Braving Creative Waters

Schreiner set out to explore ways in which she could enrich Peck’s second-grade creative writing curriculum with research-based tactics that encourage students to become more prolific and creative in their writing—as opposed to being reactive to writing prompts and prescriptive assignments. 

She started with an analysis of the curriculum at other schools, consulting with former colleagues and master teachers, and soon found a myriad of methods to approach creative writing. This exploration ultimately led her to the work of Jennifer Serravallo, a faculty member at the Teachers College at Columbia University and a prolific writer on methods for inspiring children to write authentically. 

With this new focus, she settled upon the idea of using “mentor texts”—pieces of literature that both teacher and student can return to and reread for many different purposes. Mentor texts are both studied and imitated, and encourage students to try different strategies and to take risks. She is now piloting the use of picture books and chapter books to develop specific skills with the hope that students will become more daring and creative writers.

“Writing requires a lot of bravery,” said Schreiner. “Everybody thinks of writing as free-form and creative, but it’s actually a really brave skill. It’s very hard to put yourself out there. When we ask students to be creative, we are asking for something different than being informational. We are asking them to go beyond the factual nature of something.”