Some teachers in our school have thrown in the towel on independent projects. Often our colleagues lament the many issues that come up when students are choosing their own genre and topic to write about.
In earlier articles, we focused on the reasons why independent projects in writing workshop are so valuable as well as some tips on managing independent projects. We use the term independent projects to refer to the weekly time during our writing workshop when students are working on a writing project of their choice: choice of topic, choice of genre, choice of how to publish, choice of whom to work with, choice of mentor . . . Yes, it involves lots of choice! Our ideas stand on the shoulders of Colleen Cruz and her book Independent Writing. She is the one who turned us on to the idea of independent projects for our students, and although there are challenges, we haven’t looked back.
Anticipating the challenges and even embracing them as just part of what comes with the territory of independent projects has helped us keep sight of the bigger picture of students doing this work.
Anticipating Challenges
The challenges are not exactly the same year to year. But after several years of doing independent projects in our classrooms, we know there are common hiccups that come with students writing in many different genres at the same time. We’ve grown to anticipate them and continue to work to address them.
Keeping track of who’s writing what. Although we work hard to help our students be independent and there are often many different things happening in our room at once, we’re still the type of teachers who like to have a sense of what everyone’s working on. That can be challenging during independent projects since there are twentysomething different projects happening at once.
To help us, we have a chart with a pocket for each writer that holds an index card for them to track their independent projects. To make the chart, we stuck library pockets to a piece of chart paper, put the whole chart through the laminator, and then used scissors to open each pocket back up. When in the pocket, each index card shows only the student’s name at the top of it.
When students finish a project, they take out their index card, draw a single line through that project, and write their next one, along with its topic, genre, and the date. This way, if we’re unsure what Sarah is writing, we can pull out her index card and see her current and past projects, as well as when she started them. Knowing the genre and dates is helpful when planning small groups and conferences; we might plan a small group for everyone working on a comic, for example, or pull students whose projects have been dragging on for too long to give them some tips on how to move through the process a little faster.
Knowing where students are in the writing process. Independent projects are very different from our class unit of studies because our minilessons are not focused on guiding the class through the writing process. This means that students are going through the process mostly independently, though they’ll be supported through small groups and conferences.
Although we refer to the writing process chart in all of our units of study, the sticky notes reflect students’ work for independent projects specifically.
It’s helpful to have this posted so that we can use it to inform our plans without having to check in with students individually.
Supporting students who get hung up on doing “research.” Some students who choose an informational piece—maybe a feature article or brochure—feel like they need to do some research on their topic. We’ve found that fourth graders with open-ended time to research on a computer often end up browsing the internet or looking at lots of pictures related to their topic.
To address the research issue, we will do one of two things:
1. Require that the topic they’re writing about be one they’re already an expert on (a dancer, for example, could write a feature article on different types of dance or a how-to for specific dance steps), and so will need to do little to no research about.
OR
2. Use small groups and conferences to give these writers some research tips such as these:
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Make a plan for your piece before beginning research so that your research has a specific angle, a focus. If a feature article is about the Olympic gymnastics team, for example, the writer will have already chosen the gymnasts they will focus on in the different sections of the article, so that they can focus their research on those specific gymnasts rather than just Googling the Olympic team.
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Use databases linked from our school library’s website. These are kid-friendly search engines and can help to ensure that the material the writers come across is age appropriate.
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Take notes as you do your research. In our classroom, we learn about boxes and bullets as a way to organize our essay writing and nonfiction notes, and we encourage our students to organize their notes in that structure.
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Set limits on time spent researching. We teach our students that writers make plans and set deadlines for themselves to make sure that they’re getting enough writing done. We teach our students that when research is necessary, writers might give themselves a certain amount of time to research and then force themselves to move on to do some writing about what they researched. In a classroom, this might look like rotating through shared computers, maybe after 10 minutes of researching.
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Put the research and notes away while writing. We encourage our students to read something and then take notes on it without looking back over and over again, and also to read over notes and then close them and write. These practices make it less likely that students will copy directly into their notes or from their notes directly into their writing, and gives their unique writing voices a chance to emerge.
Sharing the project with classmates. Even though the term independent projects implies that students will be working on their own, every year some of our students ask to work together on a project. Our guess is that it’s because they have fun doing independent projects, and have fun working with friends as well. Although we think a case can be made for the importance of keeping them truly independent, we’ve found success in being a little flexible and giving students who are interested in doing so a chance to work with other classmates.
To ensure that everyone is involved in the project, each writer makes their own proposal to show the specific writing work they will do toward the group’s project. If the project is a fantasy story, for example, each group member might write one chapter, and each chapter is like its own mini-story; if the group is writing a brochure, each writer would take a different section of the brochure.
We’ve found that having separate and specific parts of the project like this makes it less likely that one student will dominate the work, and instead helps everyone to be involved.
Focusing more on the art than the writing: We have students, like you do, who are passionate artists. Supporting writing with illustrations takes definite skill and craft. It’s still important, though, for the project to be more of a writing project than an art project since we are using writing workshop time. To help balance the writing and art, we might ask students to add the artwork when the writing is finished, maybe using sticky notes to capture their ideas about what pictures will go where as they write so that they remember that information when their piece is finished. If the artwork needs to be done alongside the writing, we might teach the student to use a timer to manage their time spent writing versus illustrating.
Expecting there to be hiccups when working on independent projects, and maybe even being proactive by anticipating some of the ones mentioned here that we seem to encounter year after year, will help you manage your expectations around independent projects. Yes, they will be messier than your whole-class units of study. But they will also grow your class’s love for writing, and that is a good reason to embrace the struggles.
