~~~~
As a scholar and then an educator and then a professor in education, I fully subscribe to and believe the very best way to approach literacy in the elementary school is Patricia Cunningham's Four Blocks Program. Those Four Blocks consist of: Guided Reading, Self-Selected Reading, Writing, and Working with Words. This article has links to various aspects of the program. And I have said that for working with words, the GOLD STANDARD is Patricia Cunningham's Phonics They Use. Moving into the middle grades and high school, I am a great supporter of the Writing Workshop, as developed by Lucy Calkins.
There are many ways one can approach the writing process. What is important is to encourage children to write from the moment they understand what reading and writing are. Donald Graves has proven that their nonsensical-looking scratches have meaning to them and getting them to read you the stories they have "written" is a powerful start to developing a child's literacy. At home and in the classroom, bookshelves should include books/stories written by children, giving value to the ideas and voices the children are developing as readers and writers.
Below is a standard flow chart of the writing process. The MOST IMPORTANT thing to remember about the writing process is that whilst there are key elements that writers need to practice, all writing is essentially idiosyncratic and the process of writing itself must be allowed to be fluid, not rigid. By that I mean you simply do not march a writer through the "steps" of the writing process as if completing each one will result in a solid finished product. The writing process is a more of continuum and less of a strictly linear process.
At this point, I will digress a bit and give you the best model of a continuum (learned from Louise Rosenblat) that I have seen. Simple, but clear. Instead of drawing a line with two end points, she draws a rectangular box, with a diagonal line from the top left corner to the lower left corner that is bisected from top to bottom, going from side to side.
Using her structure, this is the model of the continuum of the Issues of Self in Reader Engagement from my dissertation. As you can see, by slicing the linear form of the continuum, there is always a bit of both selves informing the engagement, the self of the reader and the self of the character. As you move along the continuum, sometimes there is more influence by one self than the other, but both are a part of engagement in the reading process.
So, what I am trying to say, albeit admittedly clumsily, is that the writing process should be viewed as all the parts overlapping to some degree, informing each step along the way. Hence, writing is a fluid process from beginning (the idea) to the end (the completed text).
Take the first part of the writing process: Prewriting. It is essentially comprised of four key elements: brainstorming, researching, outlining and discussing. All of those elements themselves can overlap and be repeated or returned to as, for example, discussing an outline might need to a new brainstorming session that in turn leads to further research. And, once the actual Drafting part of the writing process has begun, the progression of the development of the text may reveal the need to return to some of the pre-writing activities.
To me, the model speaks for itself. By that I mean I see no real need to explain each yellow segment, or green subsegments or purple deep subsegments. The point is that all of those activities on the model are ones that take place during the writing process and, as a whole, move from one major part of the writing process to the next (remembering the fluid nature of that journey) until the project is complete.
The key point of the model is to demonstrate that the writing process is a multi-step, multi-faceted process. Not all writing need to be taken to completion. Writers should have the freedom to abandon projects that become overwhelming, unwieldy, or basically a bad idea. All finished writing projects, however, should have more than a single draft and should include pre-writing activities, rewrites of drafts, editing, and some form of publishing. Finally, the latter can take many forms, and over the course of their literacy instruction, writers should explore the process of writing in varied genres and publishing in varied formats. The beauty of the advancements in technology since I first started my college degree in education is that publishing in varied formats today is quite easy, with programs, apps, and online hosting sites—to name a few technological tools—a plenty.
