Until our students see that writing can offer more than points and grades, they won’t fully engage with it.
Category: Writing Workshop
The Benefits of Writing 11: Better Decision-Making
One of main benefits of writing, so far as I have been able to figure out, is that is helps you make decisions.
The Benefits of Writing 10: Perspective Taking and Points of View
To really persuade someone, you need to show them you understand their point of view.
All Things Made New: My New Book About Writing
This year on Moving Writers, I’ve spotlighted re-reads of some older books about writing, and not all of them by teachers. Together, we examined the writer’s inner life with the poet Ted Hughes, practiced memory writing with the book Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, and honed our questions for conferring with the wonderful Barry Lane. […]
The Benefits of Writing 9: Exploring and Expressing Enthusiasms
For those students, taking any spark of enthusiasm they show and fanning it to a flame, and helping it spread to other possible enthusiasms, becomes one of my goals.
All Things Made New: A Classic of Classroom Revision
This year on Moving Writers, I am dusting off some old-but-wise books on my shelf about writing, creating a tiny review, then considering how one passage from the book can inform writing instruction today, even decades after the book was first published. This month, I’ll consider After The End by Barry Lane, the original edition. […]
Syntax Study for Earth Day
Placing Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and Craig Santos Perez’s “Good Fossil Fuels” side by side can elicit a wide-ranging classroom conversation about the ways the climate crisis is downplayed. Through describing points of convergence and divergence, students can ponder how the “recycled” aspects of Smith’s syntax and prosody appearing in Perez’s poem challenge their thinking […]
The Benefits of Learning 8: Questioning
Writing is the act of asking yourself hard questions and then trying to answer them.
An End-of-the-Year Essay Unit Plan that Brings Students + Literature Together
When Allison and I wrote Beyond Literary Analysis, we read thousands of pieces of writing in the quest to figure out what kind of analysis professional, published writer truly write outside academia. In other words, beyond what English teachers have culturally and historically deemed to be our analytical territory, what kind of analytical writing will […]
The Benefits of Writing 7: Processing Learning
My point is this: using your knowledge to create something new in writing not only helps learning stick – it can inspire more learning.
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