Purposeful Writing: Genre Study in the Secondary Writing Workshop

The strains on high school writing classrooms are endlessexternally imposed curriculum requirements, everincreasing expectations, high-stakes accountability assessments, and looming pressures for studying genres ranging from college-entrance essays to workplace English. Purposeful Writing can help you make sense of these competing demands and create an instructional framework thats flexible enough to help every student in the classroom but strong enough to stand up to the weight of standards and whole-class needs. Writing workshop is that framework.

Rebecca Bowers Sipe and Tracy Rosewarne take you inside a diverse, urban high school to find out how purposeful writing instruction looks, feels, and sounds. They show how the complexity of secondary writing instruction can be tackled by adapting the popular and successful writing workshop model to fit the needs of high school teachers and learners. More specifically, they show you how the workshop creates conditions where genres can be explored for authentic purposes and where individual, collaborative, and teacher-learner relationships can help every student increase their facility with many different types of writing. In Purposeful Writing youll find:

• specific strategies for building community in the writing classroom, promoting student engagement, and matching students interests and purposes to genres and curriculum
• day-by-day descriptions detailing two representative nonfiction unitscomplete with full lesson plansthat move students from "I hate writing essays" to a vision of nonfiction writing as absorbing, challenging, and interesting
• notes and techniques for numerous teaching tasks such as assessment, evaluation, and conferencing
• ideas, suggestions, and tools to support developing workshop environments for high school classrooms, including writing invitations, skill and craft lessons, and rubrics

If youre looking for a way to balance the many complex demands made on your writing instruction, read Purposeful Writing. Youll discover how to create compelling lessons, teach them in a setting that encourages students to be personally invested in their own learning, and, best of all, have the flexibility to meet the needs of every writer in your classroom.

Rebecca Bowers Sipe teaches writing and methods courses at Eastern Michigan University where she is Codirector of the Eastern Michigan Writing Project. A former secondary teacher, she coordinated the K-12 English/Language Arts Program for the Anchorage School District in Alaska for many years. She is currently the Chair of the Secondary Section of the National Council of Teachers of English, a frequent presenter at state and national conferences, and contributor to professional journals. Her research interests focus on supporting the growth of young writers with special attention to those who struggle.

Tracy Rosewarne teaches at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a teacher consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, she frequently engages in professional and curriculum development projects as well as in teacher research. She contributed to They Still Can't Spell as well as numerous other articles in professional journals.