“How do you ensure that children become engaged enthusiastic writers? Read Matt Glover’s book Craft and Process Studies. Delightful to read and highly practical, it shows us how to teach writing so that children become and continue to be engaged while expanding their writing repertoire. It is the antidote to orthodoxy in the writers’ workshop. Thoroughly illustrated with concrete examples and videos, it offers multiple versions of units as flexible frameworks inviting us to innovate responsively and purposefully.”—Peter Johnston
“After reading Craft and Process Studies, teachers will walk away with a thousand ideas to help them ‘genre bust.’ That’s my term! Matt’s argument that students need significant periods of time to write outside of conventional genres is strong, rational, and compelling.”—Ellin Oliver Keene
“In Craft and Process Studies, master teacher Matt Glover recovers a key, maybe the key, principle of writing instruction—choice. Too often, students are marched through genre units, often presented as distinct types, with little opportunity to write about what matters most to them. Genre becomes not a resource, but a constraint. A means becomes an end. Matt retains the idea of a units of study, focusing on processes and issues of craft that can apply to whatever genre the student might choose. In the best tradition of mentor texts, these units build insights inductively, by a careful study of what authors actually do. What’s more—we get to see Matt in action, conducting conferences and mini lessons in over forty video clips.”—Thomas Newkirk
“Matt has long been a passionate advocate for student choice, and in this book he shows teachers how to put choice at the center of all their planning and decision making. What a gift to be able to learn from Matt’s years of experience doing this work in so many different classrooms. There’s no question you will think so much more expansively about the teaching of writing after reading this book. If you’ve ever felt like your students were boxed-in by the narrow confines of genre study after genre study, you’ll find so many possibilities for breaking out of that box and supporting student writers with smart, bold studies that lift the level of their work in genres they have chosen for themselves.”—Katie Wood Ray
“Matt Glover’s Craft and Process Studies is my new favorite book on the teaching of writing! Not only does Matt make a compelling—and essential—argument for including units of study in our writing curriculums that give students the opportunity to choose the genres in which they write, but he also shows us how to do this by detailing seventeen beautifully realized units of study on process and craft.” –Carl Anderson
“Writing is a content area, and Matt’s generous, joyous, crystal-clear, and thoughtful compendium of all things worth teaching about craft and process in addition to genres, will help teachers build a compelling and robust year of learning for young writers. Stunningly, if students could be in classrooms that follow his map for how such units could go, I believe that genre knowledge would take care of itself! After you read and underline every other sentence, as I did, you will want to meet with your colleagues immediately to begin planning your next writing study.”—Katherine Bomer
