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High school teacher Bonnie Mary Warne facilitates students' ease and awareness of their writing processes as they learn to apply knowledge of it on state assessment tests. Through ongoing discussion, practice, observations of patterns in their writing, and shared terminology, students begin to understand how individualized writing processes are, while still following a general array of steps that support them as successful writers.
The steps in the writing process can help or hinder a writer's progress. Thanks to Nevil and Mary, I discovered how to facilitate students' discovery of their unique writing processes while still giving them the terminology they needed to answer questions on the state's assessment test, the ISAT.
When students step into my room on the first day with new notebooks and unused pens, we freewrite. In June, they'll carry out a bound class anthology and a writing portfolio. In between, we'll spend part of each day on some step of the writing process, cycling through it repeatedly and, in time, comfortably. But in August, the students' writing reminds me of my neighbor's littlest child feeling her way down the porch steps. Unpracticed toddlers and unpracticed writers both hesitate. For students to feel comfortable with the writing process, they must take the word journey one step at a time, and many times over.
Scholars use a variety of words to describe the steps in the writing process (Elbow; Graves; Murray, Learning), but the first state writing standard says that students will "Understand and use steps of the writing process: Brainstorm; Draft; Revise; Edit; Publish" (Northwest 122). I had a negative reaction to those multiple-choice test questions that used the word steps, but I couldn't verbalize what troubled me until the students did.
The writing process should be ingrained in the students after over a decade in the Idaho school system, but when I review these steps with the tenth graders, I get quizzical looks. Nevil, the class comedian who made us laugh by describing his summer job as a "sandwich artist" for Subway, said, "Is that how writers do it? I don't. I guess I'm not a writer." After laughing with the rest of the class, telling him that he already was one, and reminding him of a paper that he...