Donald Graves, a professor of early childhood education and director of the Writing Process Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, has done extensive research on how children learn to write. He is the author of Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, which is considered a pioneering book in the field of literacy education.
He also helped create a method of writing instruction called Writing Workshop. This approach was formalized by Graves, Donald Murray, Nancie Atwell and others in the 1970s and has since been used extensively by Lucy Calkins in her research on teaching writing at Columbia University in New York City.
Throughout his career, Graves remained committed to finding effective writing instruction for children. He and his research colleagues have demonstrated that unstructured, expressive writing is a natural need for young writers, and that it is an important part of their development as critical thinkers.
His work also demonstrates that when young writers are given the opportunity to express their own ideas, their voices often take shape in the writing process. This is a major advantage over the traditional whole language writing program, which emphasizes rote memorization of vocabulary and grammar.
As a result, Graves and his research colleagues were able to produce a series of paradigm-shifting books for educators that transformed the way students learned to write. These books, published by Heinemann, are still widely available today and have influenced generations of teachers.
In his bestselling books, Graves argued that the best teachers know their students and that the most effective teaching involves knowing and recognizing their individual strengths and weaknesses as writers. He urged teachers to let students choose their own topics and to listen to what they have to say as they worked through the writing process.
While some approaches to writing instruction have come under questionable scrutiny over the years, Graves was one of the few teachers who took a stand for this type of teaching and helped to establish it as a valid approach to literacy learning.
Don Graves’ acclaimed research study of sixteen New Hampshire children, which became the basis for his book Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, is more than an excellent example of how to do research; it is a landmark in the development of what has become known as the “process approach” to writing. He was never hesitant to report his findings and to give the impression that they were evidence of a powerful writing program for elementary school children.
But what is the evidence?
The evidence that Graves and his colleagues offer for their writing workshop approach is based largely on testimonials, exemplar writing of selected students, and their own observations. While these methods are certainly valuable, the evidence they provide is limited and cannot be considered a scientific assessment of their effectiveness as a teaching tool.
While the apprenticeship method is a successful strategy for teaching students to write, it can be daunting and time-consuming for teachers. It requires careful planning and thoughtful attention to detail, but it is a more efficient and effective approach to instruction than the traditional whole-language model.
