Using Uncharted Territory to Study Authors’ Craft: The Power of Micro-Mentor Texts to Improve Reading and Writing
In her book Micro Mentor Texts: Using Short Passages from Great Books to Teach Writer’s Craft (Scholastic 2022), Penny Kittle offers useful and engaging ideas for new ways to use Uncharted Territory to deepen students’ study of the craft of reading and writing. In short, she encourages you to use the many different texts in Uncharted Territory as “micro-mentor texts.”
Matt de la Peña, author of Last Stop on Market Street, argues in his foreword to Kittle’s book that using such mentor and model texts “[extends] an invitation [to] teachers [that] changes the way…students engage with writing” (7). As de la Peña observes, “the best writing teacher in the world is great literature” (7). Using the texts from Uncharted Territory as a treasure chest of models, you can follow Penny Kittle’s example by “exploring with [your] students gorgeous passages” that you will find in the stories, essays, and other nonfiction texts of Uncharted Territory. Penny repeatedly emphasizes that such careful attention to the study of writers’ craft has the added benefit of improving not only students’ writing but also their reading skills.
Asking students to engage with the texts in this way places them in the role of writers, for it invites students to enter into the decisions that writers make when they choose one word or move over another. In other words, by using the texts in Uncharted as opportunities to study the authors’ craft, we give students room to discover and develop their own voice by showing them how many ways there are to write about a certain topic or genre such as the personal literacy narrative.
Penny breaks down her approach to the selection and use of mentor texts into a few short and intuitive steps:
Notice: Look for those moves the writer makes in a text that you can use as models with your students. Talk through with your students what you notice in this text so you can help them to see what the author is doing, how and why they might be doing that.
Imitate: Have your students imitate the moves the author makes by trying them out in the same way artists might make different sketches of a figure to see the different ways they could approach it. During this stage, Penny writes with her students, sharing her own process and choices about the moves she makes and how they relate to the mentor text.
Your Turn: Students now draw from a set of specific mentor texts that Penny (or you, I, or any other teacher) selects for reasons related to what the students are writing or need to learn. Here, students continue to imitate the models as they adapt the model texts to their own writing.
Their Turn: Finally, Penny invites students to seek out their own models to study and use as students continue to work on their own writing. In this case, you might let kids choose from a set of texts within one of the units of Uncharted Territory or direct them to choose additional texts from the titles listed by genre or theme in the appendices.
If, for example, I was sketching out a lesson sequence related to ways to open up or write a literacy narrative, I might ask students to use these readings from Uncharted as mentor texts to get them started:
“Blue-Collar Brilliance,” by Mike Rose, directing them to focus on the first two pages (20-21) as a model for one way to set up such an essay.
“To Keep It Holy,” from Educated, Tara Westover, suggesting they study page 72 and how it compares with the way Rose begins his narrative.
From Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren, paying close attention to pages 529-530, especially how she begins her story and how it compares with the other two.
From here, students could find many other texts, or excerpts from these micro mentor texts to study and use as models when it is time to write their own. Penny Kittle reminds us at the end of her wonderful book that “great writer’s craft is everywhere” (168). Good writing, as Penny might say, is wherever you find it, including in your own classroom.
Misc. Notes/Links/Resources
Penny Kittle’s Website (a wealth of wisdom and additional resources!)
“Teaching the Writer’s Craft with Micro Mentor Texts,” Penny Kittle (Edutopia)
Interview: Penny Kittle on Teaching Writer’s Craft with Micro Mentor Texts (Literacy Lenses podcast)
