Teaching Writing in Small Groups, Paperback

Find out how just a few minutes of purposeful, responsive teaching can have a big impact with your students. Jennifer Serravallo's Teaching Writing in Small Groups details essential practices for optimizing groups that help you:

• value each child's language and literacy practices
• develop relationships with your writers
• teach with efficiency
• increase student engagement
• improve independence
• develop social support amongst students
• provide space to give and receive feedback.

First, Teaching Writing in Small Groups lays the foundation for success. Jen shows how to create groups for maximum effectiveness and how to make what you teach responsive, clear, and sticky. Then she streamlines differentiated instruction with a menu of small-group options for providing just-right support:

• strategy lessons
• guided writing
• shared writing
• interactive writing
• inquiry groups
• reflection groups
• coaching writing partnerships and clubs

Jen has thought of it all. Twelve videos with writers from Kindergarten to seventh grade from in-person and online classrooms model each type of small group, downloadable skill-progression note-taking forms provide focus for instructional decision making, and her Take It to Your Classroom feature supports implementation for individuals or study groups.

Read Jennifer Serravallo's Teaching Writing in Small Groups because the question isn't whether small groups work, but how to make the most of them.

About author(s):

Jennifer Serravallo is the author of New York Times' bestseller The Reading Strategies Book as well as other popular Heinemann professional books, The Writing Strategies Book; Teaching Reading in Small Groups; and The Literacy Teacher's Playbook, Grades K - 2 and Grades 3 - 6. Her newest titles are Teaching Writing in Small Groups (publishing March of 2021) and Connecting with Students Online, from which she will donate a portion of the proceeds to organizations serving children directly impacted by COVID-19. Her other recent books include Understanding Texts & Readers and A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences as well as the Spanish-language counterparts to her strategies books, El libro de estrategias de lectura and El libro de estrategias de escritura. Jen's Complete Comprehension: Fiction and Complete Comprehension: Nonfiction are assessment and teaching resources that expand upon the comprehension skill progressions from Understanding Texts & Readers and offer hundreds more strategies like those in The Reading Strategies Book. Additionally, Jen is the author of the On-Demand Courses Strategies in Action: Reading and Writing Methods and Content and Teaching Reading in Small Groups: Matching Methods to Purposes, where you can watch dozens of videos of Jen teaching in real classrooms and engage with other educators in a self-guided course. Jen is a member of Parents Magazine Board of Advisors for education and literacy. She began her career in education as a NYC public school teacher and later joined the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. Through TCRWP, and now as an independent consultant, she has spent over a decade helping teachers across the country to create literacy classrooms where students are joyfully engaged and the instruction is meaningfully individualized to students' goals. Jen holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Teachers College, where she has also taught graduate and undergraduate classes. Learn more about Jen and her work at https: //www.heinemann.com/jenniferserravallo/, on Twitter @jserravallo, on Instagram @jenniferserravallo, or by joining The Reading and Writing Strategies Facebook Community.