1. Putting It All Together: Immersion and Inquiry
“…Writers learn to write from reading,
rather than from teaching.”
Page 32 of Study Driven by Katie Wood Ray
Dawn Johnson Mitchell,
SWP Teacher Consultant and Partnership Director

2. “…Writers learn to write from reading, rather than from teaching
“…Writers learn to write from reading, rather than from teaching.” Page 32 of Study Driven by Katie Wood Ray

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Immersion and Inquiry
*Teacher as Writer
Gathering Texts: Take a few minutes to look through the text set on your table. What do you think the texts have in common? What makes them different? What genre would you classify these texts in?
What do you notice about your text set?
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Immersion and Inquiry
Setting the Stage: Let’s define our genre of study. Take a few minutes to read through our class noticings chart and then read through Ray’s description of the memoir genre on page Think about this genre. Have you read any of these memoir texts? Have you written any? Is this genre familiar/unfamiliar?
From the texts and Ray’s description, discuss the genre of memoir.
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Immersion and Inquiry
Immersion: Let’s spend some time reading like a writer and immersing ourselves in some of these texts. Take time to read the text chosen for your table and annotate/make some notes of the text as you read. If you finish early, choose another text from the set to immerse yourself in.
What did you notice about the text you read?
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6. Small Group Immersion and Inquiry
Group 1 – Southern Living Article
Group 2 – Marshfield Dreams “War”
Group 3 – “Brother” – Prologue of The Most They Ever Had
Group 4 – SC Wildlife Article
Group 5 – Excerpt from Fried Butter
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Immersion and Inquiry
Close Study: Let’s spend some time in close study of the texts we just read. Take a few minutes with your small group and discuss what you noticed about your text, using the Craft Study chart in your handout as a guide for your discussion. Be prepared to share your chart with the whole group.
*Close Study Small Group Share
Using the Craft Study chart to guide you, discuss what you noticed about the whole group text?
*Close Study Whole Group Discussion of “Abner Creek, 1991”
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Immersion and Inquiry
*Teacher as Instructor – Let’s deconstruct our own experience using Ray’s immersion and inquiry framework to “read like a writer” to determine curriculum for our students as writers.
*The What? – Reading Like a Writer
What is reading like a writer? Explain from your own experience.
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Immersion and Inquiry
**The Why? - The Research Behind the Practice
Why is this approach effective?
*The How – How Can We Implement this in the Classroom?
What ideas do you have for utilizing this framework with your own classroom? Do you have any ideas for your own unit of study?
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Immersion and Inquiry
Writing Under the Influence: Now that we’ve spent some time defining our genre of study and immersing ourselves in well-written texts representative of that genre, let’s think about the possibilities for our own writing.
What ideas do you have for writing your own memoir?
“What have you read that is like what you are trying to write?” How has the reading immersion of other author’s memoirs helped you envision creating your own?
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*Teacher as Professional – Let’s take a few minutes and share what we learned and our new ideas for implementation with each other.
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“In an inquiry stance, teachers help children explore different alternatives for how to write something, and then they let them do what writers really have to do and make decisions about how their pieces will go. Does this make it harder on students? Perhaps. But when teachers simply ask them to do it as well as they can and understand it will take lots of experience for them to get really good at it, it makes it achievable. Then, while students are getting that experience, what they are learning is grounded in the realities of real-world writing, both product and process.” Katie Wood Ray’s Study Driven (27)
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13. Inquiry Stance used for Teaching Reading Like A Writer
Gathering Texts
Setting the Stage
Immersion
Close Study
Writing Under the Influence
An inquiry stance – “curriculum is the outcome of instruction rather than the starting point”, “depth rather than coverage is the driving force in the development of this content”, “is used to uncover curriculum about writing itself”
Immersion and Inquiry in the Teaching of Writing Chart Excerpted from Katie Wood Ray’s Study Driven (19)
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14. Immersion and Inquiry in the Teaching of Writing
Gathering Texts – The teacher, sometimes along with students, gathers examples of the kind of writing students will do.
Setting the Stage – Students are told they will be expected to finish a piece(s) of writing that shows the influence of the study.
Immersion – During immersion (Cambourne 1988) the teacher and students spend time reading and getting to know the texts they’ll study. They make notes about how the texts are written. They think about the process writers use to craft texts like the ones they are studying.
Close Study – The class revisits the texts and frames their talk with the question, “What did we notice about how these texts are written?” The teacher and students work together to use specific language to say what they know about writing from this close study, developing curriculum as they go. The teacher through modeling, takes a strong lead in helping students envision using what they are learning in their own writing.
Writing Under the Influence – Students (and often the teacher) finish pieces of writing that show (in specific ways) the influence of the study.
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15. Teaching From An Inquiry Stance
*asks students to read like writers, developing a habit of mind that will potentially teach them how to write well throughout their lives;
*ensures that the content for writing is grounded in the realities of both product and process;
*expands the teacher’s knowledge base as she learns alongside students;
*helps students develop vision for writing before they’re asked to engage in revision;
*asks the teacher to model the process of writing, rather than create a model for what the writing should look like when it’s finished.
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Bibliography
Ray, K.W. (2006). Study driven: A framework for planning units of study in the writing
workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Ray, K.W. (2004). About the authors: Writing workshop with our youngest writers.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Ray, K.W. (2002). What you know by heart: How to develop curriculum for your
writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Ray, K.W. (2001). The writing workshop: Working through the hard parts (and they’reall hard parts. Urana, Illionis: NCTE.
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