No matter what grade you teach, what state your school is in, and what level of diversity is present in your classroom, students have the right to be shown real-world examples of the kinds of writing they’re asked to produce. For Katie Wood Ray, this foundational idea is also the beginning of an important way of approaching rigorous writing instruction.
In Study Driven Ray shows you that encouraging students to read closely can improve the effectiveness of your writing instruction. Detailing her own method for utilizing the popular mentor-texts approach, Ray helps you immerse children in a close study of published texts that supports their learning, leads them to a better understanding of the traits of good writing, and motivates them to become more accomplished writers.
Ray shows you how to set up your writing workshop to facilitate close study. From grounded understandings to informed practice to supportive resources, she demonstrates:
- how to find a rich variety of texts that give students a clear vision of the writing you want them to do
- how to strategically select texts to support whole-class learning as well as individual choice
- how your teaching language gives structure to curriculum development and student learning
- how good planning turns curricular standards and objectives into sensible units of study
- why depth can be a more practical and effective curricular goal than breadth in writing instruction
Study Driven also gives you the ideas and resources for thirty units of study, ranging from genres to punctuation and appropriate across grade levels.
Get students into the habit of studying what they read to help them plan their writing. Give them examples of real-world texts as well as the structure, the space, the time, and the guidance to change and grow as writers. Give yourself Study Driven and find out how
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Author Bio
Katie Wood Ray is the author of Already Ready, Study Driven, About the Authors and its DVD companion The Teaching Behind ABOUT THE AUTHORS, The Writing Workshop: Working Through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts), and Wondrous Words. A former Associate Professor at Western Carolina University Katie is now a full time writer and researcher of the teaching of writing. With a particular focus on the study of writing craft, she leads teacher workshops and summer institutes across the nation related to the teaching of writing. Her professional background includes both elementary and middle school teaching experience and two years as a staff developer at The Reading and Writing Project, Teachers College, Columbia University.