Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing [Paperback]

Penny Kittle (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0325010978 | ISBN-13: 978-0325010977 | Publication Date: May 9, 2008 | Edition: Pap/DVD

Please join us in congratulating Penny Kittle for her 2009 NCTE Britton Award for Write Beside Them!

This book is about teaching writing and the gritty particulars of teaching adolescents. But it is also the planning, the thinking, the writing, the journey: all I've been putting into my teaching for the last two decades. This is the book I wanted when I was first given ninth graders and a list of novels to teach. This is a book of vision and hope and joy, but it is also a book of genre units and minilessons and actual conferences with students.

-Penny Kittle

What makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to them. Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It's the comprehensive book and DVD that English/language arts teachers need to ensure that teens improve their writing.

Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section of Write Beside Them describes a specific element of Kittle's workshop:

• Daily writing practice: writer's notebooks and quick writes
• Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts
• Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres
• Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style
• Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading.

All along the way, Kittle demonstrates minilessons that respond to students' immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her workshop. In addition, Write Beside Them provides a study guide, reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all, the accompanying DVD takes you right inside Penny's classroom. Its video clips explicitly model how to make the process of writing accessible to all kids.

Penny Kittle's active coaching and can-do attitude alone will energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher.

Write Beside Them debuts as the field's most comprehensive, contemporary, and practical book on high school writing. Kittle not only tells how a skillful writing teacher operates, she shows you on the accompanying DVD, with clips of kids at work in every stage of a writing workshop. And all this glorious teaching happens with real, sometimes struggling kids who remind us of our own classrooms and students. Write Beside Them is the whole package.

-Harvey Daniels

Author of Content-Area Writing and Subjects Matter

Click here to view a sample video from the DVD.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

As a professional development coordinator for the Conway, New Hampshire, School District, Penny Kittle acts as a K-12 literacy coach and directs new-teacher mentoring. In addition, she teaches writing at Conway's Kennett High School and in the Summer Literacy Institutes at the University of New Hampshire. Penny is the author of four books with Heinemann-Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing (2008) which won the 2009 James N. Britton Award from NCTE, Inside Writing (2005), coauthored with Donald H. Graves, The Greatest Catch (2005), and Public Teaching(2003)-and she is a Heinemann Professional Development Provider. Please join us in congratulating Penny Kittle for her 2009 NCTE Britton Award for Write Beside Them! Click here to learn more about her award. Penny's students make a statement about how student choice in reading has affected them, click here to watch the video.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Heinemann; Pap/DVD edition (May 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0325010978
• ISBN-13: 978-0325010977
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Righting Your Writing Workshop, June 8, 2008

By 

Ken C. (MA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing (Paperback)

Writer's Workshop. The term has almost become cliché among English teachers, and it means very different things to different educators. For a new take on this now-old warhorse (though Nancie Atwell shall be forever young in our minds!), teachers should revisit the writer's workshop as Penny Kittle runs it in her New Hampshire classroom.

In fact, this book will appeal to teachers across a wide spectrum: those who have never tried writer's workshop for a myriad of reasons, those who sampled the waters and ran out due to the chill of chaos, and those who still consider themselves practitioners but have nagging doubts about its effectiveness with the students. The benefit here is that Kittle is a borrower. She unapologetically stands on the shoulders of some familiar giants of the teaching/research field, including not only Atwell but the two Don's (Murray and Graves), the two Tom's (Newkirk and Romano), Jim Burke, Kylene Beers, Linda Rief, Lucy Calkins, and many others. As she describes how her classroom is an amalgam of their philosophies and puts her own imprint on them, Kittle literally "shares the wealth" and saves the reader a lot of personal research by showing highlights of their work in practice.

Though the workshop described is based on a half-year semester for seniors, it can be customized for any grade. Kittle assigns a short personal narrative followed by a longer one focusing on the elusive (for young writers) "So What?" as seen in a memoir. Then she turns to persuasion and argument, followed by a unit on multiple genres. As a foundation to her workshop, she uses a writer's notebook (quick writes) and model texts. Also essential (thus, the title) is the notion of writing WITH the students, then sharing the frustration, successes, and strategies that come with the hard work of writing.

Most teachers have mastered the mini-lesson, but the numbers are legion among those who struggle with conferencing. This book, which includes a generous DVD-ROM showing Kittle teaching her class, provides the good, the bad, and the ugly of struggling not only with conferences but with the workshop in general. In fact, Kittle's frank tone (yes, things sometimes go wrong and she provides graphic evidence!) is one of the book's strengths. It goes deeper than Atwell's seminal book from yesteryear, IN THE MIDDLE, and admits that some students can confound even the best of us with the best of strategies and intentions. In other words, it's not one of those rose-colored narratives where all the students are charming, hard-working, and cooperative. Kittle shares good with bad and earns our respect along the way because it looks much like the classrooms WE teach day to day.

Ultimately, Kittle's is an appeal on behalf of the students. She puts us in their shoes as students and as writers -- both very vulnerable entities. She helps us see the harm of commenting heavily on mechanics and lightly on content. She points out the foolhardiness of keeping papers forever, or of only marking up the final drafts. It all makes sense, of course, but we teachers are often so caught up in our own daily struggles (which can be depressingly enormous) that we often forget to walk a mile in their shoes.

Trying those shoes on is worth it -- as is this book. I can't imagine any English teacher who cares about writing skipping this. Agree or disagree with Kittle, you should at least hear her out. My suspicion is that many will be as convinced and as grateful as I was when I turned the last page knowing full well that this would become dog-earred in future years. Recommendation: buy and use.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writing Beside Them, August 29, 2008

By 

E. Mailloux - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing (Paperback)

Love this product - used it in a workshop and had to have a copy of my own. Has great ideas on setting up the writing arena in your classroom, and great activities to get students headed in the right direction. Makes the topics of voice and audience, which are difficult to most students, easy to understand, and obtainable.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something for Everyone, June 22, 2008

By 

Julie in West Chester (West Chester, OH, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing (Paperback)

Write Beside Them is written with voice, humor, and humility. Penny Kittle does not tell us she has the perfect class with the perfect student. She tells us how to stick with what we believe to help our students achieve their fullest potential.
I teach third grade (self-contained) and still gained so much insight into writing workshop with a constructivist approach by reading Penny's book.
The dvd is phenomenal! It has her first day of class, her conferring with students, student work . . .
I think writing teachers of grades 3 and up can gain from this book although it is geared to high school English teachers.
Penny also refers to the work of other great writing teachers - Don Murray, Don Graves, Tom Romano, Tom Newkirk, Linda Reif, Nancy Atwell; it helps to have all these resources that readers can turn to for more information.