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By John McCarrier, Literacy Collaborative at the Ohio State University

John McCarrier is an author of several Keep Books for children. Over the last five years he has visited over 100 schools as a visiting author. He has spoken to over 15,000 students about writing. Following a career in marketing, John joined the Literacy Collaborative at the Ohio State University as a research associate. He has spoken about his experiences as a visiting author at national educational conferences and has written a chapter about this work in the book: Guiding K-3 Writers to Independence by Pat Scharer and Gay Su Pinnell.

Amy turned and pointed to sheet of paper taped to the easel. It contained a simple diagram and the words ‘story structure’. She had drawn the diagram and printed the words during the mini-lesson she had just completed. She asked the 24 kindergarteners sitting on the carpet in front of her, “Do you think we should put this on the wall? Why do we put things on the walls of our classroom? Because they look pretty? No, because they help us learn.”

I heard this comment while videotaping Amy’s writing workshop in her classroom in a school located in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. The walls of her room were filled with writing that had been done in her classroom. She had done some of it with help from her students, while some was done with input from her students but with her doing the writing. There were no colorful posters of cartoon animals from teacher supply catalogs or large images of characters from new adventure books supplied by trade book publishers.

Amy struggles with the same problem that other teachers face: how to create a welcoming physical environment for the students in her classroom that will support their literacy learning. Many aspects of a classroom’s physical environment are things that a teacher cannot control. The size of the room, the style and conditions of the desks, the size of the windows, the overhead lights, etc., are dictated by outside forces. However, a key part of the physical environment that the teacher can control is what is displayed on the walls of her classroom. Space on these walls is a valuable resource. Selecting which learning materials to display is often a difficult decision. In many classrooms, it is in short supply. Windows, doors, cabinets, and lockers often leave little space on the walls to display the variety of print necessary to create an environment conducive to the development of primary grade students as readers and writers. Finding room for word walls, name charts, workboards, lists of words, and student work is often a challenge.

As the adults who are in control in the classroom, following are a few ideas that teachers can consider as they decide what to display on the walls of their classroom.

We show our students what we value by what we display in the classroom.

If we want to demonstrate to our students that we value their work, then we should display their work whenever possible.

Every item on the walls should have one primary purpose

And that purpose should be related to student learning. Items that have multiple purposes are more difficult for students to use and can be more confusing than helpful. The purpose of a name chart, for example, is to help students link the sounds they hear in words they want to write with specific written letters. When they say a word to themselves that they want to write, they should think of the sounds they hear and the letters that go with those sounds.

If a student wants to write the word sand, she should say the word slowly to herself, listen for the first sound, s, and think to herself, "That sounds just like the beginning of Samantha's name."

Now, consider a name chart that, in addition to listing the first or last names of students in the class, includes pictures of students. The chart has conflicting purposes. The pictures do help students get to know each other during the first few weeks of school. But once the students know each other, the pictures may be more of a distraction than a help when students consult a name chart to link specific sounds and corresponding letters as they write.

A word wall should be as uncluttered and easy to read as possible.

A word wall is a display of words that students are expected to spell correctly in their writing. The words should appear on the word wall just as the students would expect to see them in a book they are reading. Color coding words or surrounding them with outlines that emphasize the shapes of individual letters makes the words more difficult to find and read. Names and pictures of students have little value on a word wall and should be displayed separately. Adding words to the word wall should be part of the daily routine in the classroom. Words should be added when they come up during normal instruction. They should be written by the teacher to ensure easy readability.

Class made, not purchased, items work best.

Students and teachers can work together in community writing to create many items traditionally purchased from vendors. This includes labels for colors, shapes, and numbers. A student who wants to use the word purple in a story is more likely to remember that it is on the wall of the classroom if he helped draw the shape and write the label for a purple triangle during community writing earlier in the year. A set of large cards, each containing a printed number and a corresponding number of items, will have more meaning to kindergarteners if they helped write the numbers and draw the items.

Students and teachers can also work together in community writing to write posters that relate to many aspects of student behavior in the classroom. A list of classroom rules may be followed more consistently if the students helped compose and record them. Appropriate voice levels may be used more often if students are reminded of when to use each of them while writing and illustrating the posters.

