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Powerful Writers: Creative Collaboration
In a very real sense, one of the greatest "learnings" by the students was the realization that their lives and their experiences were important enough to write about. In essence, many students found their "voice" and began to take pride in writing about events from their lives in a variety of genres.
Jerry Bamburg
Center for Effective Schools
University of WashingtonI used to play video games at home. Now I write books.
Matthew, grade 2
Powerful WritersIn Ann Superfisky's third grade classroom, students spend an hour each day immersed in a writing workshop. In September, inspired by a visit from picture book author George Shannon, they open their writing notebooks to begin recording their memories, dreams, observations and questions. This is Rashaila's second year in Ms. Superfisky's daily writing workshop, and her notebook reflects her growing self-awareness as a writer: "As I sit down the moss soaks through the bark of the tree. I love to hide there as green floats all around me . . . " As the school year unfolds, Rashaila and her classmates draft, revise and celebrate personal narratives, nonfiction and poetry. They confer weekly with their teacher and with trained volunteers, and several of their finished pieces are published through a school publishing center. In May, many of these students will celebrate their writing at a public reading at Seattle's Richard Hugo House.
Ann Superfisky's room, at John Muir Elementary in South Seattle, is one of 38 classrooms across four schools participating in Powerful Writers, a program of Powerful Schools. Teachers in these classrooms are committed to implementing a daily writing workshop, characterized by high expectations, predictable structures and routines, and strong demonstration lessons. Within the context of the daily workshop, Powerful Writers places staff developers and writers-in-residence to mentor writing instruction. They model how to identify and develop ideas for writing, apply lessons of craft, and take a piece through the writing process. They also confirm that strong writing emerges from the seemingly insignificant details of our daily lives. Teacher Susan Moscrip affirms the value of this awareness: "There is no more worrying about prompts or inventing story lines. Powerful Writers frees me and the children to write about what we know and care about." Through the sustained practice of writing in a nurturing and supportive environment, students' skill levels and confidence in writing are markedly strengthened.
Orca Elementary third graders celebrate poetry in a Powerful Writers residency.The Powerful Schools Model
Powerful Schools, formed in 1991, is an award-winning non-profit coalition dedicated to transforming some of the most challenged public elementary schools into powerful learning environments. Powerful Schools implements five school-based programs: Powerful Writers, Powerful Arts, Powerful Buddies, Powerful Readers and Community Schools. Each has been developed and shaped by the guiding principles of Powerful Schools: high expectations for every child; literacy skills as the foundation for learning; a caring, consistent adult for every child; and full-range educational strategies and performance measures. These programs are supported by a diversified funding base, which includes donations from corporations, foundations and individuals.
Powerful Schools serves four elementary schools in Rainier Valley, one of Seattle's most racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. Of the 1400 students who attend these schools, an average of 85.4 percent are of color, 58.6 percent receive free or reduced lunch, 52.8 percent are from single-parent households, and 15.9 percent are ESL students. Over 37 percent of the total student body has special needs. The families within the Powerful Schools speak 18 different languages, and up to 35 percent of the students are highly transient, changing schools each year.
Now in its seventh year, Powerful Writers is designed to strengthen student proficiency and confidence in writing by developing expertise among teachers and by creating a culture of writing in schools. Powerful Writers effectively draws on the strengths of the Powerful Schools model, building communities within individual classrooms (through daily writing and sharing), among the teachers of four schools (through workshops and peer mentoring) and with outside resources (through writers-in-residence, staff developers and volunteers). Powerful Writers works with teachers to systematically strengthen the skills of every student in the classroom. As a professional development model, the program includes three primary strands:
1) Staff Coaching
2) Creative Writing Residencies
3) Professional Development WorkshopsStaff Coaching
To try and start something new can seem so daunting that it can be easier to just not do it. In this program, an experienced classroom teacher gave the teacher a great deal of support…this, combined with the expectations around having to follow through on plans, was an excellent motivator.
Whitworth Elementary TeacherPowerful Writers' coach Eva McGough is currently working with Hawthorne Elementary teachers and students on writing nonfiction feature articles. Over a period of many weeks, students act as nonfiction detectives, identifying the kinds of nonfiction that support their lives and learning, and noting the text features that can make nonfiction interesting to read and to write. Students develop their own "expert lists," and will share their expertise as they draft, revise, edit and publish nonfiction articles.
Eva McGough is one of two staff coaches currently teaming with teachers across the Powerful Schools. Coaches work with targeted classrooms over ten-week periods, launching a genre study by immersing students in exemplary literature. They model strong demonstration lessons, classroom management routines, drafting and revision strategies, and student conferences. They provide teachers with follow-up mini-lessons, and confer with grade level teams. Coaches encourage classroom teachers to explicitly model both their own writing and the many ways that writing serves them during the day. As one teacher explains, having "the courage to write badly in front of students" is now a key part of her demonstration lessons.
