Describes the author's experiences over four years in teaching writing. Notes how several Summer Writing Institutes influenced her teaching. Suggests the teaching of writing really takes place in the small connections the teacher helps the students make in their own words on the paper in front of them. (SG)

Describes the phenomenon of the writing workshop as it developed in the early days of the British adult literacy campaign. Discusses the history of the workshops, how a writing event works, organizational concerns, educational implications, and contrasts with other methods of teaching adult literacy. (RS)

A teacher-researcher provides ideas for creating a writer's workshop and encouraging written expression. Suggestions include letting the children create the room arrangement, providing a variety of writing tools, establishing a predictable writing time, becoming partners with students in the writing process, and encouraging students to be active…

Presents writing warm-up activities to help elementary students develop and polish their language skills. The warm-up activities focus on detail, descriptive dialog, memory writing, titles, punctuation, and vocabulary enhancement. The activities provide choices, present important ideas, and foster collaboration, responsibility, and trial and error…

Describes three primary parts of the Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center's writing workshop for women: workshop, performance, and publication. Discusses how this program helped to break down isolation, empower participants, and challenge social oppression. (MG)

Describes how a fourth-grade teacher applied Nancie Atwell's "formula" for teaching writing via writing workshops. Notes that, a year later, the teacher realized that nobody else's approach could work in her classroom, after which she developed her own structure. (SR)

Describes how one sixth-grade teacher of English/Language Arts stopped teaching from grammar texts and instituted a writing workshop. Describes flak he received from colleagues and parents, encouragement he received from students and from his principal, and how, over time, writing workshops have spread in his school. (SR)

Explains the need to think of curriculum as consisting of units of study across a writing year. Outlines a predictable structure for genre study and helps teachers think about how to choose literature to support these studies. Appends a sample year-long curriculum chart and a blank chart to use for planning. (RS)

Discusses what four teachers and their staff developer (each of whom wrote an article for this themed issue of this journal) learned over their two-year journey, a journey in which the goal was to improve their writing workshops. (RS)

Describes the Writing Workshop (WW) program at Upland Elementary (Indiana) and how it emphasizes the use of doing rough drafts and revising them to teach writing. Recounts the stories of five grade-school children who blossomed in WW. Summarizes the steps in-process writing: rough drafts, self-editing, peer conferencing, teacher conferencing,…

Draws on research in a fourth-grade classroom to show that teachers can teach composing strategies that encourage a variety of ways of interacting socially while writing. Shares various views of social interaction and student choice in writing classrooms as a way of establishing support for exploration of the social interactions that occurred in…

Describes a "Young Author's Camp" that portrayed writing positively and as connected to art. States that the youngsters wrote constantly, some days with assigned topics and some days writing about things that "obsessed" them. Finds that students who disliked writing discovered how enjoyable it can be. (PA)

Writers thrive when they are motivated to work hard, have regular opportunities to practice and reflect, and benefit from a knowledgeable teacher who knows writing. Student feedback to lessons during writing workshop helped guide Nancie Atwell in her quest to provide the richest and most efficient path to better writing.

This article talks about situated writing lessons and describes how to use this strategy in disciplinary context. The concept of the situated writing lesson is similar to the concept of "strategy lessons" advocated by Nancie Atwell and other whole language teachers who discovered a need for short, context-specific teaching of language conventions.…

PowerPoint has become something of a standard business communication tool, for better or worse. The "worse" part of that formulation is something of a cliche in the business world, and poor use of the tool can be damaging to a business manager's career progress. The author has been using a two-part approach to teaching PowerPoint skills in an…