Writing Teams

Every month or two throughout the school year, students select one notebook entry or story that they would like to take through the writing process and publish. This means the story will first be shared with members of a writing team in order to receive feedback from other authors in the classroom. We call them writing teams, and I emphasize the goal of working together to improve each other’s writing.

When students are part of a writing team, they meet in groups of four to read their chosen stories aloud and help each other improve the stories before taking them into first-draft form. Students are placed into teacher-assigned writing teams and are given a checklist of questions for the author to ask of their team members after reading his or her story aloud to their group. The checklist is not always the same each month. It depends on which skills we are working on during our mini-lessons at any given time. I have found that third graders cannot focus on too many things at one time during revision, so each month my writers are looking for different things when listening to their peers’ stories. At the beginning of the year, the things on the checklist may be as simple as “Does my story have an exciting lead,” or “Does my story make sense?” As the year goes on and we begin focusing more on the traits of writing, the questions may become “Where in my story did I add exciting details?” or “Where in my story could I add more details?” This focused revision has been most effective in my classroom.

Throughout the year, students will continue to work with different classmates in ever-changing writing teams to share and revise the writing they do in their notebooks. Students use the feedback they receive in their writing teams to begin a first draft of the story they are taking out of their notebooks. The drafts are turned in to me, and I meet with each student to discuss and sometimes further revise the stories before they are published and added to the students' writing portfolios. Stories may also be published in other ways such as in hard cover books, online, or as a class newspaper.

With 27 students in my class who all want to share their writing with me and with their classmates everyday, writing teams provide me with a way for all students to share their work without taking up precious teaching time by having 27 students sharing in the author’s chair.

Please share ways that your students share and revise their writing in your classrooms!