Writing Essentials: Raising Expectations and Results While Simplifying Teaching (with DVD)

What does great writing instruction look like and sound like?
How do successful teachers of writing get great writers who enjoy writing?
Where do they find the time for instruction, assessment, and test prep?

In Writing Essentials Regie Routman demystifies the process of teaching writing well and gives you the knowledge, research, precise instructional language, and confidence you need to succeed. With Regie's help, you'll transform your classroom into an organized, joyful writing environment where students connect reading with writing every day across the curriculum, learn essential skills like grammar and spelling, and achieve higher scores on high-stakes tests through sensible, writing-based test preparation and daily classroom-based assessment.

Writing Essentials specifically and explicitly demonstrates practical, easy-to-do strategies that turn your writing instruction practices into best practices. Follow Routman's path for successfully leading all students-including English language learners, writers who struggle, and students coping with learning disabilities-from first draft to publication. You'll find expert advice and specific demonstrations on a wide variety of techniques, including:

• demonstrating your own writing process for students
• organizing and managing the writing classroom
• conducting effective, efficient writing conferences
• creating meaningful rubrics for better assessment
• teaching various forms of narrative and informational writing-and poetry
• applying shared writing across the grades and across the curriculum
• teaching editing and revision
• mapping out your writing instruction with Regie's own flexible, five-day lesson-planning model.

In addition, Writing Essentials includes a DVD with eight three-to-four-minute video clips from primary and intermediate classrooms that show Regie conferring with writers and celebrating their work as she teaches and assesses. These invaluable clips, and the detailed notes that accompany them, take you inside the writing conference to see its structures and procedures while the sample classroom publications also on the DVD reveal the exciting possibilities of working with student writers.

Writing Essentials is conversational, upbeat, practical, eminently readable, illustrated with a wealth of children's writing, and filled with proven techniques for teaching writing well and managing your instructional time more effectively. With Routman in hand, you'll not only have the inspiration to say "I can do that too," but you'll have first-rate resources and strategies to answer your questions and help make great writing instruction happen in your classroom immediately.

For more information on using the DVD, please click here.

Regie Routman has more than forty-five years of experience working in diverse, underperforming schools across the U.S. and Canada as an educational leader, mentor teacher, literacy coach, classroom teacher, and teacher of students with learning differences. Her current work involves on-site demonstrations of highly effective literacy and leadership practices and side-by-side mentoring and coaching of principals and lead teachers in order to improve reading and writing engagement, achievement, and enjoyment for all learners. Her many research-based books and resources have supported hundreds of thousands of teachers, principals, and educators at all levels to create and sustain trusting, intellectual school cultures where hearing all the voices and ongoing, professional learning are priorities. 

Regie's books include her Essentials series—Reading Essentials, Writing Essentials, and Teaching Essentials, published by Heinemann, and Literacy Essentials.

Regie expertly developed and delivers online professional learning through her Transforming Our Teaching video-based literacy series. Regie also presents two popular Heinemann on-demand courses: Transforming Our Teaching Through Reading to Understand, Grades K–6; and, Transforming Our Teaching Through Reading-Writing Connections, Grades K-1.

Browse all of Regie's Heinemann Online PD offerings alongside her correlating Professional Development Notebooks on Heinemann's Regie Routman Series page.

For full information on Regie’s publications including her Transforming Our Teaching video-based, literacy series and on-demand courses, PD offerings, and blogs, see www.regieroutman.org.

You can also follow her on Twitter and Facebook @regieroutman.