Brett Vogelsinger – moving writers

September 17, 2021September 17, 2021Brett Vogelsinger

Learning From Poems: Brevity

The brevity of poems allows us to slip them into lessons as we develop skills for writing in any genre.

June 18, 2021June 19, 2021Brett Vogelsinger

3 Things I Learned About Writer’s Notebook From A Parent Email

It think it’s safe to say that for most of us, this school year felt like several different years. In my school there were remote portions, hybrid portions, five-day-return portions, and with just a few days left in the school year, a masks-optional portion. Texting teacher friends throughout the year, I have used a rickety […]

May 21, 2021May 21, 2021Brett Vogelsinger

Explosion, 2021: A Post-In-Verse

I have bent under the weight
of it all and
I am yet
unbroken.

April 16, 2021April 16, 2021Brett Vogelsinger

Old Connections Made New

Despite all that the pandemic has stolen from us, it has given us a few things too. I’m sure that over the course of the last thirteen months, everyone can relate a story of a connection they have restored thanks to the speed of technology and the slowdown that coping with COVID has imposed. Through […]

March 19, 2021March 19, 2021Brett Vogelsinger

What Went Right?

I write this post coming off of a “grading high.” Assessing student work does not always leave me feeling cheerful and refreshed. There are times it leaves me feeling discouraged and plagued with questions: “What went wrong? How did so many of my students miss the mark on this skill?” But as we race into […]

January 29, 2021January 30, 2021Brett Vogelsinger

Designing With Grammar

Teaching grammar is my instructional nemesis. I’m sure I am not alone in feeling this way. For nearly twenty years now, I have worked at teaching grammar in the context of writing, without skill-and-drill worksheets, and every year I tweak my approach, often some variation of Harry Noden’s creative Image Grammar approach. But it’s still […]

December 18, 2020December 17, 2020Brett Vogelsinger

Thinking Smaller

I am proud that under normal circumstance I can choreograph a lot of “movement” into a single class period, but for this year, I am learning to embrace the fact that I cannot. I need smaller, simpler moves in a writing workshop that we can learn together and execute well. Otherwise, frustration will prevail.

November 20, 2020November 19, 2020Brett Vogelsinger

Welcoming Reflection

For many teachers, this fall has been a time of mourning. We mourn for the teaching strategies we can’t use right now, for the trickles of conversation before and after class that we used to enjoy with our students, for our feelings of self-efficacy in our chosen profession. Most of us are facing challenges that […]

October 23, 2020October 22, 2020Brett Vogelsinger

In Defense of Paper

And these days, when my students’ physical proximity to each other and their teachers is more tightly controlled, I can still provide a space for physical proximity to their ideas: the ink and paper and smeary graphite, the texture of it all.

September 18, 2020September 13, 2020Brett Vogelsinger

On the Lookout For Happy Accidents

My greatest hope is that amid this newness, the “I-feel-like-a-first-year-teacher-again” of it all, we can all learn some things about teaching writing that we may never have otherwise explored.