In our writing classrooms, 2020 has been a year full of surprise. In Pennsylvania, we had a warm, nearly snowless winter and sudden, snappy late frosts in in the spring, so it’s been a year of surprises in the garden just outside my back door as well. Recently, I started taking some photos of striking […]
Category: remote learning
Well, What are You Waiting For?: An End of Year Rant
Trigger Warning: this post opens with a possibly offensive rant. If you feel the need to skip said rant, I have inserted a subheading to indicate where it is safe to begin reading. When I first started this beat about starting over and about being more intentional with which practices we keep and which ones […]
Overcoming “New Tank Syndrome”
The Feedback Dilemma The workshop model is built around giving students high-impact and timely feedback. Instead of writing comments on a graded paper, we get to work with students one-on-one or in small groups during the reading and writing process. As a result, students get that feedback when they need it, and they have time […]
Where do we go from here? How ’bout a victory lap?
Lindsay Bruggeman is a high school English teacher currently working toward her Masters of Arts in Teaching with the Ohio Writing Project at Miami University. You can reach her at lindsaybruggeman3@gmail.com or Twitter @MrsBruggemanLHS So, where do we go from here? We can start by holding on to the good bones of our classrooms. […]
A Collaborative Poem for An Isolating Pause
The good news is that words bind us together and can help us to create collaboratively with our students even as we all adjust to our new, socially distant ways.
A (Remote) Exploration of Poetry: Week 3
Hello, friends, I hope you had a good week last week. I hope you’re feeling well, and that the people you love are feeling well, too. This week’s poetry work is focused on a strange pairing: imagery and concision. It seems like imagery is requisite for any kind of poetry study. However, I find that most […]
A (Remote) Exploration of Poetry: Week Two
Hello, friends, It’s another week of distance learning — and boy, are we all learning. To tell you the truth, I’m grateful for the distraction of the learning right now. Less time to surf the news. 🙂 This week, my students will be thinking about line and stanza breaks and how poets do this intentionally to […]
We’re All New Teachers Now: Tips for Teacher-Collaborators
Now that the pandemic has struck, many of us feel like we are starting over as we navigate this fluid and nebulous teaching situation. What’s a teacher to do? If you’re anything like me, you stand on the shoulders of other teachers. Every Sunday since this all began, the Ohio Writing Project has hosted […]
A (Remote) Exploration of Poetry: Week 1
Hello, dear friends and brave teachers, I’m going to dispense with the bells and whistles because none of us have time for that. Since my students are at home for the rest of the year, I’ve made some on-the-fly adjustments to our curriculum (like: No Macbeth By Yourself at Home!) and, so, come up with […]
