About Ginny Hoover...
Ginny Hoover took an early retirement after 31 years of teaching in Kansas public schools. Her experience spans the 5th through 8th grades. During the last ten years she has functioned as a trainer of teachers in a variety of areas in her district, surrounding districts, professional organizations, and teacher service centers. At the state level Ginny is a state trainer for the KS State Writing Assessment (based on the Six Traits Writing Model), a member of the Kansas Social Studies Committee for writing the social studies standards, benchmarks, and indicators, and the lead trainer for the state in government and civics.
Recently, Teacher TimeSavers published a variety teaching units and tutoring hookups that Ginny wrote and designed. These include a Six Traits materials, literary unit for Taming the Star Runner, Hookups for Language Arts, Transcripts of Trials for Goldilocks, The Wolf, and Mr. Dad, and Tactile/Kinesthetic Activity Patterns.
The Gifts of Children by Hoover and Carroll Killingsworth, a book about recognizing, acknowledging, and refining the gifts of children, is scheduled to be published some time this year. Visit Teachers Helping Children--The Gifts Project for additional information.
Joyce McLeod, Jan Fisher, and Ginny will soon have a classroom management book to be published by ASCD. It will cover managing time and space, managing the classroom, and managing instructional strategies.
The Gifts of All Children
by Carroll Killingsworth and Ginny Hoover
The Eclectic Teacher
by Ginny HooverWriting on Demand---As Necessary as Process Writing
Think about it. When you write, do you write more often with the first draft as a final copy (write-on-demand), or do you use process writing with quality revision and editing? The truth is people need to know how to do both, but writing on demand is probably more common in real life.
I've written quite a bit about process writing combined with the Six Traits to create a writing program, and now it is time to address write-on-demand. First, where would you find a use for write-on-demand? In classrooms. Essay questions, particularly on tests, require it. Write-on-demand essays used for writing evaluations give pertinent information about students' writing skills, growth in writing, and after scoring, provide quality data for future instruction and conferencing with students.
The most common real life application of write-on-demand that comes to mind is letter writing of all kinds (business, friendly, thank you notes). We normally zip off a letter to our friends and trust that it is coherent and interesting without any in depth editing and revision. When we write on the [Teachers.Net] chatboards, that, too, is a form of write-on-demand. Can you think of other real life applications? What about job applications that must be filled in on site and require a writing piece about why the applicant is interested in working for the company? Memos? Emails? Meeting/committee minutes or notes?
I don't teach write-on-demand until I'm finished teaching the writing process, because the instruction is based on abbreviating process writing. Below are some guidelines that I'd use.
Be aware of time.
Briefly plan main topics (suggest quick mind mapping).
Quickly write a lead and thesis statement.
Using "plan" mentioned in #2, write the body of the writing piece.
Plan a conclusion that will satisfy the readers' need for any additional information, etc. (may include a restatement of the thesis).
Read aloud (at least form the words without noise) your essay…you'll locate more mistakes if you have the opportunity to read it aloud to yourself. Correct errors as located.
Editing skills---particularly spelling, grammar, and punctuation---take on greater importance because no outside editor will be helping to locate those errors.
When planning writing tasks for your students, don't forget to train them for write-on-demand tasks. It is a real life skill that needs to be refined…as much as the process writing.
The Eclectic Teacher