Two weeks ago, I wrote about one of the very most foundational elements of any writing workshop: student choice. I gave you some ways to wade in; I gave you some ways to try something new with choice if you’re already a veteran. And then I asked you for lingering questions and concerns, a record […]
There’s a John Lennon song that addresses an issue that teachers know all too well: “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making [lesson] plans.” Even the most responsive and differentiated approaches can fall victim to the different kinds of chaos that life throws our way (Technology, I’m talking to you). On top […]
Last week I began a series on scaffolds for helping students read like writers. To read like a writer is to appreciate what another writer has made while exploring possibilities for your own work. When students are surrounded by excellent writing and have been taught how to mine that writing for craft, their writing toolbox […]
As English teachers, we often fancy ourselves not just teachers of reading and writing, but keepers of a sacred flame: Culture. For better and worse, we’ve hitched our wagon to both the humanities and the arts and made it our role to help make students both literate and “worldly”. It’s an interesting time to […]
I think what I liked most about middle school was the fact that I had two English classes: Language Arts AND Reading. Now, as a high school English teacher with three sections of an intensive literature course, I often think back to middle school and wish my classes were twice as long so I could […]
There are lots of ways to “do” research in a secondary classroom–everything from small writing pieces with just a little research to full-blown research projects that span several weeks. However you do it, though, it can get messy quickly. How do we show them all the rules of citation without overwhelming them? How do we […]
I’ve found over the years that “writing workshop” means a lot of things to a lot of people. So, what does it mean to have a writing workshop functioning in your classroom? How do you even take the first step? This semester, my regular every-other-Monday “beat” will focus on the fundamental building blocks of writing […]
Image via publicdomainpictures.net Let’s face it: no matter how well we run our reading and writing workshops, there are about a hundred different points in any given class period where problems can crop up. There’s no such thing as a perfect lesson plan, and as a result, teachers have to be decision making machines on a […]
Today’s guest post comes to us from one of our 100 Days of Summer Writing participants, Erin Palazzo. Erin is a high school English teacher in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. She loves helping teens fall in love with reading and develop confidence in writing through mentor texts and readers & writers workshops. Her students would also add that […]
Quick Blurb About My Fall Beat As Rebekah mentioned in her back-to-school series introductory post, each of us will be dedicating a lot of our thinking and writing to a particular “beat” during the fall semester. There may be days we blog outside of our beat simply because another idea or experiment has risen to the […]
moving writers 