One of the most rewarding aspects of my Moving Writers beat is hearing from other educators about how they encourage students to identify when they feel they are a part of Nature and not merely apart from it. Despite receiving a constant barrage of information, or perhaps because of it, our information-glutted minds seem to […]
We know that writing strategies are everywhere. And, I am amazed at the amount of writing skills and strategies that are embedded into social media platforms. Although the student writer may not actually notice the author’s craft and intention that goes into well-crafted tweets, they are there in abundance, and I realized recently that these […]
I have had a lot of conversations this year with teachers about expectations for students, specifically 9th grade and high school students, and it is clear that not everyone agrees on what the expectations should be for writers at the secondary level. Which, honestly is ironic considering the amount of standards and standardized assessments that […]
Providing feedback that builds on conferring conversations can be a game changer…if you start keeping track of your conversations with writers!
Teaching writing, at first, was a struggle for me. It was a struggle because the kids seemed to detest it. When I asked them why I received all sorts of answers, but one answer that kept coming up was that they didn’t feel like the writing was “real”; they turned in all their writing to […]
Ever heard of the Enneagram? How could implementing personality types into ELA help your students better analyze characters and create authentic characters? I take you through some moves in this MW piece
Some thoughts on why I always establish reading conferring in order to prepare students to confer about writing.
Dear (overly tested subject) teacher, How are you? February in Texas was a rough ride. And, I’ve been thinking about how to support you. I’ve been thinking about the most meaningful thing to write about this month every day to add to the writing resources and ideas for supporting teachers of writing and writers themselves. […]
Things are a little stressful in Texas, where I live. We just survived a snow-pocalypse the likes we’ve not seen in a century. Many of us had power outages, no internet, no water, or busted pipes, and this was just during the week of SNOVID! That doesn’t include all of the trials of the aftermath. […]
Finding balance in the classroom is one of the most challenging aspects of instruction, especially now that time is even more valuable than before. And, every year at this time, conversations start about how teams of teachers are providing intervention and about what the data says in regards to which students are on track to […]
