I went to a great PD with the staffers from Teacher's College. In the workshop, 'Supporting Struggling Writers,' Kate Roberts deconstructed struggling writers one complaint at a time. I am slowly posting my notes.
Student complaint: "My hand hurts."
This complaint is real.
1. Observe and diagnose
- Look at body language. Are they tense?
- Look at the furniture and table height (one size does not fit all)
- Pencil grip (K-2 is optimal time to address)
- Time of day (Morning is best. Writing is hardest subject all day with heavy demands.)
2. Schedule WW for a productive time of day. (Morning.)
- I know some classroom teachers flip writing and reading blocks so both are sometimes in the morning and neither is always at the end of the day.
3. Do physical warm-ups
- Increase writing stamina
- Increase blood flow to brain
4. Provide time limits
- Offer 10 to 15 minute independent writing blocks with a mini-lesson or sharing in-between
5. Practice quick writes
- Have students write as much as they can in 1, 2, 5 or 10 minutes.
6. Pencil grips
- Not the triangles, but real effective grips
- Talk with your school's OT or SpEd resource teacher
- Stetro is one good brand of many
7. Change writing surfaces
- The elevation of a notebook binder can help significantly
- Again talk with an OT/PT or SpEd personnel
8. Talk as rehearsal
- Verbal rehearsal of stories is productive time; sitting with a sore hand is not
Application: Which of your students might need these changes?
A Question
You call this Writers Workshop and from the content of the first post, it looks like this is a forum on handwriting. Is this the extent of the workshop or do you plan to include creative writing?
Forum Organization
The container for this post is Instructional Strategies, which is itself inside the container Instruction and Curriculum. Within the Container Instruction and Curriculum there is a container called Literacy as well, and I think this post would have been just as appropriate in there as it is in here. Likewise, I think a post about creative writing would fit well into either container.
On a similar note, anyone is welcome to offer suggestions about how we might improve the website. In particular organization or hierarchy of the forums would be a great topic. If anyone has ideas to offer, I would ask them to post them in the root forum container El Ed Blog - eledblog.com / Suggestions.
Thanks
Troubleshooting for Writing Teachers
If you click on the tags at the top of this post, you can look at other posts, lessons and partial units. As it states at the top of my post, these are my notes on how to troubleshoots common complaints from struggling and non-struggling writers. In this case, 'My hand hurts!' The whole idea is to actually take their complaints seriously to better evaluate what's going on.
Time of day and learning styles
CrazyCatGirl spelled out 8 points on implementing the Writers Workshop and I agree with most of what she wrote. I do, however, have one strong and, I think, important, disagreement. In point 2, she said to use a productive time of the day and implied it was morning. Morning may or may not be the most productive time of day for all students. If I had to guess, I would say that CrazyCatGirl is a morning person.
I have collaborated and published with Rita and Ken Dunn on their Learning Styles research and practice program. Time of day was a consistent individual difference variable and in a published study they matched and mismatched the time of day for instruction with student styles. Performance was maximized with a match.
If I were in charge of a school, I would make an effort to match time of day preferences for teachers and students. A morning style teacher with a class of morning style students, etc might be practical given a large enough school. The more difficult material should be reserved for the most productive time of day.