There are lots of teachers who implement writing workshop in baby steps — maybe first some mini-lessons, and then some conferring down the road, and later expanded choice for students, and next year some mentor texts. And that works! For me, it didn’t, though. I dabbled in workshop for a year before I realized that […]
We had the honor of joining CNUSDEdChat last summer when we were in California for their Literary is Everywhere conference! Take a listen!
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 […]
Writing alongside our students is one of the most important instructional moves we can make – both for our students and for ourselves.
Before I leapt into writing workshop years ago, the biggest thing holding me back was my fear of writing conferences. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t know what to say or that I couldn’t help or that a student would bring me a problem I didn’t know how to solve. Years have passed. Now, […]
Today’s post is from frequent guest-poster Kelly Pace. Kelly teaches 9th, 11th, and 12th grade English and Theory of Knowledge to students at my former school home in Hanover County, Virginia. You can read some of her other Moving Writers pieces here and here. You can connect with her on Twitter @kellyapace. “Mrs. Pace, did you […]
We are singing Hamilton as we read today’s fantastic, deep-dive guest post from Scott Bayer, an English Language Arts (ELA) Instructional Specialist for grades 6-12 in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has taught high school English for 16 years and is passionate about creating meaningful learning experiences for students, teaching a more inclusive reading list, and developing student […]
You might remember that this fall, on a whim, I jumped into a year long independent writing routine with my students. I did it because I know that students needed more time to pursue their own writing interests, because I know it will build students’ writing muscles, because I know some of my own teacher […]
I acknowledge that learning to really craft writing on demand (rather than brain-dumping on demand) is an important skill for our students to cultivate. They will all engage in some kind of timed, test-like writing situation in their academic lives. And after that, they will still be asked to compose something on-the-spot in job interviews […]
Although there may be a horde of teachers who have whittled it down to a perfect science, no teacher has ever been excited or invigorated by preparing his or her students for a standardized writing test. And yet, it’s something that pretty much every one of us must do in one way or another. Like […]
moving writers 