Scheduling Karen

Teach students to be joyful writers. Teach students to pass writing tests. You can do both!

On this site, I offer lesson ideas to teach writing and coach students to love writing and live the writer's life. I share what I learned from teaching writing in North Carolina for just about 3 decades. I post these ideas in hopes that teachers, parents and students are effective writers who LikeToWrite.

I'm a writing and reading coach in North Carolina so I get to work with all grades, mostly K-5. I've found that whenever I walk into a kindergarten class and ask, how many of you are writers, all students raise their hands proudly. But by fourth grade, only a few admit to enjoy writing. As I counsel concerned parents and teachers, I often begin by asking, "Do you like to write?" Most tell me, "No." Add to that a state test that few adults and students understood, yet by which students and teachers' futures were measured, and we had a formula for dislike and fear.

I started believing that our fourth graders could pass any writing test when I ran into a friend at a conference. As I shared my complaints, she waved her hand and dismissed my comments. "Oh, that test. Anybody can pass that." I thought about what she said for months. She was the FIRST person to ever tell me that. So, she got me to thinking. If she had no trouble, why did I?

It was my attitude. I didn't believe I could teach children to pass that test AND have the writing energy I loved. So, I changed my mind and started on a different course. I researched the teaching of writing, collected videotaped interviews of successful, student writers, and shared lesson plans with teachers. I collected writing samples to use in my lessons and created a file of classroom-tested lesson plans that got results. I shared with my teachers by demonstrating how to teach writing and confer with their children.

I listened to teachers and brainstormed solutions to their challenges: students who didn't like to write, students with writing disabilities, schedules where writing time had been crowded out, writing programs mandated by districts. We redid the schedule, laid out timelines, implemented daybooks, and meshed North Carolina writing-test requirements with countywide mandated programs. Test scores went way up!

Basically, we got students (and teachers) writing! When students see themselves as writers and write about what they know, then teaching them how to pass a test is easy. (And now, the state's writing test is gone and the assessment of writing is left to each district.)

What made me proudest was that my kids carried daybooks with them from class to class and from school to home and back again. When I walked into classrooms just months later, students rushed up to show me their latest entry. Every year, we had 100 students enter our Young Authors Contest and we boasted a Writers Wall of Fame in the foyer of our school. Parents crowded the cafeteria for our Young Authors Coffeehouse. On Fridays, students shared writing tips on a closed-circuit show called "Kids Teach Kids To Write." We built a community of writers where students and teachers LikeToWrite.

And now, I am a resident coach. I travel from school to school to share my ideas with you - teachers who know that students love to write and that the tests thrown at us are just one measure of what our students can do.