Long after I had moved to a workshop-style classroom, I couldn’t shake a very typical writing-class problem: kids didn’t write. Well, they did, but they still didn’t write until the very last minute, procrastinating and frozen until the assignment was due. Sure, I’d dutifully teach mini-lessons, but then, instead of writing, students would stare, doodle, […]
I never speak at a conference or work with a district where I don’t talk about the magic of flash drafting. Probably second only to mentor texts, flash drafts have utterly changed the way I teach writing. A flash draft is a super-fast, down-and-dirty draft that moves ideas from your brain to paper. It is […]
I am very late to the flash draft party. It’s not a new concept. Ralph Fletcher mentions it in What a Writer Needs, and he attributes the concept to another teacher entirely. But I hadn’t heard about it until a Twitter chat last month when a group of elementary writing teachers raved about its power […]
