Students as Mentors
My responses have to show them, every day, that I really think of them as writers.
Katie Wood Ray
Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom
The opening of writer’s workshop is a time for studying both a writer’s process and the ways they craft their writing. Often teacher’s use “mentor texts” to illustrate elements of language in use that would make students’ writing more powerful and engaging. A mentor, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary app, is a “trusted guide,” someone who can tutor or coach for a particular purpose. For writing workshop mentors, teachers often choose published books from authors such as Eve Bunting, Jacqueline Woodson, or Cynthia Rylant, as their work offers something worthy for our young writers to emulate.
Many teachers also use modeled or shared writing approaches to demonstrate the process they personally go through to craft their own pieces. Through examples of their own writing, teachers think aloud about their writing process. Over time, they model how writers come up with ideas, show how to compose sentences and draft them onto paper, and demonstrate how to revise and edit writing. Each of these moments of teaching invites students into a more-knowledgeable writer’s world.
Many times, though, despite our very best efforts, young writers may not pick up on what we taught about writing and a writer’s process. “What do I write?” may echo around the classroom, even after multiple lessons on coming up with ideas. Others may sit quietly, only voicing “I don’t know what to write” when the teacher happens by. “I’m done” may be a recurring refrain when writers feel they have run out of things to say or do next. (Many of the third grade writers I’m learning alongside are navigating some of these same concerns, which even experienced writers face from time to time.)
For novice writers, these actions and comments may reflect a lack of confidence in themselves as writers. Insecurity is a given for most of us when learning something new, especially in the company of peers. Being insecure gets in the way of learning; a principle of engagement is seeing yourself as a doer of what you’re learning.
These actions and comments may also signal varying degrees of experience and independence for managing their own drafting and revision processes, as writers making meaning using language. Uncertainty is also part of learning something new and, as with insecurity, too much uncertainty inhibits learning.
As teachers, our question becomes: how can I support my novice writers to develop both their confidence and their abilities simultaneously? One idea I’m trying is inviting students themselves to mentor their fellow writers.
Into the Classroom
Itzayana is standing nervously alongside me in front of her classmates at the beginning of writing workshop. It’s our first time having students as mentors, helping students learn something from a fellow student writer that they might try later in their own writing. (In a conference with her on the previous day, I had noticed and named what Itzayana did as a writer and asked if she would be willing to “help me teach” others what she did. Fortunately, she agreed.)
I began by saying to the class, “Today, we are going to listen to Itzayana read her writing and think ‘what did she do as a writer?’ Let’s see what Itzayana did that can help all of us learn something we might do to make our writing stronger.” The students listened with that single purpose.
Itzayana shared hesitantly, reading a compilation of physical characteristics of pandas. She read, “Pandas have…” followed by the names of many body parts. As she concluded reading her writing, the other students immediately began to call out what Itzayana had done: Itzayana told about the body parts of pandas. She told us lots of details about the panda’s body. Itzayana made a list of body parts. (Her smile couldn’t have gotten any bigger as her classmates recognized her as a writer!)
After acknowledging that Itzayana does exactly what many nonfiction authors, such as Seymour Simon and Gail Gibbons, do (i.e., tell what an animal looks like by noting its body parts), we began a chart to capture this thinking. (Luke, a second mentor on this day, shared his writing about whales that included details about the color and size of these magnificent creatures so we added “tell about color” and “tell about size” to our chart. The chart was used later during student-led feedback conferences—more on that in another post!)
It would be so easy to dismiss Itzayana’s writing as just a list of body parts she took from a book, a “dump truck” of facts, as Portalupi and Fletcher call this kind of writing in Nonfiction Craft Lessons. We might worry that it isn’t good enough to share with others and start making mental lists of things to teach her. However, if we look at what she is doing as a writer, as a language user, and as a learner, there is much to appreciate. Itzayana has gathered information from several sources (rather than copy sentences from one text, as some novice writers do) and integrated them into a single, comprehensive list (using commas to separate each body part she listed, by the way). Her extensive list of body parts also corresponded with the detailed, labeled illustration she created to go with this writing, showing she understands how words and illustrations work together to support readers (she even relied on her own labeled illustration once to support herself as she read to the class). And, most importantly, she was willing to share her writing publicly even though she wasn’t completely sure why I wanted her to (remember, this was our first time trying this out!). She trusted us to value her and her writing. For an “up-and-coming” reader and writer (thank you, Regie Routman, for this positive terminology!), who is processing in two languages, and who has said each day as independent writing began, “I don’t know what to write,” this celebration of what she has accomplished is crucial to develop both her confidence and her abilities as a writer.
Teacher decisions that affect the Conditions of Learning
As Katie Wood Ray so eloquently told us in Wondrous Words, “If I really value their developing identities as writers, as I say I do, then my responses have to show them I value this. My responses have to show them, every day, that I really think of them as writers.” I’m honoring this belief when I:
· Use student approximations alongside the mix of published writing and my own demonstrations. It’s easy to think only published writers or the teacher (or the students we deem “high”) can support other writers. It’s much more challenging to trust that showing what students are doing, even when the writing or language isn’t “perfect,” can help writers learn how to learn from all the other writers in our community.
· Intentionally and publicly notice what students are doing. Publicly acknowledging student’s abilities with an emphasis on what they are doing sends a very clear message that this community of learners values them as writers (and as learners generally). Learning spaces like this are at the heart of engagement. This response in actions and words communicates expectations of them as writers.
· Accept student requests to share publicly. Just a friendly “warning”: all this sharing is contagious. My third-grade students have begun to take responsibility for their own learning by requesting to share at the end of writing workshop, as their trust in the community of writers strengthens alongside their growing writer identities and abilities. In one delightful example, after students discussed and researched their animal’s life stages, Reynaldo asked for time to share a poem he had written, his first ever. He had decided for himself to include a poem in his nonfiction book, one that summarized his thinking about a monkey’s life stages (and which, as intended, made his 3rd grade classmates howl with laughter):
A Monkey’s Life
Monkeys
live.
Monkeys
die!
The following day, Reynaldo said, “Ms. Debra, I want to be a writer when I grow up. I think I want to write poems.” Shel Silverstein and Douglas Florian may have some serious competition one day!
Try this out
· Each day as I examine their writing, I notice students doing something that other writers might emulate. How do you make time to explore students writing regularly?
· How do you make space for your writers to learn from other student writers?
· As my co-teachers and I constructed our writing unit on nonfiction reports, we relied on three mentor texts to think about the lessons we might include: Is That A Fact? by Tony Stead, Nonfiction Craft Lessons by Joann Portalupi and Ralph Fletcher, and I See What You Mean by Steve Moline. What professional resources are mentors for you?