Ms. With's Writing Steps In The Writing Process

In the video, “Revising for Clarity,” Ms. With demonstrated how she guided her fourth grade class through the revising process. She first reviewed the writing process. Ms. With’s writing steps are: prewriting, writing the FIRST draft, revising, editing and proofreading, and final draft and publishing. Ms. With’s writing steps are the same as Tompkins. In the video, Ms. With made a comment that the writing process is

“very fluid.” Tompkins also noted, “The numbering of the stages doesn’t mean that this writing process is a linear series of discrete activities” (Tompkins, p. 6). Therefore, Ms. With and Tompkins definitely shares the same type of philosophy when it comes to the writing process.

Just because the writing process may appear to

With finished brainstorming and activating their prior knowledge, she then had the students go into guided practice. “Teachers work with the class as they compose a piece of writing together, and then students work in small groups and with partners to apply the strategies in other guided wiring activities before they’re expected to use them independently” (Tompkins, p. 47). Ms. With wrote a paragraph for the students to revise together in small groups. Ms. With grouped the students by ability. Her rationale for grouping them by ability was in order for her to first help the struggling students get on the correct path then go to the other groups who didn’t need as much assistance. Before, they started in the groups, Ms. With modeled for the entire class, what they need to work on while they were in their groups. Ms. With had her paragraph on the overhead screen connect to her computer so that she could make instant changes to the paragraph. This is an example of incorporating technology. “Computers support students’ use of writing strategies” (Tompkins, p. 53). Ms. With did a lot of great think-alouds with the students. “Teachers use the think-aloud procedure to teach students how to direct and monitor their thinking during writing” (Tompkins, p.

With’s students when it comes to the revising. My students are very good about editing. They can edit their own, their peers’ papers, and the teacher’s mistakes easily and quickly. However, they do struggle editing the simple mistakes on their own papers. For example, not capitalizing “I” or missing some simple punctuation mark like a period. Nevertheless, when it comes to revising it feels like I am in a room of hibernating bears. They are all sleeping and I don’t dare wake them up or else I could be there lunch! Therefore, I would like to create a similar lesson like Ms. With, with my students. I am interested in seeing if they clearly do know the difference between editing and