After the last installment of my four-part series on reading like a writer, I received a question from Lisa in Waunakee, WI about helping students better understand what they are doing in their own writing: “How to help students explain WHY/HOW an aspect of the piece (like a description, an added scene, a certain line, […]
Mentor Text: Five Truths and a Lie about Paxton Avenue by Jose Olivarez (pdf) Techniques: Writing Memoir Using a Structure Background – In the first paragraph of this column, I usually reference my Twitter feed. I follow a lot of poets, not only because they share their work, but the poetry community is wonderful at sharing […]
In this series, we’ve been going back to the basics of writing workshop — those fundamental pillars that distinguish workshop teaching from other teaching. The things that make the biggest difference when you want to grow — and move — writers. Giving frequent chunks of time to the practice of writing is hard for all of […]
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, […]
This whole scaffolding series has been building up to this last post. Everything we do to teach kids how to read like writers is in preparation for the last leap: trying the craft in your own work. In literature heavy classrooms, teachers may skip this step: The peak of literary analysis instruction is teaching students […]
If choice is the easiest element of writing workshop to implement, time might actually be the hardest. Because we never, ever have enough of it, do we? And if you don’t currently dedicate class time to writing — and a lot of it — this is going to be hard. But don’t worry. We’ll take […]
(Before diving in to today’s post, be sure to read the first and second posts in this four-post series about noticing and naming craft.) As we move deeper into the process of reading like a writer, we climb higher and higher on Bloom’s pyramid. After we notice and name craft, it’s time to consider why […]
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 […]
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. […]
Every time I go to a workshop about research writing and synthesis (and I’ve been to a few since I teach both AP Language and AP Seminar), we talk about making smoothies or chocolate chip cookies or chili. In every instance–much to my disappointment– we’re not talking about eating, we’re talking about blending evidence effectively. […]
moving writers 