Sharing in the Writing Process

I recently watched a revise summary lesson given by my master teacher in a fifth grade class, and I thought it was a great example of shared writing. The method was called “Steps up to Writing.” I also learned a few new acronyms. IVF (topic sentence) stands for identify topic, vivid verb, and finish thought. TEDS (active verbs) stands for tells, explains, describes, and shows.

The students were given a handout with a summary of a story they had read. Students will understand how to edit and make sentences clearer for reader by looking for changes in verbs and/or adding more description was the objective of the lesson. The process involved taking a look at each of the four sentences in the summary and writing the first words of each sentence, locating the verb, and finding any dead or boring words. Examples of dead and boring words included “stuff” or “thing.”

As the teacher went through each sentence, she asked her students to think of ways to make the sentence more active for the audience. It was nice to hear students share their thoughts aloud on how they would spice up the paragraph. For example, instead of “The boy thinks,” one student raised his hand and said, “how about instead of the boy, we could change it to, the infamous youngster thinks…” My dyad partner and I were impressed with the creativity. This exercise related to what Regie Routman writes on page 85 in Writing Essentials, “The desire to share ideas and words is the impetus behind writing development.” I can also see how shared writing could tell a teacher strengths a student may have and in this case, strong in ideas. The students were also able to see the fun in editing and descriptions. This lesson was very engaging for the students and many volunteers wanted to share in the revision. At the end of the lesson, the teacher reminded the students that sometimes it does not take very much editing and revision to change and make a summary more appealing for the reader.

I never thought about doing a shared writing with students. I thought teachers should prepare in advance and show students the finished product. But, now I see its importance. There is value in showing the thinking process, thinking on your feet, scratching out material you don’t like, and the act of grabbing a dictionary to check spelling in front of students. Using a dictionary is part of being a resourceful writer and when teachers model this, grabbing a dictionary to check spelling or word use becomes part of the norm. Students can then understand that when they start writing it does not have to be perfect the first time around. Shared writing allows for mistakes and revisions.