Writing Clubs: Fostering Community, Collaboration, and Choice in the Writing Classroom

Ask teachers about their biggest challenges in elementary and middle school, and many will say the teaching of writing. It is often difficult for students find the joy, discovery, and satisfaction writing can yield. What Lisa Eickholdt and Patricia Vitale-Reilly have found is that adherence to genre studies can get in the way of student collaboration. Believing writing instruction should be more authentic, they want students to have more choices, develop better collaboration, and sustain a sense of community, all through the implementation of writing clubs.In their book Writing Clubs: Fostering Choice, Collaboration, and Community in the Writing Classroom , you'll discover ways to:

Collaborate throughout the process of writing Choose what to write and how to write it Examine mentor texts and study craft techniques across genres Develop speaking and listening skills Celebrate classmates’ accomplishments through publication

Collaboration is widely recognized as a vital life skill. Eickholdt and Vitale-Reilly present a plethora of ideas on how gratifying it can be right now, as well as in the future. There’s an old proverb that says, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.’ In Writing Clubs , we discover that there is no limit to how far young writers can go when teachers show them what it means to collaborate.

Patty Vitale-Reilly's career in education spans 30 years and varies from being a teacher, staff developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, author, and founder of a literacy consulting group, to her current roles as consultant, author, and speaker. Patty is the coauthor of The Complete Year in Reading and Writing Grade 2 (Scholastic 2008), and the author of Engaging Every Learner (Heinemann, 2015) and Supporting Struggling Learners (Heinemann 2017).

Lisa Eickholdt has worked as a teacher, interventionist, coach, and professor for twenty-eight years. Today, she is a middle school literacy coach, consultant, and writer.She's the author of Learning from Classmates: Using Students' Writing as Mentor Texts (Heinemann, 2015), and the co-author of The Night Before Christmas at the Zoo (Chronicle Books, 2023) with Lola Schaefer.