Lucky Calkins is a well-known innovative leader, in the world of literacy, for her contributions to writing instruction. She is the founding director of the Teacher College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP), which is an information hub and teacher training center, for methods dedicated to teaching reading and writing to young children (Feinberg, 2007). Lucy Calkins is also the author and co-author of many books pertaining to reading and writing workshop instruction. She is also known for her work as an associate professor at Columbia University, where she directs TCRWP (Calkins & Harwayne, 1987). Lucy Calkins is a leader in the area of writing instruction because of her extensive professional development over strategies for …show more content…
Lucy Calkins advocates that students need to write about personal stories, or what matters most to them (Calkins & Harwayne, 1991). Writing with a purpose is a major part of writing workshop (Calkins & Harwayne, 1987). I will go more in depth, on the topic of writing with a purpose, in the motivation section of this paper. Self-assessments are another key component during independent writing time (Calkins, Hohne, & Robb, 2015). Lucy Calkins, et al. (2015) provides teachers with a handbook of successful student checklists, rubrics, prompts, and student writing examples to aid teachers in this process. Students can revise their work and independently guide themselves through the writing process with these tools and self-assessments. The teacher will also confer with individual students during this time, to check in and help them revise their work (Calkins & Harwayne, …show more content…
She introduced a new way of teaching writing, using the “workshop” method. Writing workshop includes: (a) a mini lesson, (b) independent writing, and (c) sharing time. Lucy Calkins also encourages writing daily, through the use of notebooks. Notebooks provide children with an everyday invitation to write about whatever they want. Lastly, Lucy Calkins provides teachers with multiple strategies to motivate children to write including: (a) encouragement, (b) illustrations, and (c) personal stories.
Further Exploration After conducting all of my research, I would want to further my exploration into the use of drawings as a means for motivating children to write. This was interesting to me because as a future educator, we are taught to always manage our time effectively. I was in a student teaching position where my cooperating teacher viewed drawing, during daily 5 (literacy centers), as a waste of time. Lucy Calkins views drawings and illustrations as an asset to the writing process. These contradicting views intrigue me, and I would want to look further into this in the