I believe our students can become powerful writers by doing the same thing. If you’ve read Study Driven, by Katie Wood Ray, she basically believes that if you gather a stack of books that are true examples of a genre or structure, your students can study them and create books very similar.
You can teach your students to read books with different lenses: like a reader, and like a writer. Because of this, it is important to study authors. I think it is important that our students know what there are real people behind the books that we love. They have histories and experiences that made them writers. If we teach our students that they are writers just like Mo, Kadir, and Vera, then they will feel like they are in great company!
