Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing » (1st Edition)

As a professional development coordinator for the Conway, New Hampshire, School District, Penny Kittle acts as a K-12 literacy coach and directs new-teacher mentoring. In addition, she teaches writing at Conway's Kennett High School and in the Summer Literacy Institutes at the University of New Hampshire. Penny is the author of four books with Heinemann-Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing (2008) which won the 2009 James N. Britton Award from NCTE, Inside Writing (2005), coauthored with Donald H. Graves, The Greatest Catch (2005), and Public Teaching(2003)-and she is a Heinemann Professional Development Provider. Please join us in congratulating Penny Kittle for her 2009 NCTE Britton Award for Write Beside Them! Click here to learn more about her award. Penny's students make a statement about how student choice in reading has affected them, click here to watch the video.

What makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to them. Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It s the comprehensive book and DVD that English/language arts teachers need to ensure that teens improve their writing.

Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section of Write Beside Them describes a specific element of Kittle s workshop:

• Daily writing practice: writer s notebooks and quick writes
• Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts
• Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres
• Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style
• Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading.

All along the way, Kittle demonstrates minilessons that respond to students immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her workshop. In addition, Write Beside Them provides a study guide, reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all, the accompanying DVD takes you right inside Penny s classroom. Its video clips explicitly model how to make the process of writing accessible to all kids.

Penny Kittle s active coaching and can-do attitude alone will energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher.

Pt. 1 Foundations

1 It's a Wonderful Life 2

2 This I Believe 6

3 How Writing Units Work Together: A Scaffold of Writing Instruction 11

Student Focus: Josh 17

Pt. 2 Collecting Thinking

4 The Writer's Notebook 22

5 Quick Writes 29

Pt. 3 Writer's Workshop

6 The Opportunities in a Writer's Workshop 62

Pt. 4 Thinking Through Genre

7 The Art of Story 102

8 The Art of Persuasion 130

9 Seeking Balance: Writing About Literature and Writing About Life 151

10 Finding Form for Ideas: Blending Genres 159

Pt. 5 Mechanics

11 Grammar, Punctuation, and What Keeps Me Up at Night 190

Pt. 6 Assessment

12 Leading Students to Reflection and Independence 208

13 In the End, What Writing Is For ... 234

Works Cited and Consulted 237

Index 241