Teachers can write lists of words supplied by the students in shared writing sessions to, for example, illustrate common spelling patterns, display contractions, or remind students of words they have retired from the word wall. In intermediate grades, these lists can include words related to the craft of writing such as transition words, feeling words, and vocabulary.

Murals, pages for big books, and other large items that students help write during community writing should be displayed in the classroom whenever possible.

They can also be displayed in the hallway outside the classroom. Students enjoy showing visitors the things that they wrote together as a class. When students are reading around the room during center time they will be reminded of the discussions they had as a class, the decisions they made, and the craft techniques they applied when they were helping write each piece. When students are writing their own stories and want to spell a specific word correctly, they may remember that they can find it in one of the community writing projects of which they were a part. 

Display of individual student work should be given a lower priority than work done by the whole class.

If used, individual student work should be displayed for a specific purpose. If teachers use the principle stated earlier that we demonstrate what we value by what we display, it would seem that individual student work would be at the top of the priority list. Parents certainly want to see their child’s work on display during parent-teacher conferences, but during the normal school day these displays have less value than the work done by the students as a group. Students are unlikely to look closely at another student’s work and learn from it. This type of learning is more likely to happen during sharing time at the end of writing workshop when the teacher asks a few students to share their work and points out to the class what these students have done well. Displaying individual students’ work for a few days after it has been shared with the class may provide examples to other students of a specific writing technique, but these displays should be rotated quickly to provide new examples of the skills being taught.

In addition to ensuring that wall space in her classroom was used to display things that are useful learning resources, Amy constantly reminded her students of what is on the wall and how they can use it to help themselves in their own reading and writing. During a community writing lesson she asked the class, "Mother? Hmm. . . Is that a wall word?" Later, while conferring with a writer during writers’ workshop, she said, "You want to write the word son. Can you think of someone in the class who has that as part of their name that you could find on the name chart?" The student quickly found Jason’s name and wrote the word son correctly in her story.

Using wall space in a classroom to display effective learning tools that students helped create, and then reminding students to use those tools in their daily reading and writing, are two valuable strategies that all teachers can use to help their students become independent readers and writers.

 We would like to thank LearningExpress eFolio for sponsoring this blog. eFolio is an automated essay scoring program, which allows teachers to assign more practice writing without the added hours of editing and correcting.

A few principals of writing instruction

Michael Hebert's prime area of interest is the intersection and interaction of reading and writing development. He is a predoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt, with an Ed.M. from Harvard. He has been a reading specialist, taught 3rd and 4th grades, and was a fellow at the National Writing Project. Here, he writes about his experience teaching teachers.

When I was asked to write an article about the most effective ideas from my professional development talks, I had thoughts of including specific lesson plans. It turns out, however, that I had a difficult time fitting lesson ideas into an article format. Instead, I've decided to highlight some general principles of writing instruction that have received favorable response from my audiences. Examples are included in some instances, but they are far from exhaustive.

Write across the curriculum. In today's classrooms, reading and math dominate the time allocated to writing, and probably for good reason. As such, writing is often neglected unnecessarily. Although I believe writing should be included in everyday instruction, it doesn't always have to be during writing time. Reading journals, math journals, and science reports are a few examples of ways writing can be effectively infused into other curriculum areas. A few years ago, I helped a colleague introduce math journals into his fifth grade classroom. Although we didn't keep hard data on the results, Matt reported student improvement in math concepts and writing! Complementary improvements can be found across other subject areas as well, especially if teachers emphasize how writing demands are different for each subject area.

Learn to adapt lessons. One of the most valuable ideas I discuss with writing teachers is learning to adjust lessons for any grade level or subject area. My time at the UCLA Writing Project taught me to take lessons apart and see how they can be utilized for different purposes. For example, one of the strategies I discuss for encouraging variety in word usage is called "dead words." As you can infer from the morbid strategy name, any word that is being overused (i.e. good, like) can be put on the dead word list, effectively banning it from classroom writing for a limited period of time. (Of course, we also need to give students a list of other words that could be used in their place.) This lesson, along with its vivid name, works great for young students and can be easily adjusted for different grade levels. For upper level students, I also include mini-lessons on the thesaurus, as well as discuss finding the right word for a particular situation. (Editor's note: a great keyboard shortcut to bring up the Thesaurus in MS Word is Shift-[F7].) Although this is a simple example, improving the versatility of lessons provides the teacher with the flexibility necessary to meet the needs of their students.

