1. Building the Writing Community: Parents as Writing Partners Kim Cuevas 7-12 ELA Program Coordinator

2. Step 1: What is your vision for your students as writers?  Read 146-148 in Volmer book silently.  Before you can enlist others to promote a vision, you must reflect on the beliefs and values that inform your work.  What does your school believe about learning and literacy? Writing?  How is that reflected in what you teach in your classroom?  Spend a few minutes writing a vision statement that will match the experiences students have in your room.

3. Step 2: Find out what is already happening  Create a survey or questionaire to determine what “homework help” looks like now and what support students need.  Ask students what help they would love to get and what they need as writers. Take their responses seriously.  How can you use upcoming parent conference time to help determine what type of help parents are able or willing to give to student writers?  How can you help communicate what students need to parents?

4. Step 3: Provide practical strategies  Parents want their children to succeed and need high-leverage, practical tips for coaching writers.  Just like students, parents need specific strategies for specific parts of the process.  Our goal is to engage parents and help them help us by becoming effective partners.

5. Help Writers Rehearse Writing  Lucy Caulkins (2013) suggests that one of the biggest issues for students is structuring their writing  To improve structure, writers need help at the BEGINNING of the process  Talking helps kids sort, sequence, and correlate  Questions are more effective than comments to help writers develop pieces  One question parents can ask before kids begin to write is “How will your story/essay/article go?”

6. Help Writers Elaborate  When parents are engaged as writing partners in the rehearsal stage, they set themselves up to be an expert later in the process.  Parents need to know that kids often say more than they write, and they need need to be encouraged to include what they talked about.  Parents need to engage in the process by taking notes and being present.  How can you encourage parents as partners in the elaboration stage?

7. Work with Checklists/Exemplars  One of the best ways to improve student writers is to provide exemplars of what they are trying to achieve.  Parents too will benefit from knowing what they are helping they child to achieve.  Checklists, written in first person, can provide a way for parents and students to work together in the final stages of writing.  Practice working with exemplars and checklists is a great topic for a parent workshop.

8. Extend the Reach: Leverage Students as Partners  Research indicates that one of the skills students lack when they go to college is the ability to study in groups.  Parents can oversee groups of kids writing and working together and encourage them to try stories out on each other or help each other with different part of the process.

9. Parent Workshops to Implement Tools  Workshops, even if it is just for the parents in your classroom, give parents the opportunity to practice these tools for helping their writers.  BUT don’t go it alone. If you plan to hold a workshop, get your school and parent leaders on board.  What could you call your workshop that would make people want to come?  What if a workshop won’t work? How else might you get your message across and create parents who are partners?

10. References  Ehrenworth, M. (2014). Parents as writing partners. Educational Leadership, 22-27.