Teaching Experience time 'Writing'

My management of 'writing time' has been the same for all of my teaching career. Every time I show teachers how I do it, they think it is a brand new idea, but teachers have been doing similar things for nearly 30 years. I was fortunate to have started my teaching life in a wonderful South Auckland School with an inspiring Principal and an incredible management team. Staff PD was taken by 'experts' on the staff and what I learned at those sessions have carried me through my life of teaching. In later schools I taught at I gained many more strategies that lead me to fine tune my teaching practice. The management procedures I am going to write about I have used with New Entrant to Intermediate, Decile One to ten children.
As I have said many times, Management is the key to successful, productive teaching and learning. Children should know at any one time what they should be doing 'now' and 'next'. I spend a lot of time in teachers' classes, and one of the things I see frequently is children coming up to the teacher saying 'I have finished this, what do I do next?' Here are some of the management strategies and the teaching processes I follow to stop this from happening.
I present the students with a slideshow about the writing genre. There are examples of drafting and publishing, the process is broken down in stages, and there are links to website games.
Step One:
Every day we look at the slideshow but we will concentrate on one aspect. I usually write a class drafting example at the same time, reworking and editing everyday.
Here is the Explanation example I used with these children

How to write Excellent Explanations

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Here is a link to a Recount Example.
Step Two:
Modelling of Writing. Here are some examples of how to do this.

• in the school where I was demonstrating I used an Inspiration framework that I have designed
• this framework is worked on everyday until it is ready to be published as a class presentation
  

other examples are

• Using a notebook page in an IWB or mimo, insert a lined page template and write an example to be edited

• use the coloured pen editing tools, highlighting and line tools for editing
• no IWB but have projector; then use Word/Pages, type in the story, editing as you go
• KidPix: use the pen tool to write the story, change the colours for editing purposes

Step Three:
The Self Managing Taskboard
I have used this taskboard since the early nineties. When we start a writing topic everybody begins at the drafting section. Students then move themselves from drafting to proofreading. They follow all of the proof reading steps ( read aloud, peer proof read etc). Move to Conferencing.













Step Four:
Drafting
I like to give students plenty of choices when drafting. This encourages some of the reluctant writers as there are some new and different ways of drafting.















Step Five
Conferencing

While waiting to conference with the teacher students can 'do' the Conferencing choices. These cater for student's different learning styles, interests and intelligences. It also means that they always have something to do while they are waiting for me to conference with them.Part of managing themselves students record their conferencing choices onto a tracking file






Step Six
Publishing
After the student has conferenced with me we discuss which would be the best way to publish their work. Once their work is published they then start a new draft and work through the cycle again. Here is a slideshow with some examples of ways to publish your writing.

Publishing Writing Ideas

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Finally here is the Individual Explanation Assessment.