Inside This Week’s Episode: Feel like your students are all over the place when it comes to writing? Perhaps a little goal-driven instruction is what they need! Writing goals help students hone in on specific skills and give them an action plan to help them reach those goals. Learn how to create writing goals with your students!

Want to see more progress in your students’ writing?

Then it’s time to take a hard look at how we approach writing in your classroom.

We spend a lot of time teaching skills and strategies for writing, but not every student needs work on the same skill or strategy.

That’s where helping students to develop writing goals can make a huge impact. Setting individual writing goals gives purpose to student writing, and helps students to make progress on what THEY need. Goals drive instruction and serve as a road map for what to work on during independent writing conferences.

But - to help students achieve more success in their writing through goals, we must break it down into a simplified process. In this week’s episode, I’m doing just that.

Make goal-Setting a driving force in your students’ writing

Here’s a Snapshot:

• We know how important goals are for ourselves and how crucial it is to have an action plan to help us reach those goals. Students need goals, too. Specifically, students need writing goals to help them become stronger, more independent writers.

• The first step to helping students set writing goals is to help them understand the importance of setting writing goals in the first place. I’ll share how I start this process with my own students.

• The idea of setting goals can be over-whelming for students. One way to make goal-setting more tangible is to help students see that there are 5 different types of writing goals - each with their own place and purpose. Tune in to hear the categories that we can group writing goals into in order to make goal-setting personalized.

• Just choosing a writing goal is not enough. The next step is giving students an action plan for reaching that goal. We’ll talk about how you can teach your students to take action steps toward reaching their goals as well as how to reflect on that goal overtime.

• Writing Conferences will play a crucial role in the goal-setting process. Learn how to conduct goal-driven writing conferences that help keep your students on-track with reaching their individual writing goals.

Links & Resources Mentioned in the Episode

EPISODE 63: Conducting Writing Conferences: A Simple Goal-Driven Approach

RESOURCES:

• Launching Writer’s Workshop

• Student Writer’s Notebook

REVIEW & SUBSCRIBE TO THE CLASSROOM COMMUTE PODCAST

Don’t miss a single episode. Subscribe to the podcast and you’ll get notified each week when a new episode gets dropped! And - if you love what you hear, I’d be so honored if you took a quick moment to rate and review the podcast so that other awesome teachers can find the podcast!