Between this post and my last, a war began. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Like the rise of Nazi Germany after WWI, the conflict in Ukraine has been building for more than twenty years. Putin and his post-Soviet ancestors have been playing a game of Hungry Hippos with the Ukraine and former Soviet satellite states […]
Teaching writing, at first, was a struggle for me. It was a struggle because the kids seemed to detest it. When I asked them why I received all sorts of answers, but one answer that kept coming up was that they didn’t feel like the writing was “real”; they turned in all their writing to […]
I have heard numerous teachers say that although the end of last year was crazy, the start of this academic year is crazier. With even more uncertainty of what the year as whole will look like, teachers are navigating unexplored territory. Yet, amidst all of this (along with the increased tension of a pandemic, politics, […]
A few years ago, the writing in my classroom was floundering. Our department had been aligning curriculum for awhile and, in my rush to get my ducks in a row and “cover” everything, I had begun sacrificing key parts of my instruction. There just wasn’t time to fit it all in. One afternoon during a […]
My whole teaching life I have been in search of a way to teach grammar that is meaningful, effective, and enduring. I have tried bits and pieces of other people’s curricula for years––Kelly Gallagher’s Sentence of the Week, Nancie Atwell’s editing sheets and proofreading lists––but I’ve never been able to find my groove with these […]
What a happy, exciting day it is here at Moving Writers! We’d like to introduce you to our friend and newest regular writer, Stefanie Jochman. Like so many great relationships of our day, we met Stefanie on Twitter. The connection was immediate. She’s a gifted writing teacher, an experimenter, an innovator, and we are thrilled to have […]
So much of the workshop method is built on the desire to mold students into independent writers who will continue to thrive when they leave our classes. By the end of a year in my ninth grade Reading Writing Workshop, I hope that students will have discovered their own unique writing process, they will know […]
I have a hard time narrowing down the list of mentor texts I want to use in each writing study. There always seems to be just one more amazing text that I think can instruct and inspire my students. In Writing With Mentors, Allison and I recommend 3-6 mentor texts as the ideal cluster for […]
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