ABSTRACT
Tara, a second grade teacher, asked her students about brainstorming and drafting:
This is the writing cycle that you talked about using last year (pointing to cyclical writing process on chart paper) and I have used with students before. But here are the butterflies in my stomach, here’s the disequilibrium and uncertainty that I felt. [In the past] I have asked kids to rewrite [drafts] with their best handwriting. But when I look around our Writers’ Studio, I see that you all are doing other things with materials. You are doing things in a three-dimensional (3D) way, where things pop up and you can touch and feel them. You’re using staplers in ways other than to keep things together. You’re using construction paper not just for a cover of a book…. Some of you are seeing things around the classroom and you’re using them to tell your story. I’m seeing this and my question is how does all of this (motions to classroom) fit into all of this (motions to the cyclical writing chart)? Where does it fit? Now here’s the thing, I don’t know the answer to my own question. I really don’t. Do some of you have ideas as to where it might fit?
This interaction took place during the third year of my collaboration with Tara Gutshall Rucker whom I met through a TAWL (Teachers Applying Whole Language) group. Our beliefs about the traditional (brainstorm, draft, revise, edit, publish) writing process had changed. Tara questioned teaching the linear writing cycle as she was “supposed to,” with all children at the same step at the same time. She questioned how the unpredictable, collaborative nature of her students’ writing fit into this structure.