If you’ve paid much attention to BookTok or even the shelves at your local bookstore, you’ve probably realized that romance is having a moment. And that moment extends far beyond the days of grocery store paperbacks with Fabio on the cover. Whether through cozy holiday stories, contemporary meet-cutes, or sweeping romantasy series with swords and […]
I know that I am “preaching to the choir” as we say in the South, but the start of school gets earlier and earlier every year. So let’s get moving quickly into something you can start working on DAY ONE with students. Most state tests ask students a variety of questions rooted in analysis, specifically […]
Mentor Text: Leading Us To Revelation: On Rita Dove by Jericho Brown Techniques: Background – I’ve had a subscription to POETRY Magazine for a few years now. And I almost never finish an issue. Issues travel with me in my school bag. Issues are lugged to dance and swim practices in my satchel. Issues can usually […]
When Allison and I wrote Beyond Literary Analysis, we read thousands of pieces of writing in the quest to figure out what kind of analysis professional, published writer truly write outside academia. In other words, beyond what English teachers have culturally and historically deemed to be our analytical territory, what kind of analytical writing will […]
(See what I did there?) “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I […]
I’ll admit: I’m a sucker for beautiful notebook work. I will tell students that the quality of the thinking is really what matters — and I mean it. But I also swoon when I see gorgeous notebook pages. I associate gorgeous “two-page spreads” with Penny Kittle and the thinking she has been sharing with teachers […]
One way to help students become climate stewards is to model how reading paired climate texts enhances our ability to both problem-spot and problem-solve. In our haste to offer solutions, we may insufficiently consider the root causes of environmental problems. While reading Neal and Jarrod Shusterman’s novel Dry, my students and I pore over local […]
Catch up on the whole mini-mentors series! Mini-Mentors for Review Writing, Prompt-Based Writing, and Revision! In the previous iterations of this series, I’ve suggested some ways you might use these mini-mentors in your own classroom: as sentence study warm-ups, as whole-class lessons, in small-group and individual writing conferences. But, you’ll notice something different and special […]
A few weeks ago I outlined my peculiar teacher headspace this year as I face the challenge of teaching AP Lang after years of working to perfect English 11, a course I helped design from the ground up and continue to approach eagerly every day. In that post I outlined my major goal for the […]
Abigail’s first beat of the year takes you through a lesson you could do tomorrow. Discovering the importance of place and how through observation growing a deeper understanding of why place matters in our writing.
moving writers 