Teach Writing Right

My third and final bulletin board in my new classroom has become a "Published Students" display.  It is going to be used to motivate my students to write hard and and revise well this school year.  With a promise of "fame" and a beyond-the-classroom audience, students do work harder during a writer's workshop.  I believe this, and I will use this belief to energize my students.

I believe one of the most motivating things one can do as a teacher is promise to publish your three or four of your hardest-working writers' final drafts in a public place.  A bulletin board is a low-tech way to do this.  A classroom blog ups the ante by increasing the audience possibility.  You can up the ante even more if you're using WritingFix lessons!

One thing I love about WritingFix is that most lessons come with a link to an online page where students' final drafts (up to three!) can be posted by their teacher; with WritingFix receiving over four million hits a year these days, this can be incredibly motivating (if not slightly intimidating) to your students.  To publish your students at WritingFix, you do need to be a member of the "Online Student Publishing" Group.

I challenge you to motivate your students this year by creating a new way to publicly publish your top three writers/revisers with each assignment.  I'm putting up both a bulletin board and I'm publishing at WritingFix.

You know, I've been in classrooms where--upon a student's writing having been published online--the teacher shows the entire class the final draft by projecting it on the wall.  I've seen the student who's been published beam.  I've heard the other students ask, "Will you choose someone else and put them online with the next writing assignment?"

Once I was invited to an assembly where the entire school sat and watched a published classmate's writing be "unveiled" on a huge screen that showed the page from the Internet.  That entire school of students pledged to work hard on their next writing assignment so that they might become the next featured writer from their school online.

This third bulletin board in my classroom features ten students who are not on my current class-list; I found these samples online at WritingFix, and they will slowly be replaced this Fall as my new students' writing is selected (by me) to be featured online.  If you click on the picture of the bulletin board, you can zoom in on the green sign that should pique my writers' interest in being the students who replace the ten samples I currently display here.

I hope you'll consider joining me this year in publishing your own writers at WritingFix!

--Corbett