Thanks for the idea to post a picture of the text Joyce!

A Community of Writers by Zemelman and Daniels (the god of Lit Circles) is a textbook designed, in my opinion, to encourage the "inner-writers" in all students to flourish. As a teacher it is our responsibility to recognize that each each of our students "want to write, can write, and do write" on some level (3). So far, what I have gotten out of this text is the process that teachers can use to engage junior and senior high school students in writing projects. The authors also discuss the paradigm they use, called "process writing" and describe it as a more liberal approach to previous "old/traditional" views of writing in the ELA classroom.

Zemelman and Daniels also focus on this process, rather than the end result, as part of a learning and growing experience that should be shared and encouraged rather than something that should be taught and evaluated (18). I think this text has a lot of ideas about the writing process that could be useful to us as teachers, the more I read the more I like their ideas about the evolution of writing. Since 1988, however, I am sure that there are even more approaches to the writing process that can be applied to students in a modern 21st century classroom that are not included in this text. I look forward to reading on, and discussing how we can adapt some of Zemelman and Daniels' ideas to our work.