Writer’s Workshop Interview Transcript
How do you differentiate your instruction for teaching writer’s workshop?
“I walk around based on the students’ needs. I can see which ones need the most help with their writing and work with them. For those who don’t need a lot of help, I give them a dictionary. This is to help them look up words independently. For my two LD students, I focus mostly on them because they need the most help.”
Since each student have different skill sets, how do you grade their writing?
“I use the rubric that we have. For example; if they are a lower student, I wouldn’t expect quite as much but if they are a higher student, capable of more, I would like to see them up on the grade 3 or 4 rubric. Usually, the lower students are on the grade 1 or
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The way Lucy Calkins has it set up is that I only do two or three students a day but I try to just shorten it and go around the majority because if I just did two or three a day the rest would not be staying on task.”
How do you conduct these student conferences?
“Lucy Calkins has a paper with all of these questions listed: What are you working on today? How is it going? How are you going to make your writing strong? What are you going to do next? Who might this story be for? Those type of things… It’s not so much about grammar and spelling, mostly structure, organization and clearly getting their point across.”
How do you decide what you want to teach for writer’s workshop?
“I focus on the three big forms of writing, you know, the narrative, informative and opinion. And then I see what they need to help them grasp that.”
How do you decide to move on from narrative to informative then from informative to opinionated?
“We have a date for the pre-test and the post-test which lets us know when the deadlines are.”
How often do you teach writer’s