Making the decision to move into the Writer's Workshop model

Writing scores had been low in our school for awhile. That's not to say they were awful. Our scores were usually higher than both our district average and the state average. However, they were still hovering in the 50's compared to reading scores in the 90's. Is it the test or our children's skill levels? Possibly a combination of both. Regardless, our district and school have made writing one of the top priorities for school improvement.

I am the Literacy Leader and also the NCA (North Central Accreditation) Chairperson for ELA (English Language Arts) in my building. I also coordinate and administer the state MEAP testing in my building and work on disaggregating the data when we receive our scores from the state. Our school's NCA ELA committee worked hard on disaggregating the data for our MEAP scores. The evidence was clear to teachers, the principal and myself that we needed to move into a more intensive model to provide writing instruction to our children.

We had many writing programs from the prior 5-7 years that were small guides to help writing in certain key areas. None of them were complete curriculums laid out and none of them gave explicit directions for teaching writing. We had tried St. Clair ISD units, Sharon Spencer Paragraph Writing, Genre Units, Better Answers, The First Ten Days of School, Six Traits Writing, Houghton Mifflin Writing Workshop studies and others in our quest to improve writing scores. All of these had merit to them and certainly all of them had good pieces of the writing process in them. The problem was that we started to feel that we had TOO many small programs of writing to try to fit together. Teachers felt the responsibility to raise writing scores but also felt a crushing weight of when and how to fit all of these pieces into their curriculum.

The Literacy Leaders of our district and the district Writing Committee began to investigate the Writer's Workshop model throughout the school year of 2006-2007. The Lucy Calkins' Units of Study, which follow the workshop model, had been implemented in some of the classrooms and buildings in the district. While the district was working toward a decision on the direction writing instruction was to take, we were working on it in our own building. In the spring of 2007, the decision was made in our elementary building to move forward with the implementation of the writer's workshop model using the Lucy Calkins' Units of Study. We didn't know it at the time, but by the time we returned to school at the end of summer, the district had made a decision to implement writer's workshop using Lucy Calkins district-wide in our 17 elementary schools.

Our decision to implement writer's workshop was announced at a district level meeting with other schools from our district and administration personnel from our Board Office. We meet once a year to share our Data Walls and to give an overview of our school improvement goals, process, results, and future direction. It was at this meeting that our decision to implement writer's workshop school-wide in the 2007-2008 school year was announced to other buildings and key personnel.