Raise Your Expectations

These are the main ideas that spoke to me in this chapter:

Raised expectations for student writing means that we need to explore writing in depth.

Raising writing expectations is a political issue as well as a school issue. When I thought about that, I had to agree. Don't we flinch when we see errors in the newspaper or in a club newsletter? We do need to be sticklers with any student work that goes public. ( As I write this, I am hoping that I have not posted anything with spelling errors, etc. : > ) )

As a school, we need to set school wide writing expectations. Raise the bar! The established writing expectations need to be shared with not only the students, but their parents as well.

The "What Makes Our Writing Interesting?" and "What Does It Mean To Write More/Tell More?" lists created by Gail Westbrook and Regie Routman were excellent. Simple, yet to the point. I especially liked Make sure to have a lot of sense and Tell more to make it BETTER, not just longer.

I am constantly pushing my students to read more to be better readers. So, I also need to be pushy about writing - creating more opportunities to write for my students.

I should expect both quality writing and legible handwriting. What is published should be perfect!

Like my grandmother always said, " You catch more flies with honey." Positive comments help and encourage a writer to improve their work.

Finally, Regie's statement on page 81, "Our decisions must be guided by 'What might help this writer?' rather than 'What might help this writing?'