Writing With Mentors has a 9-12 label in the top right corner, but it isn’t only for workshop-centered high school teachers. There is something in this book for every writing teacher who wants to engage students, connect them with the real world of writing, draw direct links between reading and writing instruction, and ratchet up the […]
Category: Rebekah O’Dell
5 Tips for Teachers Who Want to Quit Grading
I would wager that grading is probably the very least favorite element of teachers’ jobs. (I would also guess this is quickly followed by complaining parents and senseless, top-down mandates.) We’ve all had the fantasy of the perfect teaching job that would exist if only we weren’t bogged down in numbers and rubrics and gradebooks. […]
So, I Quit Grading: Part III, A Conclusion
Before reading this post, you might want to catch up with my grand grading experiment this year in my first post and second post in this series! I cried at graduation this year. No, that’s not right. I sobbed at graduation this year. Something that has never happened to me in the previous 10 graduations […]
The Catalyzing Moment – an Interview with Allison & Rebekah
We owe a lot to Tom Newkirk. Actually, we owe almost everything to Tom Newkirk. This brilliant man has been a leader in our fields for decades, but one cold morning in Boston 2 1/2 years ago he spoke directly to Allison and me through a crowded room. And everything changed. We talk about this […]
Newsletters – My New One-Stop Mentor Text Shop
Finding mentor texts can be hard. And time consuming. This, we know. Even after years of making mentor texts the fulcrum on which the rest of my writing instruction pivots, finding the right set of texts for the students in front of me can be a challenge. In Writing With Mentors, Allison and I share […]
Anthologies for Ending a Year
The beauty of Jay’s Mentor Text Wednesday posts is that they give us an instant idea — something to take back into our classrooms immediately, something to tinker with and fit to our students’ needs, and something to expand the way we think about mentor texts and the possibilities for our students’ writing. It’s easy […]
What We Wish We Had Known …
This weekend as so many teachers graduate from college and begin this wonderful, crazy, noble, life-changing career, Allison and I wrote about what we wish we had known when we started at the Education Week Teacher blog! We thought we knew everything when we left our teacher ed programs. We could plan a perfectly balanced […]
Making “Writer” a Label Students Can Wear – Three Ideas
Before mentors texts became the flexible frame onto which I could hang all of my writing instruction, I had nothing to do with all of the cool articles I stumbled across. When I found a piece of writing that connected with my curriculum, I would most often say, “Hey! Cool!”, print it or clip it, […]
Writer’s Telephone – an Information-Gathering, Idea-Nuturing Strategy
I feel like I’ve been engaged in a pedagogical ancestry project recently — mapping my teaching forebears through generations. In floods of professional books, blogs, Tweets, and chats, these ideals into which I have become so deeply entrenched sometimes lose their original source. Like a game of educational Telephone, the message gets translated and retranslated, […]
Watch Us on #theEdCollabGathering!
What a thrill it was to go LIVE this morning with #theEdCollabGathering to chat about Notebook Time and the ways it moves our student writers forward through play and discovery! You can view our session here, on The Educator Collaborative’s Gathering site, or here on YouTube! You can get all of our materials by […]
moving writers 