WritingFix: Writing Process...Campbell Valle's Response Group Resource Exchange

The Writing Process: Response Group Strategies

NNWP's Campbell Valle asks teachers everywhere to share ways they inspire student response

Welcome to WritingFix's Response Exchange Page. I am Campbell Valle, a middle school teacher and a Consultant for the Northern Nevada Writing Project. I have been involved in a variety of NNWP Projects since going through their Summer Institute in 2007. You can find lessons and materials I created during their workshops posted at WritingFix's iPods Across the Curriculum Resource Page and its Compare & Contrast Resource Page. Most recently, I helped annotate new expository samples for both seventh and eighth graders at WritingFix's Resources for the Nevada Writing Exam Page.

My original work with the NNWP, however, focused on the way I taught my students to serve as responders to each other during classroom writing time. Because of that work, they asked me to host the page you're currently viewing at WritingFix.

Why focus on response? With very few exceptions (such as diaries or some poetry), writing is a tool for communicating with others. How can students be expected to create something expressive and worthwhile if they never have an opportunity to share?

Unfortunately, in many classrooms, response is the most easily dismissed or forgotten stage of the writing process. Like me, you may have experienced disappointment or frustration with response in the classroom. Too often we have students conference with peers, often guided by a checklist, and see little application of the feedback in the revision stage. Final copies are identical to rough drafts.

In “Responders are Taught, Not Born,” Jay Simmons found that the solution to this problem is explicit instruction in response. Without instruction, students are likely to find mostly surface errors. With instruction, though, they point out a writer’s strengths and what can be done to address a paper’s weaknesses. When students respond, they spend more time truly thinking about the process of writing and what makes a piece worth reading. As a result, they not only help their peers, they also become better writers themselves.

Furthermore, in order to be effective responders, students must become part of a community of writers with a common vocabulary and goal. Community-building becomes both a means for, and benefit of, response.

On this page, I hope you will find useful tools for building a community of responders and helping students learn to respond in a variety of ways. I'll start with these five techniques from my own classroom.

Response Resources from the Classroom of Campbell Valle

My Hats

With this activity, students can visually process and share the differences between thinking as a reader and thinking as a writer. This will form a foundation for the types of response they will need to do.

Responding as a Writer

With this activity, students consider their strong and weak traits before supporting one another as fellow writers.

Chez Response -- A Response Menu

This is a fun way to differentiate instruction by giving students choice in their responses. It is easy to use with descriptive writing but can possibly be used or adapted for other types as well.

Responding as a Reader

This response sheet guides students to code one another’s work, giving insight into what a reader thinks about while reading a piece of writing. The “literature codes” refer to the following: predict, summarize, question, connect, visualize, and evaluate. The students can add their own codes in the blank spaces if desired.

These are Campbell's original tools and ideas. If you have an original tool or idea, you can post it below on this page.

Click here for details.

Writing Conferences Guide

This guide is one of the best ways I have found to facilitate meaningful conversation and response in a secondary classroom. It is truly a collaborative effort. Although I designed the format, the questions came from Barry Lane’s The Reviser’s Toolbox, NNWP’s Secondary Writing Guide, and my students’ feedback and suggestions!

Want to participate in this developing WritingFix page? If you have a favorite original lesson or tool for teaching your students to respond better to each other's drafts that you would be willing to let us post here, we will send you one of the NNWP Print Publications in exchange for us being allowed to feature it. Contact us at webmaster@writingfix.com for details or to summarize a response technique/tool that you'd be willing to send us.