Rubrics tend to be about compliance, not thinking…
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Making Sacred Writing- Sacred Again
This month Abigail takes you through 3 quick ways to jumpstart your writing. If you need a February pick me up.. this is for you.
16 Ways of Making Asking Easier (Part 2 of 2)
Someone recently asked me if my posts on Moving Writers this year are sponsored by Newkirk’s publishers.
20 Strategies for MANAGING Writing Conferences
Often, the what of holding writing conferences isn’t the problem… it’s the how. How to you manage the rest of the class while conferring one on one? How do you find the physical space in a packed classroom? How do you record writing conferences in a meaningful way that will help you and students down […]
No Dumb Questions: Using Inquiry to Drive Research
In his 1995 work, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote a sentence that would be uttered in classrooms around the world for decades to come: “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” We’ll assume, of course, that Sagan is excluding the students in your class who […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Can You Hear The Hum?
Mentor Text: “Can you hear the hum? How Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners illuminated my experience with mental illness” by Alicia Elliott Techniques: Exploring and expressing personal connections Including research in a personal essay Writing a conclusion Background – If you’re a reader of Mentor Text Wednesdays, then you might do what I do – flag passages, […]
First Year Teacher Support: Telling Yourself, “It’ll Buff”
There’s a saying a lot of students at my school use. If something unfortunate happens that they want to shake off— they’re having a bad day, they drop their iPad on the floor, they accidentally bump into someone on the way into class— you might hear them say it. When I first heard the expression, […]
A Message in a Bottle Narrative
The phrase, “a message in a bottle,” conjures an image of a weather-beaten bottle, bearing a message from an earnest sender. It came to mind as I prepared to share a National Geographic encyclopedic entry about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with my students. Eager to provide them with more opportunities to process the implications […]
Learning From Poems: Grand Finales
This year on Moving Writers, my “beat” returns to poetry as a foundational element of a writing classroom. Each month’s post will examine how we can learn about an aspect of writing from a specific poem or poems, then look at what it might sound like to extend those ideas to a writing lesson in […]
The Presents of Mind: Raising a Glass (Half-Full) to Small Victories
This school year, my beat has been all about reflection: I want to learn new strategies for prompting it and to help my students get better at writing it. Upon my own reflection, however, I know I coasted for most of my reflection quest in 2021. The spines of professional texts are barely cracked, and […]
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