My first session at NCTE was an engaging dual lecture by Ryan Colwell of Fairfield University ([email protected]) and Ruth Culham (www.culhamwriting.com), author of The Traits of Writing and The Writing Thief. Both presenters focused heavily on the power of mentor texts. Today I am going to share some of Colwell’s observations of how a fifth-grade teacher has her students use mentor texts.
For reference, a mentor text is any text that can be used to demonstrate, model, discuss and then incorporate a literary skill into one’s writing. For example, Colwell shared the example of how this teacher used the Sandra Cisneros story “Eleven” to demonstrate how authors convey (i.e., show, don’t tell) big feelings in their writing.
Let’s say you wanted to teach your students how to use similes. You could use Lauren Leedy’s “Crazy Like a Fox: A Simile Story” as a mentor text to explain what a simile is, how they are used, and why they are used, and then have students write their own similes.
So how did this teacher go about doing this? Colwell provided an important reminder before detailing this teacher’s five-point plan.
For reference, a mentor text is any text that can be used to demonstrate, model, discuss and then incorporate a literary skill into one’s writing. For example, Colwell shared the example of how this teacher used the Sandra Cisneros story “Eleven” to demonstrate how authors convey (i.e., show, don’t tell) big feelings in their writing.
Let’s say you wanted to teach your students how to use similes. You could use Lauren Leedy’s “Crazy Like a Fox: A Simile Story” as a mentor text to explain what a simile is, how they are used, and why they are used, and then have students write their own similes.
So how did this teacher go about doing this? Colwell provided an important reminder before detailing this teacher’s five-point plan.
● Students drove the process. In other words, while the teacher scaffolded the literary skill, it was the students who led the exploration, discussion and writing of the skill. This will make a little more sense below.
Here is what the teacher did when using a mentor text to teach a literary skill.
1) The teacher explained the specific literary strategy.
2) The teacher demonstrated the literary strategy in specific children’s literature.
3) The teacher modeled the literary strategy (e.g., she would write her own similes).
4) The students then tried it.
Sounds good, right? But what does this really look like?
Colwell used the example of conveying feelings in writing.
1) The teacher began by posing intriguing inquiry questions (e.g., How would you show that a character was feeling sad?). The teacher then created a semantic web with the word “sad” at its center, with the children providing examples like “crying” and “hunched over.” This appeared to be a whole-class discussion, though it could easily be done in groups and then pulled out to the whole class.
2) Students then investigated literature full of big feelings. In other words, the teacher blanketed the room with great mentor texts showing big feelings. In groups, the students noted how the authors conveyed big feelings on anchor charts.
3) The students shared what they learned from the mentor authors and texts via the anchor charts.
4) The lesson then ended with an invitation by the teacher for the students to create their own writing showing big feelings. As an example, Colwell noted how one student used dialogue as a means to show big feelings.
Once Colwell laid out how mentor texts were modeled in the classroom, he provided some interesting findings on how students were using this “literary borrowing” in their own writing, which I will detail in my next blog post.
Source: “Exploring the Literary Borrowing of 5th Grade Writers”
Ryan Colwell, Ph.D.
Fairfield University
As presented at the 2014 NCTE Convention during the lecture “Literary Models and Mentor Texts to Teach the Craft of Writing”
Friday, November 21, 2014
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