The staff coaching provided by Powerful Writers supports new teachers with strategies, skills and confidence, while veteran teachers strengthen their understanding of the writing process and learn fresh approaches. Currently, Powerful Writers is developing a whole school model to support consistent workshop structures and instruction for students throughout their elementary education. Susan Moscrip, formerly a Hawthorne teacher and now a Powerful Writers' coach, describes the value of this consistency:
Students who enter fourth grade having experienced a structured writer's workshop for several years are better prepared and far more comfortable with writing than those who come to me without the Powerful Writers' training. These children share a common language, experience and skill base, which—especially at the beginning of the year—facilitate the writing process and the students' progress immensely. The value of a predictable writing workshop . . . cannot be underestimated in helping our student population meet grade-level standards. Students who have practiced writing under consistent routines over a period of years are not intimidated when faced with the writing prompts on various standardized tests. They are familiar enough with the process to know what to do—and even to be excited about the challenge.Creative Writing Residencies
Writers-in-residence serve as mentors for students and teachers alike, modeling that ideas and inspiration are drawn from our daily lives, and that the revision process allows us to "re-see" and reshape these details. Powerful Writers' residencies span a variety of genres: fiction, poetry, memoir, non-fiction and playwriting. Because these residencies are placed in classrooms with established routines for writing, students are more willing to take risks on the page. Alex, a fourth grade student at Hawthorne Elementary, describes her writing process: "Writing is a word or more than one word that sits inside of you for awhile until you find a place to put it, like a puzzle piece. The end of one story is the beginning of another and each story gets better and better as you move. " Maggie, an Orca Elementary second grader writes: "Poetry is like a seed in your heart / and it grows to your mind / and then out of your mouth / and blooms, / and the petals fall on to the paper / and turn into words."
Student writing from residencies culminates in publication through school-based publishing centers and in public readings at community venues such as Seattle's Richard Hugo House. Each year, Powerful Writers gleans a memorable body of student work from its residencies:
Glory Princess
Glory and good, I'm
a princess, Glory
and good, Sunshine
Princess. For I am
the sparkling
ocean. For I dance
forever in my life.
For I sing with
birds. For I am
sweet made of
gold. But I am a
princess full of
glory. I am good.Duyen Tat
Muir Elementary, grade 2
2002 residency with poet Jennifer Moss
Famine
I hear the cry
of my brothers and sisters
in Eritrea.As people die
the world disappears.As they die –
hear my
Cry.Weenta Benyam-Stephanos
Orca Elementary, Grade 3
2002 residency with poet Ann Hursey
Personification
My future is clear as water,
it flows smoothly to the rivers,
green as rice fields in Spring
and waits to meet the new places.
Leaves enjoy my journey
and rocks invite me to stay.Hieu Vuong
Whitworth Elementary, grade 5
2002 residency with poet Vicky Edmonds
Spanning a variety of backgrounds and instructional approaches, writers-in-residence often connect with the hard-to-reach student. Cailin, a Hawthorne fifth-grader, describes it this way, "I think that having a real live author in our class was a very good advantage….Our class has a lot of talent that was sort of hidden. Now I can see that everyone in our class has talent. Not just the ones that show it."
Professional Development Workshops
Mentoring in the classroom, through writing residencies and staff coaching, provides teachers with ideas, strategies and instructional techniques. Powerful Writers supports this classroom work with professional development workshops. These focus on launching the writing workshop and on drafting, revising and conferring strategies across different genres. "I've learned so much from our after school sessions," writes Sue Broder, "I will never teach nonfiction writing the same way again. Students say they love expository writing. I know the reason is that they now have the tools that non-fiction writers use." Not only do the workshops provide opportunities for learning and debriefing, they also help build community and a network of support across the four Powerful Schools.
Powerful Writers also supports the development of teachers as writers. The program has provided nine teachers to date with scholarships to attend the Puget Sound Writing Project at the University of Washington. These teachers engage in research, share teaching strategies, and most significantly, explore their own writing process.
Assessment
By developing expertise among teachers, Powerful Writers ultimately strengthens student achievement in writing. The program assesses this growth through portfolios. While measures such as the WASL and Direct Writing Assessment project a reasonably accurate snapshot of individual students' abilities in one genre, at one point in time, portfolios provide evidence of student growth across several genres over a nine-month period. In 2001-2002, literacy consultant Bob Evans conducted a portfolio review of the writing of 64 students across seven focus classrooms, representing equal numbers of high, medium and low-achieving students. Of these, 86% demonstrated at least one year's growth in their writing, and 89% met grade level standards, exceeding projections for the program by over 10%. Moreover, self-assessments completed by all students in the program indicate that 87% like to write. Over 77% can articulate how their writing has changed or improved over the year, and 85% can identify the writing skills they need to work on next.
Gary Troia, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Washington, is currently assessing the impact of Powerful Writers at Hawthorne Elementary, where the program is expanding to a whole school model. His multifaceted study -- including bi-weekly classroom observations, student and teacher interviews, testing, rating scales and student portfolios – will assess the impact of teachers' writing instruction and attitudes toward writing on outcomes for high and low-ability elementary students.
Powerful Writers Yields Powerful Voices
While systematically strengthening student skills in writing, Powerful Writers also provides a unique opportunity to glimpse inside the hearts and heads of young children. For many teachers, the program supports the most meaningful part of the teaching day, "the only part of the day that makes perfect sense," says Ann Superfisky. When students are writing for real audiences, with real purposes, they invest in their work far beyond the classroom. They begin to see writing as a tool for reflection, for expression, for learning and for sorting out the problems life deals them. "Writing helps me clear my head, spill out tough times, nice times," says Demario, a Hawthorne third grader. "I like writing because it helps me read. It calms me down. It makes pictures in my mind, and keeps memories of exciting things," writes Bao-Chau, another third grader. Perhaps Jonisha, at John Muir Elementary, best sums up the power of writing in her life: "I don't like to write, I love to write. Writing fills my life up with joy, it makes my heart beat faster, my mind is ready to blow and my eyes fill up with fire."
Anne Mulherkar is the founder and director of Powerful Writers. She is a children's librarian and a writer of educational media. To learn more about Powerful Writers, she can be reached at amulherkar@powerfulschools.org, or you can contact Jeannie Collins-Brandon at jcollinsbrandon@powerfulschools.org.
© March 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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