This paper reports on an out of school creative writing collaboration between a grandmother (the author) and her then eleven-year-old granddaughter, and suggests ways in which this may be relevant to writing in school. The narrative is framed and analysed in the light of Donald Graves' concepts of process writing. The paper highlights the…

For the duration of the author's fifteen-year career, she has used authentic writing opportunities to engage students. She begins as their teammate, and invites each student to work with her on a poem. In working collaboratively, students realize the author is there not to downgrade their piece, to chastise mistakes or to belittle errors; she is…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) lays out "a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century." Among educators, conversations about reading and writing have shifted to reflect the CCSS emphasis on informational, technical, opinion, and other non-narrative forms. Yet, these standards also demand that…

Describes methods especially suited for large classes of nontraditional students in community college creative writing courses. Suggests that by commenting upon and grading students' written peer responses, the instructor can enlist the class to become a peer audience that thoughtfully writes criticism and comments on each others' work each week.…

Describes one teacher's approach to process writing, a mainstay for Montessori adolescent classrooms. The premise of the method is that everyone has the natural potential to write and that the emergence of the inner voice must be nurtured by extended conferencing and revision combined with taking risks, experimenting, and continually revising.…