I want to take the reigns of my classroom narrative by showing anyone who visits what successful learning looks like in my classroom and what they can do to positively interact with the learning that’s happening. Essentially, I am communicating my expectations for me, my students, and I am communicating my expectations for them as a […]
Friends, I’m trying something new this year! A vlog series about communicating writing workshop with students, parents, and administrators! Please let me know how you like it below in the comments (I’m dying to know)! Remember: the key to these videos is that they are brief and follow a predictable format. In every video, I […]
As is our habit, we are taking the summer away from the blog to read, write, and recharge. We’ll be back in late August with new content, but for the summer, let’s take a journey down memory lane as we visit our ten most-read posts from the previous school year! This semester I’m bringing […]
The 2nd annual 100 Days of Summer Writing is underway! Welcome, new friends! So good to see you, friends from last summer! We are hopeful that this will be a restorative and transformative experience for you both as a person and as a writing teacher! We are also grateful to those of you who registered […]
This semester I’ve been chronicling my first-ever experiment with Genius Hour and its intersection with the regular machinations of our writing workshop. You can catch up on the other posts in this series before diving into this wrap up! ________________________________________________________________________________________ Genius Hour, and the school year, are almost over. My students are writing their final […]
This semester I’m sharing my experiment with bringing Genius Hour into my writing workshop. You can catch up on the rest of the series here. I don’t have many crystal-clear high school English class memories, believe it or not, but one of them is sitting in the library with my 11th grade class, a stack […]
Not every administrator “gets” writing workshop (she says laughing at the biggest understatement ever). But a couple years ago, one of my admins, who didn’t really “get” writing workshop, complimented our program saying, “Well, I’ll tell you this. These are the most reflective students we have ever had. They can write reflectively for pages!” While that’s […]
I’m spending the next few posts sharing how I’m using Genius Hour to help kids follow their passions to deeper research, learning, and, of course, writing! You can see past posts here: Introduction + Context Finding, Developing, and Pitching Ideas Beyond conferring with students, blogging is the only formal accountability system I am using in […]
For the next few weeks, I am going to share about how my experiment with Genius Hour intersects writing workshop — and how giving kids choice and freedom to access their passion helps you do it all! If you need to get caught up, I gave an introduction and overview in my first post in […]
Reading and Writing Workshop are my teaching superpowers and my kryptonite. While the workshop model enables me to be the teacher I want to be to empower my students to be the kind of students they are truly capable of being, they can occasionally make me hesitant to try new models. I love consistency (so do […]
moving writers 