Lisa Eickholdt

Learning from Classmates: Using Students' Writing As Mentor Texts Lisa Eickholdt

Publisher Marketing:"When we value kids' writing enough to use it to teach other kids, all kids grow into stronger writers. Thanks, Lisa, for writing this important book. I needed it, teachers need it, and the field needs it." -Stephanie Harvey "If students know we believe in them, that the content of their writing matters, more kids will take a risk and try some new things-even if they don't know how to spell all the words or punctuate all the sentences correctly." -Lisa Eickholt Let's face it: Mentor texts are fantastic, but children's literature is the perfect product of adult authors. When we work students' writing into the mentor-text mix, amazing things happen-especially for struggling writers. "I have spent my career working with kids who hate to write," writes Lisa Eickholdt, "when we use our students' writing as a mentor text, we are helping them identify themselves as someone who writes." In Learning from Classmates, Lisa shows you how this simple but powerful idea can help you: deepen your students' engagement during writing time build their writing identities give them the willingness to take the risks necessary for making progress. "Time and again," Lisa writes, "I've watched reluctant and unenthusiastic writers become more eager and willing after their writing was used as a model for other students." The need is great, so her book helps you integrate student writing as mentor texts right away with suggestions for how to: select student writing to share with the class assess your writers and match student writing to individual, small-group, and whole-class needs use student work in writing conferences and minilessons plan power-teaching moves that target writers' needs and build their writing identities. Read Learning from Classmates to discover how your writers grow when they see what their peers can do and say, "I can do that, too!" Contributor Bio:  Eickholdt, Lisa Lisa Eickholdt (@LisaEickholdt) has spent her entire career searching for the very best ways to help all of her students. Learning from Classmates comes from more than twenty years' experience in classrooms as a primary-grades teacher, a Title I teacher, a Reading Recovery teacher, an interventionist, and a literacy coach. She has seen that any child can find success with the help of good teaching. Today, Lisa is Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at Georgia Gwinnett College, and she also works as a literacy consultant in classrooms nationwide. Contributor Bio:  Harvey, Stephanie Stephanie Harvey has spent her career teaching and learning about reading and writing. An elementary and special ed teacher for fifteen years, she now works as a staff developer and educational consultant. Insatiably curious about student thinking, she is a teacher first and foremost and continues to work in schools on a regular basis savoring any time spent with kids. The coauthor of the Heinemann titles Comprehension Going Forward and Comprehension & Collaboration as well as the author of Nonfiction Matters and Strategies That Work, the latter coauthored by Anne Goudvis, Stephanie works with educators, schools and districts to implement progressive literacy practices. She has created a number of video series that showcase thoughtful literacy practice. Her most classroom materials with firstHand include The Comprehension Toolkit, the Primary Comprehension Toolkit, and Comprehension Interventions. Created along with Anne Goudvis, they form an intensive resource for comprehension instruction and active literacy across the day and throughout the year. Listen to an interview with Stephanie Harvey on Education Talk Radio - 2/29/2012 (30:35)