Kindergarten Is More Than Ready for the Common Core State Standards

Standards can aid educators as they work to produce strong student writers who can create meaningful and skillfully crafted authentic pieces of writing. This once -a -month, yearlong professional development program, conducted during the school day, shifted a district’s kindergarten writing program to a writing workshop model that enabled the teachers to concentrate student work on kindergarten and beyond-grade-level writing standards. Transitioning from a basal-based, isolated skills worksheet writing program to a meaning-making writing process approach enabled the teachers to use their professional experience and discretion to articulate and operationalize their fundamental beliefs about teaching writing. As the teachers worked through their own struggles with how to teach writing, and as they made some hard methodological decisions, these teachers began to see the writing standards as a flexible framework whose expectations could be exceeded by their general education, special education, and English Language Learner kindergarten population.