Writing with Mentors

1. A Classroom Where Mentors Matter

2. Developing a Mentor Text Habit of Mind

3. Moving from Mentor Texts to Writing Lessons

4. Introducing Students to Mentor Texts

5. Mentors Show Students How to Play

6. Mentors Show Students How to Plan

7. Mentors Show Students How to Draft and Revise

8. Mentors Show Students How to Go Public

9. Mentors Show Students How to Be Independent

This book was written to help you understand the potential that writing with mentors has for your students.

We've organized it into nine chapters that mimic the scaffolded instruction we use to support writers in our own classrooms, beginning with the teacher. As you look at the contents, you'll see that Chapter 1 offers a new way of thinking about mentor texts and the central role they can play in writing instruction. In Chapter 2, we explore what it means to be a teacher who puts her full faith in professional writers and leverages this faith as far as it can go in the classroom. We take you to our most trusted sources for finding mentor texts-sources that never tire and never feel old, sources we promise will excite both you and your students. Finally, we share our criteria for selecting the best mentor texts these sources have to offer.

In Chapter 3, we move into the classroom, offering a practical explanation of how a teacher might move from this trust in professional writers and discovery of rich texts to planning for instruction. In Chapters 4 through 8, we walk you through our work with students and mentors from the first day of school to the last-from the early stages of inspiration to the final moments of publication. We share lessons that demonstrate the enormous potential of mentors at every stage of the writing process.

Finally, we close with a chapter that explains why we teach with mentors at all, because it's the influence of writers that will endure long after our students have left our classrooms. With the help of mentors, we cultivate independence in our writers and help them build lasting writing lives.

You'll notice that chapters are punctuated with brief invitations (A Way In) to engage in the work your students will be doing or to think about your classroom and how the approach we're describing might work for you and your students. For these invitations, we suggest you reserve some space in your writer's notebook or find a small, separate notebook for the jotting and thinking you'll do over the course of this book.

Other chapters will engage you in some observational work: You'll listen as we "teach aloud," offering a window into our thinking as we search for, curate, and plan with mentor texts or talk to students about how to seek help and inspiration from the work of professional writers. And then you'll listen some more to the voices that really matter: the students'. You'll watch some of our students collect thinking, plan, play, draft, start over, write some more-with mentors at their side every step of the way. These students represent a wide variety of ability levels, from the most emerging writers to students who have always wanted to grow up to become writers, but they all have one thing in common: The quality of their writing has been markedly improved by the influence of mentor texts.

Although we've written this book with upper middle to high school-aged students in mind, the mentor text approach to writing instruction is relevant to a wide range of writers at all grade levels. In fact, mentor text instruction has traditionally occurred in the primary grades, well-documented in books like Katie Wood Ray's Study Driven, Ralph Fletcher's What a Writer Needs, and Ruth Culham's The Writing Thief. And while the texts we refer to are geared toward a more mature audience, the philosophy and organizational tools, as well as the ways of talking to students about mentors, are timeless and ageless. We have always taught by the mantra "Good teaching is good teaching," and we use elementary school materials all the time and adapt them for high school.

"Great teachers have an unstoppable drive to figure things out.  We imagine that our classrooms might be places where, as Rebekah and Allison say, "the craft of writing is truly studied, not assigned, and we study it together," but we need mentors to show us how.  You have two here in your hands.  I am certain Don [Graves] would have celebrated these wise, kind, and fearless advocates for young writers.  This book vibrates with joy and possibility."--Penny Kittle, from the Foreword

Writing With Mentors is one of the best books I’ve read on harnessing the power of mentor texts to spur authentic student writing. By helping students to recognize the “writing that is beneath all writing,” Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell provide a bank of rich, vibrant reading experiences that immerse young writers into deep study of both technique and genre. This book made me a better writing teacher, and it will make you a better writing teacher, too.—Kelly Gallagher, author of Write Like This

Wow! Writing with Mentors has transformed the way I think about using exemplar pieces. Instead of a writing instruction add-on, Allison and Rebekah show how mentor texts can—no, should— live as the heart-and-soul of a powerful writing classroom. Their vivid portraits of kids at work, sage advice, and plenty of tools, make it all feel possible. This book will mentor my teaching with texts for years to come.—Christopher Lehman, coauthor of Falling in Love With Close Reading

For decades, writing teachers have been encouraged to use mentor texts with their students as a way to introduce the elements of author's craft, examine structure, and revel in the joy of language. Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell have updated this advice for our modern age, providing dozens of mentor texts that teachers can use right away.  More importantly, they also show us how to harness the power of the Internet to follow authors on Twitter, read the latest commentaries and news via RSS, and listen to podcast reviews of books, films, and music. No longer do we need to find mentor texts only on our book shelves; Marchetti and O'Dell show us many ways to write with the mentors that are part of our—and our students'—daily lives. —Troy Hicks, author of Crafting Digital Writing

Marchetti and O'Dell have woven together a gift for secondary teachers: A book plump with easy-to-access mentor texts, framed in the principles of writing workshop. Useful and extremely current. —Jeff Anderson, author of 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know and Mechanically Inclined

With a pen in one hand to take notes and my Smart phone in the other to scan the QR codes of the numerous mentor texts, I finished the book with an incredible amount of ideas to implement in my classroom and a list of mentor texts to use with my high school students.   Writing with Mentors is a long-awaited book that illuminates the power of using mentor texts and gives teachers the tools to move their students to places in their writing beyond where they ever thought they could go.

—Laura LaVallee, English teacher, Portsmouth High School and NH Teacher of the Year finalist