Every month or two throughout the school year, students select one notebook entry or story that they would like to take through the writing process and publish. This means the story will first be shared with members of a writing team in order to receive feedback from other authors in the classroom. We call them writing teams, and I emphasize the goal of working together to improve each other’s writing.

With 20+ students in my class who all want to share their writing with me and with their classmates every day, writing teams provide me with a way for all students to share their work without taking up precious teaching time by having 20+ students sharing in the author’s chair.