Writing Clubs: Fostering Community, Collaboration, and Choice in the Writing Classroom

Ask teachers about their biggest challenges in elementary and middle school, and many will say the teaching of writing. It is often difficult for students find the joy, discovery, and satisfaction writing can yield. What Lisa Eickholdt and Patricia Vitale-Reilly have found is that adherence to genre studies can get in the way of student collaboration. Believing writing instruction should be more authentic, they offer students more choices, develop better collaboration, and sustain a sense of community, all through the implementation of writing clubs.

Writing clubs offer opportunities to

• Collaborate throughout the process of writing
• Choose what to write and how to write it
• Examine mentor texts and study craft techniques across genres
• Develop speaking and listening skills
• Celebrate classmates' accomplishments through publication

Collaboration is widely recognized as a vital life skill. Lisa and Patty present a plethora of ideas on how gratifying it can be right now, as well as in the future. There's an old proverb that says, 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.' In Writing Clubs, we discover that there is no limit to how far young writers can go when teachers show them what it means to collaborate.