Attending to a Writer’s Voice and Meaning

The author responds to the growth of Jingxiu Cheng’s teaching described in Akiko Hayashi’s Teaching Expertise in Three Countries by describing the ways his own growth as a teacher of writing mirrored both her increasing focus on valuing children’s feelings and experience and in the collaborative nature of that growth. He tells how an encounter with and subsequent engagement in the collaborative Prospect process of description of a work led to deep changes in how he responded to his students’ writing. This then led to ongoing collaborative inquiry that changed how he thought about and taught writing with students from first through sixth grade. These changes made writing accessible, meaningful, and powerful for more students and led to more deeply expressive, thoughtful, and moving pieces of writing. He shares a student’s response to what this work meant and how it helped remake the class into its unique whole.