Welcome to the official Mini Moves for Writers launch week! We’re so excited to share this new project with you — one we hope will help you, make your teaching life easier, and move the writers in your classroom. Each day this week we will be sharing a new idea for how to use these […]
Catch up on the whole mini-mentors series! Mini-Mentors for Review Writing, Prompt-Based Writing, and Revision! In the previous iterations of this series, I’ve suggested some ways you might use these mini-mentors in your own classroom: as sentence study warm-ups, as whole-class lessons, in small-group and individual writing conferences. But, you’ll notice something different and special […]
Someone recently asked me if my posts on Moving Writers this year are sponsored by Newkirk’s publishers.
Often, the what of holding writing conferences isn’t the problem… it’s the how. How to you manage the rest of the class while conferring one on one? How do you find the physical space in a packed classroom? How do you record writing conferences in a meaningful way that will help you and students down […]
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
There’s a saying a lot of students at my school use. If something unfortunate happens that they want to shake off— they’re having a bad day, they drop their iPad on the floor, they accidentally bump into someone on the way into class— you might hear them say it. When I first heard the expression, […]
The phrase, “a message in a bottle,” conjures an image of a weather-beaten bottle, bearing a message from an earnest sender. It came to mind as I prepared to share a National Geographic encyclopedic entry about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with my students. Eager to provide them with more opportunities to process the implications […]
This year on Moving Writers, my “beat” returns to poetry as a foundational element of a writing classroom. Each month’s post will examine how we can learn about an aspect of writing from a specific poem or poems, then look at what it might sound like to extend those ideas to a writing lesson in […]
The best lesson I’ve learned about leadership is if you want people to listen to your ideas, you better be the kind of person who listens to theirs. And the best lesson I’ve learned about finding great teaching ideas is that sometimes the thing your teaching practice needs most is occurring just a few doors […]
At the beginning of this year, I committed to spending some time reflecting on what went well last year and which areas of my teaching practice needed a “reset button” after 18 months of interrupted schooling. This month I’m looking closely at one of the things my PLC discussed most during virtual and hybrid learning: […]
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