If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed by now that I’m as likely to retweet something that entertains me as I am to retweet good educational practices when I see them (I’d argue both are important–one for reasons of my sanity and…actually I guess both of them for that.). Which means, for me, […]
“You have to learn the rules before you can break them.” This is an argument I hear frequently – usually in favor of teaching the 5 paragraph essay before more authentic genres or for memorizing parts of speech before studying craft. This year, my beat for Moving Writers reflects my role at school: intervention and […]
I want my students to be continually thinking about context–cultural, historical, and otherwise. For many of my students, the boundaries of their writing AND reading are constricted by their narrow contextual pools of knowledge. Helping them to see why the narratives of their history classes or the view through the microscope in biology are actually […]
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 […]
If you want students to write deep analysis, try starting with a medium and “text” that’s familiar to them: The opening sequences of their favorite TV shows.
Recently, I was wandering around a Target while my daughter was at Girl Scouts, and I was amazed to find six (six!) collections of poetry in the book section! Poetry! At Target! I was so moved that I took a picture and Tweeted, I suppose what moves me is that I don’t think it’s coincidental […]
An exploration of how Twitter can provide quick mini-lessons on writing structure.
Peeking at Twitter last Wednesday during the school day as teachers and reporters posted pictures of students during the National Walk Out, I couldn’t help but cry. Isn’t that always the way you feel when you are so, so sad and also when you see people you love do something extraordinary? But when I saw […]
We’ve been studying up on the idea of journalistic “angles”, in preparation for the writing of our big narrative journalism piece. It’s an unfortunate and important time to be examining such things with high school students. Where we’d normally examining several models about random topics and attempt to uncover the underlying purpose or persuasive efforts […]
Kelly Gallagher is well-known for a lot of reasons in our English teacher world. Killer writing activities. “Readicide”. Clark Kent vibe. (Allison and I once stalked him around a breakfast at NCTE. Remind me to tell you that story sometime.) But I would argue that the thing most frequently associated with Kelly Gallagher is the […]
