Social-emotional responsiveness ensures a safe, supportive, and engaging environment for taking risks and overcoming challenges in the writing process.

Cultural responsiveness ensures a diverse and authentic representation of authorship, characters, and content within the texts and resources we use.

Linguistic responsiveness ensures language(s) used in instruction and in the classroom environment are accessible and inclusive of home language(s).

Academic responsiveness ensures new skills and content match students’ abilities and goals.

Our book, The Responsive Writing Teacher, frames responsive writing instruction within four domains of responsiveness:

“How do we meet students where they are?”.It requires teachers to see children and discover answers to these questions: Responsive writing instruction activates an asset-based mindset when making modifications to instruction. One student drew a portrait of Ransome in preparation for the virtual author visit. Additionally, the storyline was one that many children could connect to during the pandemic - siblings spending time together and going on a walk to the store.

Johnson’s text includes repetition, dialogue, and sentence structures that students could approximate in their own writing. But are the mentor texts you’re using in writing instruction responsive to your students’ abilities and needs? With growing access to texts and authors across multiple literacies, mentor texts can be selected with responsiveness to students and their communities.įor instance, w hile writing personal narratives in the fall of 2020, Kelsey’s kindergarten class studied a mentor text: Do Like Kyla, written by Angela Johnson and illustrated by James Ransome. Mentor texts invite young writers into the process, immersing them in words, inspiring them to try, demonstrating the power that is possible through words and shared ideas. I f you love a book, read it twice so that you can study it and figure out what the author did to pull you in, to make you want to keep reading and then, apply those techniques to your own writing. The more you read, the stronger writing you’ll become. My advice to aspiring writers is to read, read, read.

Do Like Kyla by Angela Johnson