Before reading this post, you might want to catch up with my grand grading experiment this year in my first post and second post in this series! I cried at graduation this year. No, that’s not right. I sobbed at graduation this year. Something that has never happened to me in the previous 10 graduations […]
We owe a lot to Tom Newkirk. Actually, we owe almost everything to Tom Newkirk. This brilliant man has been a leader in our fields for decades, but one cold morning in Boston 2 1/2 years ago he spoke directly to Allison and me through a crowded room. And everything changed. We talk about this […]
Finding mentor texts can be hard. And time consuming. This, we know. Even after years of making mentor texts the fulcrum on which the rest of my writing instruction pivots, finding the right set of texts for the students in front of me can be a challenge. In Writing With Mentors, Allison and I share […]
The beauty of Jay’s Mentor Text Wednesday posts is that they give us an instant idea — something to take back into our classrooms immediately, something to tinker with and fit to our students’ needs, and something to expand the way we think about mentor texts and the possibilities for our students’ writing. It’s easy […]
This weekend as so many teachers graduate from college and begin this wonderful, crazy, noble, life-changing career, Allison and I wrote about what we wish we had known when we started at the Education Week Teacher blog! We thought we knew everything when we left our teacher ed programs. We could plan a perfectly balanced […]
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! We certainly appreciate you, loyal readers, and all you do every single day to do the hardest, most noble, and most wonderful job in the world! Our friends at Heinemann are offering an amazing deal this week — use the code UTEACH to get 30% off your purchase AND free shipping! What better […]
Before mentors texts became the flexible frame onto which I could hang all of my writing instruction, I had nothing to do with all of the cool articles I stumbled across. When I found a piece of writing that connected with my curriculum, I would most often say, “Hey! Cool!”, print it or clip it, […]
I feel like I’ve been engaged in a pedagogical ancestry project recently — mapping my teaching forebears through generations. In floods of professional books, blogs, Tweets, and chats, these ideals into which I have become so deeply entrenched sometimes lose their original source. Like a game of educational Telephone, the message gets translated and retranslated, […]
What a thrill it was to go LIVE this morning with #theEdCollabGathering to chat about Notebook Time and the ways it moves our student writers forward through play and discovery! You can view our session here, on The Educator Collaborative’s Gathering site, or here on YouTube! You can get all of our materials by […]
This April, English teachers, Anglophiles, all buddies of the Bard will commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. Museums, libraries, schools, and theater companies are marking the occasion with special events like the homecoming of the Globe to Globe tour of Hamlet, which will have performed in around 200 countries by the […]
moving writers 