Writer to Writer

The guided workshops depicted in this book offer seven, ready-to-implement instructional units that walk secondary language arts teachers through practical, day-one engagements to get writers collaborating and connecting with one another.

By focusing on texts from a writer’s point of view, Writer to Writer offers a fresh vision for teaching language arts that dramatically increases engagement by centering student lives, voices, and peer relationships. Grounded in a workshop model, this book blends theory and practice to show how writing and reading can be humanizing, relational, and responsive for adolescent learners.

Across seven genre-based workshops that include place-based poetry, narrative, speculative fantasy, novel study, literary analysis, and argumentative writing, readers will find practical routines, mentor text studies, conferring strategies, low-stakes daily writing invitations, and author’s craft lessons. This culturally sustaining instruction fosters student agency and engagement while ensuring robust alignment with academic standards and assessment demands in ethical, relational ways.

New and experienced teachers will find inspiration, concrete tools, and renewed purpose in this curriculum designed to reduce planning time and resist burnout, allowing you to reclaim the joy of teaching ELA.

Book Features:

• A holistic, relational vision for ELA curriculum: seven distinct workshops on writer’s notebooks, place-based poetry, narrative, speculative fantasy, novel study, literary analysis, and argument writing.
• Ready-to-use, teacher-friendly features: guided lessons in “instructional invitations,” peer conferring protocols, write-in activities, mentor text suggestions, assessment tools, and celebration practices.
• An innovative integration of joy and critical justice: practical teaching routines blended with critical pedagogies such as grammar as linguistic justice, place-based poetry, and writing speculative futures to promote equitable instruction.
• Assessment that humanizes learning: concrete models of ethical grading, including student self-assessment tools and reflection practices integrated into each workshop
• Professional development in book form: a series of workshops designed for both individual teachers, Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), or book study groups.

Sarah J. Donovan is an associate professor of secondary English education at Oklahoma State University who leads professional development on workshop routines, genre-based instruction, and ethical assessment. Jenn Yong Sanders is a professor of literacy education at Oklahoma State University who works with K–12 teachers to enact culturally sustaining and relational writing instruction. Contact the authors for professional development partnerships!

“This book recognizes the social and emotional needs of today’s youth, most of whom yearn to be more connected and explore life’s enduring questions in their reading and writing. Donovan and Sanders build on decades of shared experience to offer ELA teachers an impassioned rationale for a more relational, responsive, and humanizing workshop approach. With detailed descriptions of lesson ideas, they craft moves to explore and mentor texts to read across seven workshops—from poetry to speculative fiction to literary criticism and more. Writer to Writer demonstrates clear, compelling ways for us to build rapport with our students and to help them find meaning by expanding their own literate lives.”
—Troy Hicks, interim associate dean of the College of Education and Human Services, and director of the Chippewa River Writing Project, Central Michigan University

“Writer to Writer is a generous offering of organized, thoughtful, and humanizing pedagogies for teaching writers. Donovan and Sanders provide so many effective resources (the Mirror-Point-Wonder protocol for student-to-student conferences; author care statements to prepare readers for difficult topics; defined boundaries for a unit on speculative fiction, to name just three) that this book will become dog-eared in no time. The authors make a persuasive case for centering writers not texts or products. They recognize the challenge of preparing so many new teachers in our schools and offer realistic guidelines for working with a standardized curriculum to center students and their writing processes. Every teacher will grow a deeper understanding of both teaching and writing by reading this book—finding more joy in both. I certainly did.”
—Penny Kittle, author of Write Beside Them and coauthor of 180 Days

“It is so refreshing to read about instruction that focuses on what matters most to fostering the immense joy and fullest capacities of readers and writers, to learn about specific teaching moves and instructional focus that promotes what is most transferable and generative because it can be practiced and further developed any time that one reads or composes throughout a lifetime of literacy.”
—Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, distinguished professor of literacy education, director of the Boise State Writing Project, Boise State University

“This is the book that the field—and I—have been waiting for! Flipping the ELA curriculum on its head, Donovan and Sanders begin with writing, place students at the center of our work, and focus on teaching and learning rather than evaluation and ranking. May every middle and high school teacher find their way to this book.”
—Tanya Baker, executive director, National Writing Project

“In their book, Writer to Writer, the authors offer quite literally everything you need to run a year-long relevant, research-based, authentic, powerful, and productive writing curriculum. They have, somehow, synthesized and distilled the very best of our collective knowledge around impactful, engaging writing practices and deliver it in a practical yet profound sequence of work you can jump into today. Follow their lead—they know the way.”
—Kate Roberts and Maggie Beattie Roberts, literacy consultants, authors, guest teachers