Despite all that the pandemic has stolen from us, it has given us a few things too. I’m sure that over the course of the last thirteen months, everyone can relate a story of a connection they have restored thanks to the speed of technology and the slowdown that coping with COVID has imposed. Through […]
My beat this year is all about teaching in the hybrid classroom, but I’m taking a break this month to share an outside-of-the-classroom project that could easily be adapted for in-person, virtual, or hybrid learning. Just two months before my city locked down, I attended a public forum about storytelling featuring StoryCorps founder Dave Isay. […]
Our newest book, A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts, 6-12, comes out in just two weeks! For a limited time, you can get 40% off the list price by pre-ordering and entering the code MENTOR at checkout! And if you pre-order, we’d love to have you join our book club! Just email us your payment […]
I have had a lot of conversations this year with teachers about expectations for students, specifically 9th grade and high school students, and it is clear that not everyone agrees on what the expectations should be for writers at the secondary level. Which, honestly is ironic considering the amount of standards and standardized assessments that […]
Providing feedback that builds on conferring conversations can be a game changer…if you start keeping track of your conversations with writers!
One of the most common genres we ask secondary students to write is the argumentative essay (thanks, Common Core!). State tests ask for it, ACT and SAT, the AP tests…it’s everywhere. In the last fifteen years or so, I think we’ve all done a pretty solid job of prepping students for that type of writing […]
I kept trying to get better at giving students more independent writing time and ensure I conferred with every student every day. Yet, my ELLs continued to struggle in both their language proficiency and productivity. They wrote the least number of pieces every year.
Here’s my first post in this series that will give you some background on Language Field Guides as well the foundation of choice word field guide entries. Language field guides are a place where readers + writers make discoveries about the language they explore. It’s how I approach vocabulary instruction in a way that’s meaningful, […]
We often give them common prompts, or common texts sets with common prompts. We give them common pieces of literature to write about. So why not a common experience?
Teaching writing, at first, was a struggle for me. It was a struggle because the kids seemed to detest it. When I asked them why I received all sorts of answers, but one answer that kept coming up was that they didn’t feel like the writing was “real”; they turned in all their writing to […]
moving writers 