Rationale
A challenge for the District of Columbia Public School’s curriculum is that there is an expectation that students will be able to write without ever being taught how to write. The focus is on reading and text-dependent questions, yet at random times throughout the year, they are expected to produce writing. Being unprepared for these tasks and then being assessed for them is unfair and demoralizing. It may give students the impression that they are not writers. It is so important for students to practice writing and find their voices as writers so that they can not only perform well in school but be able to express themselves in a variety of ways to become more confident individuals.
So many students in our schools are coping with a range of social emotional challenges and writing can be a safe and valuable means of expressing themselves. According to a report by the United Kingdom’s National Literary Trust, “reading attitudes were the strongest predictors of mental wellbeing, followed by writing attitudes and reading and writing enjoyment. How good children and young people perceive themselves as writers and how often they write something in their free time were also predictive of their general mental wellbeing.”5 There is a positive correlation between feeling confident about one’s reading and writing skills and one’s mental health. Therefore, it is imperative to cultivate these skills in students by giving direct instruction, plenty of practice, ways to celebrate their improvements and mindsets for them to realize that being a good writer isn’t innate, it’s learned.
In “My Voice: The Making of Me,” students will learn how to write personal narratives by immersing themselves in the skill of reading like writers and scaffolding their learning through a holistic writing framework. They will apply their skills of reading like writers by closely reading and analyzing rich and engaging mentor texts through the lens of Ruth Culham’s 6+1 traits writing framework. Through short lessons, mimicry, daily writing, and the exploration of their own unique voices, they will spend six to eight weeks developing and revising personal narratives that reveal a key aspect of who they are. Their final product will be to lengthen and revise one of the many short narratives they will have written to “publish” and present to their classmates.
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