How do we get students to buy into writing? How do we begin to hear their stories. Oral storytelling is a way to engage your writers in a low stakes way and create a basis for a really strong writing community.
Category: collaboration
First Writing Moves of the School Year
In this summer’s beat Abigail takes you through two strategies that you can discover in Liz Prather’s new book “The Confidence to Write”… two strategies to start the school year off right and a great starting place for teacher growth this summer.
Picture Book-Driven Inquiry: Picturing Survival with Octavia Butler
I’ve been eager to shake up my classroom literature circles. Sometimes, it is easy to fall into a routine rut: assign some chapters to be read, passages to be annotated, literary techniques to be identified. As we read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I thought about what it meant for Lauren Olamina to come […]
Inquiry Lab: Teaching Students to Nudge Each Other Toward Deep Learning
Welcome to the Inquiry Lab! In this series, we’re thinking through how we can use the workshop model to teach inquiry work, in any subject (writing included, of course). For the last year or so, I’ve been rethinking the way we teach into group work and partner collaborations. To that end, here at Moving Writer’s, […]
The Power of Writing Collaborative Fiction
The experience of writing a novel together didn’t inhibit individual creativity – it made them all want to go home and write more on their own.
It’s a Celebration!: Why We Should Honor Achievements in the Classroom
My 40th birthday is in a couple of days, June 6th to be exact. I expected this to be a difficult time in my life as I don’t like accepting that I’m getting older (turning 30 involved a lot of crying!). It has been kind of the opposite; it has made me appreciate the cliche […]
Identity Synthesis: Authenticity, Vulnerability, and Revision
This year in my school district, my colleagues and I have held rich and ongoing conversations about ways to be more culturally and historically responsive in our curriculum and instruction. Within these conversations, we discovered that part of being more responsive in these matters involves valuing our students’ sense of identity in their learning. In […]
Bios, Threads, & Retweets: Moving Writers with Twitter Simulations
We know that writing strategies are everywhere. And, I am amazed at the amount of writing skills and strategies that are embedded into social media platforms. Although the student writer may not actually notice the author’s craft and intention that goes into well-crafted tweets, they are there in abundance, and I realized recently that these […]
Taking “One Small Step” Toward Connection and Community with StoryCorps
My beat this year is all about teaching in the hybrid classroom, but I’m taking a break this month to share an outside-of-the-classroom project that could easily be adapted for in-person, virtual, or hybrid learning. Just two months before my city locked down, I attended a public forum about storytelling featuring StoryCorps founder Dave Isay. […]
Bridging Gaps Through the Power of Writing Through the Eyes of the Student
I have had a lot of conversations this year with teachers about expectations for students, specifically 9th grade and high school students, and it is clear that not everyone agrees on what the expectations should be for writers at the secondary level. Which, honestly is ironic considering the amount of standards and standardized assessments that […]
moving writers 