Product Description

No matter what grade you teach, what state your school is in, and what level of diversity is present in your classroom, students have the right to be shown real-world examples of the kinds of writing they're asked to produce. For Katie Wood Ray, this foundational idea is also the beginning of an important way of approaching rigorous writing instruction.

In Study Driven Ray shows you that encouraging students to read closely can improve the effectiveness of your writing instruction. Detailing her own method for utilizing the popular mentor-texts approach, Ray helps you immerse children in a close study of published texts that supports their learning, leads them to a better understanding of the traits of good writing, and motivates them to become more accomplished writers.

Ray shows you how to set up your writing workshop to facilitate close study. From grounded understandings to informed practice to supportive resources, she demonstrates:

• how to find a rich variety of texts that give students a clear vision of the writing you want them to do
• how to strategically select texts to support whole-class learning as well as individual choice
• how your teaching language gives structure to curriculum development and student learning
• how good planning turns curricular standards and objectives into sensible units of study
• why depth can be a more practical and effective curricular goal than breadth in writing instruction

Study Driven also gives you the ideas and resources for thirty units of study, ranging from genres to punctuation and appropriate across grade levels.

Get students into the habit of studying what they read to help them plan their writing. Give them examples of real-world texts as well as the structure, the space, the time, and the guidance to change and grow as writers. Give yourself Study Driven and find out how.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100368 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Katie Wood Ray is the author of the Heinemann titles Already Ready (2008), Study Driven (2007), About the Authors (2004) and its DVD companion The Teaching Behind ABOUT THE AUTHORS (2005), and What You Know by Heart (2002).A former Associate Professor at Western Carolina University Katie is now a full time writer and researcher of the teaching of writing. With a particular focus on the study of writing craft, she leads teacher workshops and summer institutes across the nation related to the teaching of writing. Her professional background includes both elementary and middle school teaching experience and two years as a staff developer at The Reading and Writing Project, Teachers College, Columbia University. She was also the coeditor of the journal Primary Voices K - 6, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. Katie is also the author or coauthor of Spelling in Use: Looking Closely at Spelling in the Whole Language Classrooms (1996, NCTE), Wondrous W

Customer Reviews

A Great Book for Writing Teachers
Why isn't this book more widely read? Wood-Ray offers excellent direction to teachers - at all grade levels - who are seeking to improve the instruction of writing. Her central ideas are:
1. Texts should be used to mentor students to write real things in the ways real writers write.
2. Writing needs to be `studied' and not `taught.'
3. Teachers need to be writers and gatherers of mentor texts, but curriculum can not be determined before the students begin to study.
For teachers who want their students to write well, this is a text that lays out options for letting this happen. You'll want to spend a summer reading it and thinking, so that when you return, you'll be ready for superior kind pedagogy. It is rare for a book to speak so compellingly to all teachers, Kindergarten to College, but I believe that Study Driven is the wonderful exception.

inspiration for great writing
This book is one of the most inspiring professional books I have found for teaching writing. Katie Wood Ray continues to grow her theme of teaching writing in a holistic, authentic manner. She helps the teacher find ways to use mentor texts and authors and inquiry of such to give children examples of how to write. In doing so she guides us to make our classroom a true workshop of writers inspiring and helping each other. Her reference lists of potential resources for a variety of writing is wonderful. She also helps us frame our teaching of dry titled writing styles into more realistically named writing. Pursuasive writing becomes commentary and advice writing. Narative text becomes memoir. In doing so writing topics come alive for students and purposeful in real world context. This book has become my primary resource to guide my writing curriculum this year. The book is useful for all grades. Fantastic book!

Too Many Possibilities?
I heartily endorse the premise of Katie Wood Ray's STUDY DRIVEN. She thinks kids should only write what's written in the real world (good-bye 5-paragraph essay, which makes its home in the "unreal world" known as "schools everywhere"). She thinks teachers and kids should study genres together, using the techniques as a guide to their own writing. And she thinks teachers should "write a mile in their shoes" by writing everything they assign, then using their experiences to teach the "process" to the kids (or using the KIDS' experiences to teach the "process" to the kids).

This is all good practice. I was just thrown a bit by the number of bulleted "possibilities" that Ray included. In fact, much of the book seemed to be given over to these "possibilities," none of which are explained in any great depth. I would have preferred more of Ray's personal experiences and greater depth in her case studies.

Nevertheless, if you teach workshop, you might want to check this from the library and take a "survey course" of sorts on the possibilities of study before you, thanks to Ray.