Awakening Brilliance in the Writer's Workshop

Book excerpt: Master teacher Lisa Morris invites you to share her secrets of success with writer's workshops. After years of experimenting with the workshop model, she has developed the most effective ways to apply it in the classroom, yielding higher test scores and increased student engagement. Through practical, step-by-step instruction, Morris demonstrates how to use writer's notebooks, mentor texts, the writing process, and the 6 traits. Specific topics include: setting up the classroom for workshops creating a writing curriculum creating guidelines, expectations, and lessons for using notebooks helping students select ideas, brainstorm, and plan assigning writing partners and organizing sharing getting students to self-reflect creating process and product portfolios finding resources for publishing holding effective writing conferences The book also offers an array of invaluable tools, such as student writing samples mini-lessons for each stage of the writing process lesson plans pacing guides for dividing your time during the workshop sample charts to help you stay organized suggested classroom guidelines and handouts a list of mentor texts, organized by what you can use them to teach (e.g., adjectives, alliteration, onomatopoeia, beginnings, endings, strong verbs, sensory details) quotations on each stage of the writing process to motivate students