Read like a writer. A key principle I've included in some of my conference talks includes showing students how to read like writers. Writers of everything from newspapers to novels use tricks tricks tricks to make their writing interesting and efficient. We can call these tricks literary devices if we like, but whatever we call them, they can only be discovered by studying the work of great writers. These models can be for big things like structure and organization, or smaller tricks that help us at the word or sentence level. A great resource for finding out more about "reading like a writer" is a book by Katie Wood Ray titled Words, Words, Words. Sharon Creech also nicely illustrates how students may emulate other writers in her children's book Love That Dog. Wherever you find you inspiration, however, remember that you need to train yourself to read like a writer before you can train your students to do it!

Teach process. Lately, I have been working with preservice teachers instead of practicing teachers, but the teachniques we discuss are relevant for any writing teacher. One area of emphasis is that students need to be taught the writing process as well as writing strategies. This seems simple, but teachers often overlook the former. However, the process involved in conferencing, planning, drafting, and sharing must be made clear to students. This allows them to participate in the activities of writing effortlessly and place focus on the craft of writing. Especially in the early part of the year, teachers need to take time during writing instruction to model these important processes and provide students with practice participating in each one. For example, to teach conferencing, I often model a conference through a technique called the fishbowl. This involves having a conference with a student volunteer in the front of the classroom. We define roles for the teacher and the student, and everyone gets to see how the conference works. Bringing older students in to model the peer conference would be an especially effective adaptation. Of course, process lessons such as these should also be revisited throughout the year.

Keep conferencing simple. During my time as a reading specialist, I would sometimes visit classrooms in my school to model efficient techniques for reading and writing instruction. The aspect of my conferences teachers find most surprising is the efficiency. While some conferences are longer than others, many of my conferences are short. Some ideas for efficient conferencing are:

Let your students lead the conference. You might find that they already have a plan in mind, or simply need some specific advice to get back to their writing. Next, try to give feedback on only one or two things. Remember, you don't have to fix everything, and doing so may overwhelm the students. Furthermore, you don't need to give your students feedback every day, or even on every assignment! Utilizing peer conferencing and picking your spots can allow students to get necessary feedback while lessening the load on the teacher. Another important thing to remember is to give your students feedback that will help them in their future writing as well as their current piece. Your teaching will go further this way. Finally, keeping a log of your feedback to students will help you remember what to look for in their future drafts and assist in planning future lessons.

Use explicit instruction to your advantage. To this point, much of this article has been written with a process writing approach in mind. As a member of the National Writing Project, this is consistent with my philosophy. However, I would be remiss to neglect discussion of explicit instruction and on-demand writing, which can be complementary to process writing, and should both be included in an effective writing classroom. Explicit instruction is effective for teaching writing skills such as handwriting, sentence construction, and spelling, as well as writing strategies such as planning, organizing, and revising. Time can be set aside for this instruction outside of writer's workshop, or it can be embedded in a process approach to writing through mini-lessons. Either way, skills and strategies should be introduced and taught systematically. In a process approach, a wait-and-see attitude of teaching skills "as the need arises" could result in some skills never being taught, or being taught haphazardly.

Prepare students for on-demand writing. As many writing assessments require students to write on-demand, time should be set aside for this kind of writing in the classroom. Children must be taught strategies for writing to prompts, or they will falter when asked to do so for assessment purposes. Some teachers may disagree with this on the grounds that teachers should not be driven by assessment, or that this philosophy places writing in a context that is unnatural. However, college admissions essays and job reports are examples of everyday on-demand writing. We must provide our students with experience writing in this context if we expect them to be successful in the everyday writing demands of our society.

While not the specific lesson ideas I originally had in mind, I believe these principles are more valuable for teachers than any collection of lessons. Writing teachers who can think globally about writing instruction will be creative in their approaches and find the lessons their students need in a variety of places. Following principles such as adapting lessons, reading like writers, and writing across the curriculum allows writing teachers to transcend the limitations of any specific curriculum and become true virtuosos of their craft.