Rebekah and I are gearing up for NCTE 2014 in just a few weeks! This week’s post is a special preview of our presentation: Moving the Writer: Embracing a Vision for a Technique-Driven Workshop. Here is the description printed in the convention program: What does it take to move the writer and not just the writing? […]
Category: Writing Workshop
All Writing, All the Time — My Plan for Semester 2
Maternity leave has given me a huge gift — the excuse to teach all writing all the time when I return to school in January. That might sound daunting or boring (writing every day? five days a week?), but for me it’s an enormous mental relief. Let’s be honest: the absolute most challenging part about […]
Using Technology for Mentor Text Hunting
We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about all of wonderful things mentor texts can do for writers of all ages and abilities. If you haven’t noticed, we’re mentor text obsessed. But, in the interest of full disclosure, here is undoubtedly the worst aspect of using mentor texts in my classroom: it […]
What a High School Writing Teacher Can Learn from Preschool Writer’s Workshop
I teach big kids and always have. High schoolers. But since writing instruction is my great teaching passion — and since summer provides few outlets for actual interaction with students — my almost-three-year-old daughter became my student as I subjected her to a summer of preschool writing workshop. How does this endeavor equal summer fun […]
Introducing Mentor Texts & Introducing Ourselves
In my classroom, the school year typically comes on like gangbusters. I begin fast and furious as a sort of illusion — more for my benefit than for the students. It’s as though I feel that the faster I tread the beginning-of-school water, the less I’ll feel like I’m drowning. This year has been very different. […]
Reader Mail, Part 2: How Do You Plan for a Year of Writing Workshop?
We love reader mail! On Monday, we began our answer to Cassie’s brilliant query. Here is the second part of our answer: How do we build our workshops & the lessons that go in them? When we first started writing workshop, we religiously referred to a chart on page 13 of Write Beside Them: “Writing: […]
2.5 Successes and a Failure
It’s June. My students will leave my classroom this week. They hope they will be successful on their exams. I hope they will take their writer’s notebooks with them and not leave them in my room, or in a locker or, God forbid, in a nearby trashcan. As I look back on this school year, […]
Year-End Digital Writing Portfolio
As our students end the year, they are preparing their final assessment — a portfolio of their work this year. Writing portfolios are nothing new, but as we thought about how we should structure the portfolio and what it should include, we considered, Since our students have submitted all of their work digitally this year, […]
Encouraging Revision: Advice for Teachers from a Student Writer
In April, my returning creative writers choose from one of two projects: write a novel, screenplay or book of poems in 30 days, or revise their novel from November. Catie, a senior, was the only student who chose revision. I wasn’t surprised. It’s hard to motivate students to revise! So I pressed her a bit, […]
Dabbling in Standards-Based Writing Assessment
Teaching writing is not for the faint-hearted. Assessing writing is even less so. For years, I have struggled in vain to find the perfect system — “objective” one-size-fits-all trait-based rubrics, rubrics I have created, rubrics my students have created. None ever seems to accurately measure what I see in a student’s writing. And while I […]
moving writers 