What are mentor texts? And how should I use them to help students improve their writing?

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All of us learn to write by being taught certain skills and strategies, but we also learn to write by emulating other writers. Very simple example, if you've been in a car accident and you go down to the police station and you have to write an accident report and you've never written one before, what do you do? You say, "Can I view some accident reports and see how others do it?" And then you look at a few models and you go, "Okay, I know how to do this ," right? Or let's say you're an educator and you're writing a grant for some funding and you've never written a grant before. What do you do? You look at how other grants have been written and then all of a sudden you emulate it. So, this is true with young children as well. If we can look at how others write really beautiful sentences, elaborated sentences ... if we can see how others use a really great transition word to make a connection between one sentence and another ... if we're trying to learn how to write an introduction to an opinion or argument piece and how to state a claim and we can see how other people have stated claims, we emulate that. And that's the whole goal or usefulness of what's called "mentor text." Now, too often what teachers do with mentor texts is they'll take maybe a whole poem or a whole chapter in a book or an article and they'll say, "This is what a good informational piece will look like. So make your writing look like that." That's too overwhelming. That's the mistake they make. The other mistake is that just by showing students a good example of a piece of writing, the students will magically figure out how to emulate it. What we have to be careful with mentor text is number one, pick the text for a very specific purpose.

So, I want to teach students how to use the transcription word, "next," or "finally." Find a couple of examples. They might just be two or three sentences where somebody's really done a great job of that, unpack it with the students, and then say, "Now you try to do the same thing, but with something you are writing about." And it's that explicitness, the guided practice, and that sort of very narrow focus for your mentor text. The other thing I'd suggest about mentor text is show more than one example. So if you can find two or three examples, that's even better.