Photos courtesy of Alicia McCauley
“My kids write knowing they’re going to be published and that they’re going to give a copy of the class book to their family…”
as horses” or “my eyes sparkle like diamonds.” McCauley has students write daily for 30 to 40 minutes, and each week, two students are selected to participate in the classroom Star Student Program. They each bring in family photographs, and the class uses the real characters and settings portrayed in the pictures to brainstorm fictional plot ideas for stories they will write. To model the program, McCauley has students write about her for the first week. An endurance cyclist, she included a picture of herself riding her bike down Mt. Haleakala in Maui and says student story ideas often revolved around the volcano erupting and her exciting escape. Each student keeps a writer’s notebook and participates in “Buddy Buzz,” a kneeto-knee collaboration with a partner to talk out ideas before writing. At the end of each school year, the class uses its jog-a-thon money to self-publish a book of its writings. “My kids write knowing they’re going to be published and that they’re going to give a copy of the class book to their family,” she 52 Enjoy August 2012
says. “They have ownership over the entire process from drafting to final publication.” Her students are also being published in a national Haiku contest. McCauley’s passion extends to conducting in-service training for other teachers. “I realized I may not be the only one who wanted to do a better job teaching kids to see themselves as writers,” she adds. “There are so many teachers out there who are hungry for something that’s not ‘fill-in-the-bubble,’ hungry to teach their students in authentic and meaningful ways.” At a time when funding for in-service training is limited, McCauley says Enterprise Elementary School District continues to support these activities for its teachers. Several of her colleagues from Boulder Creek Elementary School have completed the Northern California Writing Project Summer Institute and provide training to fellow teachers. And one day last year, she received an email from the project director who had encouraged her to submit the piece about
her unforgettable student. It was a call for submissions for an anthology on “What Teaching Means” and he encouraged her to submit. She pulled out the story, deciding to send it out one more time before retiring it. “It was picked up and chosen as the first story in the book,” she says. “It’s a full-circle moment. I feel like I didn’t really see this kid or understand his story and now it’s being seen by teachers everywhere. Everyone has a story and we need to give our kids a chance to tell theirs.” • www.norcalwp.org
Claudia Mosby is a writer and part-time college instructor. She leads workshops on writing memoir, journaling as spiritual practice, and writing basics for new writers. She lives in Redding with her husband and mischievous cat Hobo, where she also writes a column on midlife and family for the Record Searchlight.