers. A university-required junior level composition course was designed in which students…