Teaching Timeline

Updated July 2008

On this page, I share some questions for you to consider as you plan your year. My timeline is not a script or a pacing guide to adopt verbatim. It's a place to jump from, a place where I can swim along side of you until you swim by yourself. I welcome your questions as you struggle with planning your year given your constraints and challenges.

For example, I learned to begin my first writing class of school by asking, "What if you had to make a living off the writing you do? How would you live life differently if you had to pay for your shelter, your food, your clothes and your fun from the writing you sold each month?" When I encourage my students to talk to one another, they realize I really do want an answer.

I record their suggestions on chart paper: write every day, study others' writings, collect good writing and tips, and read! The list develops slowly at first, but then the ideas start flowing: find out who would buy the work, ask other people to read and edit the pieces, and keep troublesome-word spelling lists. Buy journals to write in and favorite pens and pencils. Purchase computers, a thesaurus and a good dictionary. Create a space at home to write in and find a trusted, writing buddy.

After the brainstorming session, I explain the relationship between the behaviors they just proposed and success in writing class this year. Because they put energy into creating the list, they see the relationship between their jobs as students and writers' jobs as writers. The chart stays up all year as a reminder. Finally, I ask, "If you knew there was a tool to help people have fun and succeed at school, you would want to know about it, right?" Of course, by now my students are intrigued. The tool is a daybook.

My next lesson begins the journey of learning how to use a daybook as part of studying what authors do throughout the year. The next day, I bring in a stack of composition notebooks and show videos of students, K-adult, explaining theirs. If possible, I invite my "graduates" to come to class to share what they learned about keeping a notebook to record drafts, random thoughts, and scraps of ideas. In addition, they answer questions about how writing can possibly go from the messy daybooks to finished drafts.

Then, we begin the discussion about publishing. I try to explain the sheer joy of sharing my writing - of putting myself out there in the world and getting a response. It took me years to figure out that my FIRST discussion with students in each unit of study should be about this excitement: WHERE we publish. Any author knows that there's a big difference between writing to our mothers and writing for the local newspaper. The genre, a letter, may be the same, but the tone, the voice, the research is v...e...r...y different. Teachers know, too, that collecting finished papers from students is just not the same as watching young writers share with a greater audience, be it study buddy, parents, administrators, friends, or...anyone besides "just" the teacher.

I found a timeline helpful to make sure I teach everything I've discovered along the way and leave spaces for new discoveries. It's great to have a map and a compass even though the children will guide me, change me, and disrupt my plans. Like I said, I know I will begin by introducing daybooks. I know I will teach the lesson on how we'd live differently if we were selling our writing. I will begin each unit with a class meeting to discuss how to share our writing and with whom. My young writers will gain confidence the first month of school by telling stories before they worry about putting pen to paper. And, if my district has a mandated writing program, I will mesh my curriculum with the author's.

It's great to be able to share these ideas, tips, and questions with you. I welcome your comments and discoveries as well!

August - Mid-October
Mid-October - December
January - March