November 1, 2024

District approves new high school writing workshop program

The Manhattan Beach Unified School District board members approved a notion on Dec. 13 that will allow three educational trainers to come from New York City to train teachers in a writing program from July 9-13.

Scheduled to start in the 2012-2013 school year, the MBUSD the new writing program for grades K-8 will consume 30 to 40 minutes of the school day with the goal of improving upon students’ writing and editing skills.

“There will be three sessions with 25 teachers each. There will probably be a K through second grade, a third through fifth grade, and a sixth through eighth grade session,” MBUSD Teacher on Special Assignment of Literacy and Writing K-12 Deborah Hofreiter said.

The writing workshop was started by Lucy Calkins, the developer of the Columbia University Teachers’ College Reading and Writing Project. She has come up with the workshop to allow students to write and work on their English projects at their own pace, while teaching them the proper writing methods.
“Teachers with whom I have spoken are thrilled that they will have the opportunity to be trained this summer by experts from Columbia University Teachers’ College Reading and Writing Project,” executive director of education at Costa Carolyn Seaton said.

Direction for the students’ writing will be given in a mini-lesson at the beginning of the workshop. Students will then be allowed to go write freely and work on their stories. At the end of each unit of writing, the class will hold a celebration to praise the students’ work.

“A celebration is when they publish their final work on the wall,” Hofreiter said. “People can come in and look at their stories and that would be their final version of their assignments.”

The program not only teaches students many types of writing, such as narrative, personal, and nonfiction, but also gives them confidence in their work. The workshop trains the students to be real authors by being able to analyze and understand the English language.

“Having a writing program in the elementary and middle schools will help with kids’ writing skills later on in high school,” freshman Ryan Fowlkes said.
The ultimate result of the program will be that incoming ninth graders to Mira Costa will already have a solid writing background. Freshman English teachers will already know that students have the basic skills to write several types of writing.

“In ninth-grade English, the teachers could assume that we already know the material they are teaching rather than having to refresh students’ memories,” Costa freshman Alexa Petri said.

The budget for the program will be $105,517.50, which will be used to pay the 75 teachers for the training over the summer and the trainers to teach the program. The money will come from the federal Title II staff development fund and the other half from the general fund.

“I am confident that after our teachers attend this week-long institute on teaching writing, they will feel energized and will have more tools for teaching writing than ever before,” Seaton said. “I have no doubt that the teachers’ passion for and confidence in the teaching of writing will be highly evident to their students next year.”

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