It’s funny how a few things in school remain mostly normal despite everything else feeling so strange this year. Like the annual arrival of National Honors Society nominations– it was a nice reminder of “normal” when a student in my Zoom last week asked if we could set up a breakout room so he could […]
Reconsidering my classroom practices from the perspective of a very serious video gamer…a post about writing that just happens to use video games as a metaphor
This year at Moving Writers, I hope to explore various ways to utilize writing practices in your classroom to build strong social-emotional relationships with students despite the physical separations imposed on classrooms by the pandemic. I hope very much that this proves to be a limited series… When I posted my first contribution of the […]
With almost everyone back to school in some unusual, frustrating form by now, it feels like a weird time to be asking you to kick back and read an educational blog. I know–I lost you at “kick back.” But I’m hoping this one might be timely–it’s a revelation I had this Tuesday afternoon after spending […]
One of my favorite things about being part of a community of English teachers both in my building and online (Hi Teacher Twitter Buddies!) is that every once in a while this really fun thing happens where a piece of writing gets published somewhere with really powerful voice or a really fun structure and all […]
We are back with another buddy post! The more we talk about what building authentic relationships with our writers looks like in our classrooms, the more we realize we have similar strategies that work with our different populations. This month we’re tackling low stakes writing and how we use it to create a culture of […]
January is a tough time of year for me. The holidays are over, the weather is just meh in Michigan, and the craziness of midterms and starting a new semester makes my room feel like chaos. I spent all fall writing my Moving Writers posts about balance in the ELA classroom and, at this point, […]
I came across one of those well-intended but ultimately wrong-minded tweets today while scrolling through Twitter. It offered advice for “ELA teachers” from someone who isn’t one. It suggested encouraging students to try out a new Microsoft Word feature that will basically auto-suggest (or replace, if I interpreted the gif correctly) segments of student writing […]
One of my greatest NCTE joys have been the times members of the Moving Writers team have gotten to join forces at NCTE. I love these people — their deeply-felt philosophies about teaching writing to make a difference in children’s learning and lives, their practical, boots-on-the-ground, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that brilliance. Here are some of the resources from […]
When I first moved from teaching middle school to teaching high school, I brought my workshop practice with me. At first, I was worried that this type of instruction wouldn’t meet the needs of my high school students, but it didn’t take me very long to realize that it was exactly what they needed. And […]
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