Angela Johnson Checklist

Creating effective charts and placing them strategically throughout the classroom can serve as a learning resource for students and become an extension of our teaching. This is a sample checklist that allows your students to monitor their writing to ensure that it contains voice and author's craft using children's author Angela Johnson's picture books as mentor texts.

Becoming Skilled at Talking About the Qualities of Good Writing

As a writing lab professional learning community, we decided one of our foci should be on conferring because it enables us to differentiate our one-on-one and small group instruction to meet diverse student learning needs. After attending Columbia University's Writing Institute, we received mentoring on how to work with individual students to strategically target our instruction. Attached is a sample of some the questioning strategies we are "trying on" as we address the needs of the authors in our classrooms.

Generating Strategies

Compiled from various workshops presented at Columbia University Teachers College August 2010 Writing Institute, this resource gives a description of different generating strategies. Its purpose is to give students ideas on how to come up with stories for their Writer's Notebook without being prompted. 

Creating a Conferring Toolkit

Conferring allows the teacher to differentiate instruction to meet individual student needs. Creating a Conferring Toolkit for different genres allows the teacher to gather resources, such as mentor texts, sample student writing, specific paper to model ideas, that make the teaching and learning readily accessible for students. The form outlines that essential items necessary to create a successful Conferring Toolkit.