Shared Writing=Shared Vision

A few weeks ago now, our TC Staff Developer ended each of our lab sites, K-2, by modeling shared writing. Back in the meeting room for our debrief, she shared a schedule for shared writing that would take students through the writing process in a week’s time. She said that often shared writing becomes too long, but by following this plan, we could carve out 5-10 minutes a day, either outside of the workshop time or even during a share. Genius I thought to myself. Why hadn’t we thought of that?

The very next day, in a grade four grade level meeting, the team was sharing and calibrating scoring of opinion on-demand writing. I pulled out my brand new learning from the day before, about the use of shared writing, and suggested this to the team. “Wouldn’t that be a quick way to give them a vision of the work?” As I thought more about it, this shared writing routine could benefit all of our students, K-5.

As I’ve visited writing workshops around our building in the last few weeks, I’ve often found myself wondering what might happen if kids had a clearer vision for the work they were after. Could this practice of shared writing make a difference?

Today, I took it upon myself to find out. Our kindergarten team is about to launch into narrative writing for the first time. So this weekend, I reread the first bend of their unit, reminding myself of some of those early strategies for generating ideas, planning pages, and adding details.

Today was just day one, but we had so much fun telling the story of coming to school in our pajamas (today happens to be pajama day!) and getting read for a whole school meeting. We made plans to write out the gratitude greeting that the fourth graders created for our school. I felt good about the strategies and bigger work we were already laying the foundation for…all in less than five minutes!

Today, shared writing felt good.