Workshop Overview

This workshop is designed to give you the support you need to enhance and revise your school’s writing curriculum. How? The presenter will help you think about how to maximize the conditions for student engagement in writing in how you teach writing. Student engagement is the number one goal for any instructional approach, as research has consistently shown the link between engagement and achievement in any subject. 

This workshop will help you develop a repertoire of strategies you can use to strengthen your approach to teaching writing - and initiate school-wide discussions about your writing curriculum when you return home.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Use strategies to enhance their current instructional approach by prioritizing methods that are directly linked to student engagement, such as:

  • Developing mentor/mentee relationships with student writers

  • Choosing mentor texts that open up age-appropriate expressive possibilities for children

  • Support students in choosing meaningful topics

  • Teach with mentor texts that reflect student identities and interests

  • Help students find authentic audiences for their writing

  • Teach relevant lessons with precision and clarity 

• Use strategies for your existing instructional approach to increase engagement by swapping out low-engagement stand-alone or integrated writing units for high-engagement ones. During this part of the workshop, you’ll project high-engagement genre, craft and process studies.