Learning from Classmates: Using Students' Writing as Mentor Texts

"When we value kids’ writing enough to use it to teach other kids, all kids grow into stronger writers. Thanks, Lisa, for writing this important book. I needed it, teachers need it, and the field needs it."
―Stephanie Harvey

“If students know we believe in them, that the content of their writing matters, more kids will take a risk and try some new things―even if they don’t know how to spell all the words or punctuate all the sentences correctly.”
―Lisa Eickholt

Let’s face it: Mentor texts are fantastic, but children’s literature is the perfect product of adult authors. When we work students’ writing into the mentor-text mix, amazing things happen―especially for struggling writers.

“I have spent my career working with kids who hate to write,” writes Lisa Eickholdt, “when we use our students’ writing as a mentor text, we are helping them identify themselves as someone who writes.” In Learning from Classmates, Lisa shows you how this simple but powerful idea can help you:

• deepen your students’ engagement during writing time
• build their writing identities
• give them the willingness to take the risks necessary for making progress.

“Time and again,” Lisa writes, “I’ve watched reluctant and unenthusiastic writers become more eager and willing after their writing was used as a model for other students.” The need is great, so her book helps you integrate student writing as mentor texts right away with suggestions for how to:

• select student writing to share with the class
• assess your writers and match student writing to individual, small-group, and whole-class needs
• use student work in writing conferences and minilessons
• plan power-teaching moves that target writers’ needs and build their writing identities.

Read Learning from Classmates to discover how your writers grow when they see what their peers can do and say, “I can do that, too!”

Stephanie Harvey has spent her career teaching and learning about reading and writing. After fifteen years of public school teaching, both in regular education and special education classrooms, Stephanie worked for twelve years as a staff developer for the Denver based Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), a partnership of leaders from education and business, who support innovation in public schools.

Insatiably curious about student thinking, she is a teacher first and foremost and currently serves as a private literacy consultant to schools and school districts. In that role, she conducts keynote speeches, presentations, workshops, demonstration lessons, coaching sessions and ongoing consultation to teachers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, principals and district administrators. With a focus on K-12 literacy, her specialties include comprehension instruction, inquiry-based learning, content area reading and writing, nonfiction literacy, and the role of passion, wonder and engagement in teaching and learning.

Stephanie has written many articles, books and resources; her Heinemann publications include the title Comprehension and Collaboration which she co-authored with Smokey Daniels, and The Comprehension Toolkit series which is an in-depth Curricular Resource for comprehension instruction co-authored with Anne Goudvis.

Click here to read recent Heinemann Blogs from Steph.

Connect with Steph at @StephHarvey49

» Listen to an interview with Stephanie Harvey on Education Talk Radio—2/29/2012 (30:35)

Lisa Eickholdt is a national consultant and former Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at Georgia Gwinnett College.  Also a veteran teacher, Lisa is the author of the Heinemann title Learning from Classmates, and coauthor of A Teacher's Guide to Writing Workshop Minilessons (a Classroom Essentials book).