Welcome to the official Mini Moves for Writers launch week! We’re so excited to share this new project with you — one we hope will help you, make your teaching life easier, and move the writers in your classroom. Each day this week we will be sharing a new idea for how to use these mini-lesson videos in your own classroom! And check Twitter (@RebekahODell1 and @Sam_Futrell1) for daily giveaways at 12:30pm EST for those of you who subscribe to Mini Moves on YouTube!
The flipped classroom (or flipped workshop) model absolutely saved my life during Covid School. When everything was strange and unsure and ever-changing, knowing that my mini-lessons could stay in tact and consistent gave me and my students an anchor.
The big idea of flipped instruction is that recorded, direct instruction happens outside of class for homework so that class time can be spent practicing, collaborating, conferring, and receiving feedback.
Flipping my class has been one permanent, positive change that I have adopted from those deep, dark days of 2020. Here’s why:
- My students are far more likely to watch a 4-minute mini-lesson for homework than spend a substantial amount of time writing. So, now I get to see them spend lots of time writing during class! And I get a lot more time to talk to them about their writing. (If, by chance, a student doesn’t watch the mini-lesson for homework, they can quickly watch it during writing time in class while I’m conferring with other writers.)
- Students don’t miss instruction when they are absent from class. I post the mini-lesson to our online learning platform, and absent students receive the same instruction as students present in class.
- Students can watch and re-watch the lesson as many times as they need to in order to try and master the skill!
- I can link feedback to an appropriate video mini-lesson online!
- These lessons are permanent — once I’ve made them, I can reuse them down the road.
- When I am absent, instruction can still move forward in the same way students are used to.
- I am better able to differentiate, and students can self-pace.
And this is exactly how I plan to use Mini Moves for Writers in my own classroom! And you can, too. Here’s how:
- Choose a mini move you would like to teach your writers. (Like maybe “Figurative Language that Makes You Say, ‘Huh!'”?)
- Share the video with your students. (The easiest way for me is to simply post it as an assignment in our LMS.)
- Ask students to watch the mini move video. (You might assess this through an entrance ticket as simple as, “What did today’s mini move teach you how to do in your writing and why would you choose to use it?” OR you might use EdPuzzle to embed questions into the video for students to respond to. I made one you can use! )
- Use class time to check in with students while they write: Where have you tried the mini move? Point to a place where I can see the mini move in action. What questions do you have? Where might you try it?
moving writers 
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