What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop

No one can say it better than Lucy Calkins-Katie Ray has written a wise, comforting, intimate book. It goes to the heart of where good ideas for teaching of good writing originate: from yourself and your own experience.

As Katie shows, the most profound and effective curriculum can result from your own deep understanding of quality writing-what you know about writing through your own and others’ writings and through your reading. And the best teaching can result from what you can wrap your heart and mind around and communicate to your students. It is this very personal approach and contagious enthusiasm that Katie brings to bear on creating curriculum for her own writing workshops. Her book shows how you can do it for your own.

In Part One, Katie takes a close look at the lines of thinking you can use to find curriculum in your own writing experiences. In Part Two, she shows how to use the same lines of thinking to find curriculum in your everyday reading life. Along with her own inimitable writing style, Katie sprinkles special features throughout her book as helpful tips for thinking about your own writing workshop and curriculum development, including:

minilessons and curriculum chunks Thinking it Through boxes with questions and things to try understandings and strategies notebook-keeping tips accompanied by Katie’s own handwritten journal entries
transcripts of interviews with writers references for further reading.

Follow Katie’s example. Write like a teacher of writing. Read like a teacher of writing. Then teach from your own experience. And watch as you and your students flourish like never before.