We are over-the-moon to be joining some amazing educators across the country at #theEdCollabGathering on Saturday, April 2nd! It’s online! And it’s free! Join us here at 11am EST as we share about how notebook time helps our students play, experiment, and take risks in their writing! https://gathering.theeducatorcollaborative.com/session-one/workshop-2/
Author: Rebekah O'Dell
Books That Move Us: Independent Writing by Colleen Cruz
This past fall at NCTE, I think startled Colleen Cruz when I gasped and, like a true fangirl, exclaimed, “Ohmygosh! Independent Writing! I read it on the plane! That book is major. REALLY major.” She was completely lovely to me but probably surprised to hear me raving about one of her older titles. I picked […]
On Teaching a Genre You Know Nothing About (or: an Infographic Study!)
Sometimes, no matter how good our routine, we need to shake it up. This is true in exercise; our muscles and our minds need to be surprised occasionally with a new move in order to achieve maximum results. It’s also true in writing. And it’s true in teaching. Sometimes the very thing we need to […]
#TheEdCollabGathering: Unearthing Discovery & Play
Did you know that on April 2, Chris Lehman and the generous geniuses at The Educator Collaborative are giving away a whole day of brilliant, free PD that you can watch from home in your jammies? We would love to have you join Allison and me from 11-12pm as we talk about bringing play back to the […]
Moving Speakers with “Mentor TEDs”
Early March is Optimist Club Oratorical Contest season in the freshman English classes at my school. Since our local Optimist Club chapter hosts its regional meet at our school in April, my department decided long ago to make the annual oratorical contest a component of our freshman speech unit. The prompts for the oratorical […]
A Writing With Mentors Interview
We had so much fun talking to Anna E. Baldwin (@annaebaldwin), a professor at the University of Montana, about writing workshop, mentor texts, and our new project!
Building Writing through Independent Reading Projects – a Follow-Up
In January, I reviewed Dan Feigelson’s Reading Projects Reimagined, and I was on fire! I couldn’t wait to take the brilliant-yet-simple idea of inviting students to track an idea of personal interest throughout a book. No more prescribed annotations! No more end-of-chapter questions! No more herding students into tightly-constructed pens of thought built on what […]
Sentence Study to Textual Analysis — an Aha! moment
In 2014, I attended Alison and Rebekah’s presentation at NCTE in Washington, DC, and left buzzing about so much of what they shared, especially sentence studies. For reluctant writers like my freshmen, a sentence study is a great way to ease into creative writing or new sentence styles. The thought of writing a paragraph sometimes […]
Making Time for Vocabulary Instruction that Matters
Years and years ago, before I had been bitten by the writing workshop bug, I became obsessed with vocabulary instruction. My school used a series of vocabulary workbooks at each grade level, and I had witnessed how that approach didn’t worked. Not for real. Not for the long term. Some students would dutifully memorize the […]
Books That Move Us: Reading Projects Reimagined (Dan Feigelson)
You know how the greats always make it look easy? This is the way I feel whenever I get to listen to Katie Ray or Tom Newkirk — they say something clear and simple and beautiful and even common sense, but it absolutely rocks my world. So it was when I read Dan Feigelson’s Reading […]
moving writers 