Description:

"I have spent my career working with kids who hate to write," writes Lisa Eickholdt, "when we use our students' writing as a mentor text, we are helping them identify themselves as someone who writes." In Learning from Classmates, Lisa shows you how this simple but powerful idea can help you:

• deepen your students' engagement during writing time
• build their writing identities
• give them the willingness to take the risks necessary for making progress.

"Time and again," Lisa writes, "I've watched reluctant and unenthusiastic writers become more eager and willing after their writing was used as a model for other students." The need is great, so her book helps you integrate student writing as mentor texts right away with suggestions for how to:

• select student writing to share with the class
• assess your writers and match student writing to individual, small-group, and whole-class needs
• use student work in writing conferences and minilessons
• plan power-teaching moves that target writers' needs and build their writing identities.

Read Learning from Classmates to discover how your writers grow when they see what their peers can do and say, "I can do that, too!"