When I first moved from teaching middle school to teaching high school, I brought my workshop practice with me. At first, I was worried that this type of instruction wouldn’t meet the needs of my high school students, but it didn’t take me very long to realize that it was exactly what they needed. And […]
Last month, I described my plans and worries for the new risk I’m taking with a familiar course: a mini fiction workshop in my IB English class. Last week we finished reading our mentor texts, stories from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, and now students are in the middle of some independent […]
Previously on Stefanie’s Moving Writers Posts (or, perhaps for the sake of this TV-style intro, As the Pencil Sharpens): In writing conferences with seniors last month, the most popular response to the question “If you could write anything, what would you like to be writing right now?” was “a short story.” And so, on today’s […]
Every day, the student walked into my class sighing, treating my classroom like it was maybe the second circle of hell, or, at the very least, purgatory. Every assignment induced moans, every request that the writer keep writing or try a little harder met with a roll of the eye. And now this student was […]
My beat this year is all about exploring how students can write their way INto texts and use their writing (or others’) to learn more about literature. If you’re looking for new ways to use writing in a literature study or hoping to blend writing workshop into a course where it doesn’t seem like a […]
One of the joys of a rainy Saturday afternoon when all the work is caught up and the laundry rumbles around in the washer or dryer is stretching out on my couch for a little channel surfing. Usually, a commercial break means it’s time to change the channel, but last Saturday, the break began with […]
My beat this fall is all about exploring how students can write their way INto texts and use their writing (or others’) to learn more about literature. If you’re looking for new ways to use writing in a literature study or hoping to blend writing workshop into a course where it doesn’t seem like a […]
On any day last week, a quick sweep of my three senior classes offered the same scene: gaunt, gray faces; foreheads on tables; backpacks exploding with papers; hair teased and tangled by frustrated fingers. It’s the October crunch, and my seniors are feeling the pressure of first quarter assessments, college applications, and fall SAT testing. […]
I think what I liked most about middle school was the fact that I had two English classes: Language Arts AND Reading. Now, as a high school English teacher with three sections of an intensive literature course, I often think back to middle school and wish my classes were twice as long so I could […]
“I’m crying in the middle of this Panera Bread”: not a comment I imagined I might need to add to a bank!
moving writers 