As Moving Writers readers know, one of the central ideas behind this site is authentic writing—what does writing in the real and wild world look like (versus the sometimes too-tightly controlled world of our classrooms)? Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the more the writing I ask students to do in the classroom […]
Category: writing community
Three Things I Believe
A tough start to the school year combined with the launch of a new unit created the perfect storm to force me to put into writing 3 beliefs that drive me as an educator.
Academic Gifting: Offering Authenticity and Collaboration
Academic Gifting allows students to respond to authentic writing and to identify as authors.
Titan Talk: Pen Pal Letters and Social Health
Aiming to bridge the social gap by creating authentic opportunities to read and write
The First Thing: Writers are Readers.
On Moving Writers and in Writing With Mentors, you get a taste of my classroom and a peek behind the curtain of my planning process. But what you see is only half the story. While I am passionate about writing instruction, it’s only one half of my instruction. I also teach literature — through whole […]
Coaching Writers to Provide Quality Feedback
Use these five tips and the tools provide to coach high quality peer review sessions.
Mentor Text Wednesday: The OUPA
Mentor Text: Various Poems Writing Techniques: Writing poetry Writing around a theme or topic Building a writing community Background: Though it’s no longer something that I do, I have taught Art. It’s pretty clear in my classroom, as I do a lot of work that incorporates visual elements. I love having students express their learning […]
Supporting Our Most Reluctant-to-Share Writers
We’ve all wondered what more we could do to help the Todd Andersons of our class–the painfully shy writers who would rather do a week’s worth of extra homework than read one line from their writer’s notebook aloud. And while leaving the shy student alone and allowing him to skip his turn in the […]
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