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 […]
Category: Writing Workshop
“Writing Workshop Made Me a Writer”: A Student Spotlight
Writing workshop aims to foster independence and growth in the writing process. We teach and draft and revise and confer in the hopes that our students will end up in a different writing space by the end of the school year. To be honest, we can typically measure that growth in coffeespoons. That isn’t to […]
Offering Choice During Mini-Lessons
In April, in Creative Writing, we’ve taken a detour from technique-driven units of study. Students are participating in a National Novel Writing Month-inspired challenge, choosing from one of the following writing projects: 30 poems in 30 days, a novel (10,000 words minimum), a screenplay (45 pages minimum). As the weather turns from winter to spring, […]
The Power of Flash Drafting: Less Thinking, More Writing
I am very late to the flash draft party. It’s not a new concept. Ralph Fletcher mentions it in What a Writer Needs, and he attributes the concept to another teacher entirely. But I hadn’t heard about it until a Twitter chat last month when a group of elementary writing teachers raved about its power […]
Coming to Terms with the P-Word
My friends don’t understand why I love bikram yoga–the heat (105 degrees), the humidity (40%), the predictability (26 postures repeated twice). “Don’t you get bored?” they persist. No. In fact, the predictability of the class is one of the aspects that makes the yoga so enjoyable. Most people learn the 26 postures quickly–it just takes […]
Moving Students from Idea to Draft: a Sticky-Note Structure
Structure seems to be something young writers innately sense … or don’t. Those who don’t tend to have explosive bursts of thought, leaving word shrapnel all over the paper. To try to combat this, one of my first mini-lessons of the year is on brainstorming — hoping that if students write their ideas down somewhere, […]
Connecting Writers’ Struggles to Mentor Text Solutions
I have recently found myself reinforcing (and re-teaching) the fundamentals of how to use a mentor text with my ninth graders. After our most recent unit, I asked students how many of them went back and looked at the mentor texts I provided on their own after we had used them in a mini-lesson. 56% […]
A Writer’s Secret Weapon
“I don’t know what to write about.” As a teacher and writer with “so many ideas and so little time,” I find this common student response troubling. But when I pause to reflect on why students might be uninspired or why they have difficulty finding ideas, I realize that, in some cases, it’s because they […]
Writing Our Way Into Critical Thinking
Way back one month ago, I made some resolutions for my classes. Among them was a switch-up that would turn the Quick Write into a broader Notebook Time — giving my students lots of varied opportunities to play with words in different ways. In short, switching things up has been invigorating for my students. I […]
Writers Have Plans: Using Next Lists to Build Writing Lives
Last night I tossed and turned, hunting for an idea for this week’s post. This morning at the breakfast table, a steaming cup of coffee beside me, I scan through a Google folder labeled “Blog To Do List.” Rebekah and I created this file months ago, preloading it with ideas for future entries. I feel […]
