I never speak at a conference or work with a district where I don’t talk about the magic of flash drafting. Probably second only to mentor texts, flash drafts have utterly changed the way I teach writing. A flash draft is a super-fast, down-and-dirty draft that moves ideas from your brain to paper. It is […]
You don’t have to throw away everything you’ve ever taught in order to make a big change in student writing. Sometimes we want to do what we’re already doing … just better. Not a whole new plan. Not a new curriculum. Not starting-from-scratch. We want something we can insert into our regular routines that will […]
In spite of my protestations to the contrary, I want to be the fun teacher. It’s just that often my definition of fun involves annotating or revising or learning etymology and that doesn’t consistently align with students’ definition of fun. After four months of what even I deemed to be not-fun work (various iterations of […]
I’m rarely brave enough to try a terrifying new teaching idea on my own. Ask Allison. Or, these days, Sam. For years, I’ve been trying to psych myself up to teach a writing study on graphic novels or graphic essays, but because I am so woefully inept in the artistic realm, I never did it. […]
We get different versions of this question, a lot: “I love mentor texts. I totally see why they are beneficial. But my students are struggling to notice craft in them.” or “My students have gotten pretty good at noticing surface-level craft moves, but after they’ve noticed one or two things — they’re done. How do […]
Sometime during the first week of school this year, I taped this note to my desk: I wanted this year to be different. Not just different than the last few years of COVID School, but different than all the other years of my teaching that valued efficiency and productivity almost above all. (I love efficiency. […]
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 […]
Each month in the Moving Writers Community, I share a complete reading or writing unit plan from my classroom. But this month, by popular demand, I am instead sharing an 11-page e-book detailing the process and resources I use for Kelly Gallagher’s famous Article of the Week in my own classroom. Here’s what you’ll find […]
For the last two — almost three — years I’ve been in survival mode. Pandemic stress + endless COVID-school shifts + serious health issues in my family have left me treading water. And, to be honest, when you’re drowning, you’re not pondering innovative ways of getting to the shore; you are grasping for survival in […]
One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is getting students to feel connected to history. To them, especially at the middle school age, history might as well be the Milky Way– kids are told that it’s real and that they are a part of it, but the scope of history often has such galactical […]
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