For those students, taking any spark of enthusiasm they show and fanning it to a flame, and helping it spread to other possible enthusiasms, becomes one of my goals.
Category: prewriting
The Benefits of Learning 8: Questioning
Writing is the act of asking yourself hard questions and then trying to answer them.
Making All Things New: Putting Thoughts into Words
This year on Moving Writers, I am dusting off some old-but-wise books on my shelf about writing, creating a tiny review, then considering how one passage from the book can inform writing instruction today, even decades after the book was first published. This month, I’ll consider an excerpt from the book Poetry Is by Ted […]
Using Two-Pagers to Fuel Analytical Writing
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 […]
Big Picture Writing: Things to Ponder
Thinking about our writing, big picture, helps us to think about who and how we want to be as people, and as we the people.
The Argument Essay: A Contextual Pool Adventure
As the season of AP Lang exams fast approaches, I find myself more and more urgently seeking ways to help tighten gaps in my students’ skill sets. Fine tuning writing skills is a part of it, but when it comes to one AP Lang task–the Open Argument essay–there are more pressing issues that are a […]
The Fiction-Fix for Bad Endings: Incident-Irony
I thought, There must be a key to good endings. It must be a skill – a teachable, practice-able skill.
The answer: Irony.
No Dumb Questions: Using Inquiry to Drive Research
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
Genius Hour, but for Writers
Breather Routines and the Misdiagnosis of Writing Stamina I produce a podcast called Write Answers, and about a month ago, Beth Rimer (co-director of the Ohio Writing Project) and I recorded an interview in which she talked about a between-unit-plans break that she called “Breather Routines.” A Breather Routine can be a 1-3 week series […]
Digital Notebooks, Remixes and Infographics: The Stealth Writing Workshop
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 […]
moving writers 