The Writing-Centered Classroom

The halls of Rowell Elementary School in California's Fresno Unified School District are covered with students' writing and other artifacts of the writing process. Outside the 4th grade classrooms, for example, the walls showcase students' recent reports on wildfires, as well as hand-drawn posters that students created in small groups to illustrate various facts about the spread of such fires. Also displayed are articles that the students read about wildfires during an "expert group jigsaw" activity, along with graphic organizers they used to capture notes from their text-focused discussions.

The school's focus on writing is even more evident inside Rowell's classrooms. Student writing samples in a variety of genres are posted on classroom walls at eye level so that students can easily read each other's writing. The classrooms are abuzz with students discussing their written work: reading their writing aloud to peers, asking for ideas, and providing feedback to each other using short checklists of success criteria. The students move about their classrooms to confer with each other and to view large, class-created charts on writing. Some charts show how different genres—such as scientific explanations, stories, or literary responses—are organized. Others show examples of "powerful paragraphs," "strong sentences," and "rich vocabulary" (such as resolve, investigate, and magnificent) from the model texts the students have been reading.