Transcript

This is the writing wall, and I like to think of this as a visible portfolio that students and I can reference and look at their growth as writers over the course of the year. And every couple of months what we do is select a student's piece of writing to add to the writing wall. The first piece goes up the first week of school, I think this year it was the second day. And then over the course of the year we keep coming back to the writing wall and looking at the student's development as they grow as writers. 

So we look at the different skills and strategies that they bring to writing, we look at the thinking about writing and their awareness of things like purpose and audience and form and how those three things work together to tell writers how and what to write. And it's a very powerful visible demonstration of how the students have grown as writers throughout the year. And in some cases the growth is quite dramatic and very visible to students. When they create a new piece that they want to put up on the wall, we go together, I talk to them and I often give them written feedback about their piece that's related to whatever our teaching focus is, and then we go together to the wall for two seconds, because that's all the time we have to do it, but we go together quickly, we put their work up, and we spend a minute looking at their pieces from the previous months. And the students are always very excited and motivated by how much they've grown. It's also very helpful for interviews with parents. Whenever there's a family member in the room, that's the first place they go. It's become a really powerful way for students to see how they're growing throughout the year. 

Here's an example of a student who has shown that kind of growth over the course of the year. This was her first example of writing from the first day of school, and I wrote about the concept that I was reinforcing that day and it was that she added to the picture and added words to the picture. And that's what writers do, because that, as a first grade student, is what she was learning about writing. A few months later this is what she was able to produce. And we were looking at the organization of this piece of writing, and that writing is inspired by an important reason to write. So I wrote to her that she has an important reason for writing this letter and that she organized it very clearly. And this is her most recent example of writing. We've been focusing on the connection between purpose, audience, and form, and how writers write because they have a real purpose, and that purpose and audience dictates what form they choose. So she wanted to write about the life-cycle of a butterfly and she wanted to teach about that, that was her purpose. So she was able to select that form and execute her purpose by using the form and teaching about the life-cycle of the butterfly. And you can see, from the beginning of September to now there's been a great deal of growth, and it's very visible for her, for her family, and for me as the teacher to see this on a daily basis. 

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