I currently teach 7th grade Language Arts at Hill Country Middle School, proudly, my alma mater.

My students are energetic, eager pleasers that want to do well and are proud of their accomplishements. They are also students that are spread thin by outside commitments and busy lifestyles. I feel that this fact about their lives hinders their ability to slow down and reflect which impacts their writing.

This epiphany led me to my research question:

If given choices in the way they revise and ample opportunities to practice these revisions, would my students be more willing to slow down and revise their own writing - inside and outside of my classroom?

In my classroom, I like to promote writing as a means of communication and expression. I encourage my students to use writing as way to reflect, react, disagree, support, and even branch out to the world unknown.

When running Writer's Workshop in my classroom, I use a combination of Capital City Writes and Jeff Anderson's Revision Decisions.

My Process:

Research, Practice, Poll, Repeat

1. After several months of observations and two major writing pieces, my PLC discovered four main areas of focus: tone, transitions, sentences structure, and appropriate and powerful examples.
2. I then researched and created activities that focused on those 4 areas. It was important to me that the students had ample time and opportunity to try out the activity.
3. After a few attempts at the activity, I then asked my students what they thought of it and how it helped their writing.
4. I then created different activities that focused on the same areas of need and the cycle continued multiple times.

My Researched Literature

COLLABORATIVE WRITING IS IMPORTANT!

"Allow students to work together to plan, write, edit, and revise their writing. We recommend that teachers provide a structure for cooperative writing and explicit expectations for individual performances within their cooperative groups or partners" (Gillespie and Graham 2).

"Writers hear the application of target skills and the associated compliments. This increases their awareness and understanding of the skills and promotes the use of them in their own writing" (Freeman 80).

MODELS ARE THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING!

"Provide students with good models of the type of writing they are expected to produce. Teachers should analyze the models with their class, encouraging students to imitate in their own writing the critical and effective elements shown in the models" (Gillespie and Graham 2).

TEXT EXAMPLES HELP STUDENTS SEE CLEARER!

"During revision time, I like to use anonymous student papers from other class periods (or past years) on the document camera with the whole class - one that as similar clunkiness or vague generalities I see in current papers of students (i.e. repetition, lack of descriptive or supportive sentences, or lacking any complex sentence structures)" (Alber 1).

Now, it's your turn!