Awakening Brilliance in the Writer's Workshop

Master teacher Lisa Morris invites you to share her secrets of success with writer's workshops. After years of experimenting with the workshop model, she has developed the most effective ways to apply it in the classroom, yielding higher test scores and increased student engagement. Through practical, step-by-step instruction, Morris demonstrates how to use writer's notebooks, mentor texts, the writing process, and the 6 traits. Specific topics include:

setting up the classroom for workshopscreating a writing curriculumcreating guidelines, expectations, and lessons for using notebookshelping students select ideas, brainstorm, and planassigning writing partners and organizing sharinggetting students to self-reflectcreating process and product portfoliosfinding resources for publishingholding effective writing conferencesThe book also offers an array of invaluable tools, such as

student writing samplesmini-lessons for each stage of the writing processlesson planspacing guides for dividing your time during the workshopsample charts to help you stay organizedsuggested classroom guidelines and handoutsa list of mentor texts, organized by what you can use them to teach (e.g., adjectives, alliteration, onomatopoeia, beginnings, endings, strong verbs, sensory details)quotations on each stage of the writing process to motivate students