What do I mean by "look beyond what you see"? We need to suspend our judgments each time we meet a child, to assume that every child is capable. So many children are far more intelligent than they are given credit for. We just need to see them, hear their voices, and begin our teaching there.

Buba, the boy shown on this video clip, was in fourth grade. He was a child who struggled with learning. What you'll discover by hearing our conference is that writing for a sustained period of time—for a real audience and purpose—helped Buba become a better, more confident writer. Notice he says he was concerned with his paper being "perfect." He and his classmates were over-focused on mistakes, correctness, handwriting, and skipping lines, and needed to shift their emphasis to writing for a meaningful purpose or making the writing clear and interesting for the reader.

When we demonstrate writing to students and then invite them to go through the same process real writers do, we hear comments like Buba's "I want to be an author." When kids write for real reasons, real dreams emerge too.

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