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.
Category: revision
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 […]
“The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle” (and How to Help Your Writers Deliver it with Assessment Reviews)
I came across one of those well-intended but ultimately wrong-minded tweets today while scrolling through Twitter. It offered advice for “ELA teachers” from someone who isn’t one. It suggested encouraging students to try out a new Microsoft Word feature that will basically auto-suggest (or replace, if I interpreted the gif correctly) segments of student writing […]
Connecting the Dots: Follow-up
Disclaimer #1: I am currently in a post-conference hangover—that day after high where you are just buzzing… and then the two day after low where you don’t even want to adult. I was just nerding out with 19 other K-12 literacy folks from Beijing to Oman to Laos at Riffa Views International School in the […]
Connecting the dots…
First off…a reminder that my ‘beat’ for this 2019/20 academic year will revolve around the concept of ‘connection’. My first post was related to establishing habits of daily writing at the start of a school year by way of relationship building. Connection #1—Early Set-up of the Formative and Revision Process Inspired by: A colleague that I truly appreciate […]
Workshop Process Non-Negotiable (Part 2): Revision & Determining Importance
Last month I wrote Part 1 of this topic. It focused on the “messiness” of the writing process. Actually, it focused on the necessity of it. For it is within the messiness that student engagement and ownership over their writing increases. This post is about what comes after that messiness…what to do with all of […]
When They Get It (But Can’t Quite Say So…)
As an MTSS support coach, I’m constantly reminded that students at the losing end of the achievement gap are very rarely deficient in their ability to take an academic interest in a subject. But when a student’s reading and writing gaps are so far behind grade level that traditional assessments bar them from demonstrating their […]
Making Research Relevant: Teaching Students to Synthesize Evidence
Every time I go to a workshop about research writing and synthesis (and I’ve been to a few since I teach both AP Language and AP Seminar), we talk about making smoothies or chocolate chip cookies or chili. In every instance–much to my disappointment– we’re not talking about eating, we’re talking about blending evidence effectively. […]
The Most Essential School Supply (Plus 3 Instructional Practices to Make the Most of It!)
It’s that time of year. Yeah, we may sometimes feel like we’re in survival mode with eager tallies marking how many Mondays are left in the school year, but as much as we might be counting down, we’re also starting to plan ahead for next year. We’re waxing reflective and submitting school supply lists to […]
Podcasting as Writing Process
This is not going to be a post teaching you how to conduct a unit on podcasting. (If that’s what you’re looking for, maybe someday. But also Stefanie has written a brilliant series on this starting here.) Rather, this is a post where I will muse on what teaching podcasting has revealed about the process […]
moving writers 