“Writing So People Can Hear Me”: Responsive Teaching in a Middle School Poetry Unit

If we listen to them, the words of our students can provide a road map for instructional responses that meet their diverse literacy needs. In this article, Cara Gutzmer, a middle school literacy coach, and Phil Wilder, a teacher collaborator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discuss how a responsive teaching framework guided their responses to 6th-grade students in a poetry unit. After using student writing and feedback to create the essential understandings and essential questions for the unit, the authors created a culture of transparent assessment in the classroom so that students could guide instructional responses. Within this classroom writing community, pre-assessments about reading and writing poetry as well as ongoing daily feedback informed how the authors scaffolded the writing process and flexibly grouped these young writers based on their literacy needs and interests.