We are singing Hamilton as we read today’s fantastic, deep-dive guest post from Scott Bayer, an English Language Arts (ELA) Instructional Specialist for grades 6-12 in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has taught high school English for 16 years and is passionate about creating meaningful learning experiences for students, teaching a more inclusive reading list, and developing student […]
Mentor Text: A MAD Fold-In Poem by Daniel Scott Tysdal Techniques: Poetic Form Writing Rough Drafts Analysis Visual Presentation Background – If you read this column regularly, you know that I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately. I’ve actually made it a professional goal to explore poetry in my classroom with more intent the last […]
A post exploring two Twitter accounts that provide a wealth of interesting visual material for your classroom writers!
You might remember that this fall, on a whim, I jumped into a year long independent writing routine with my students. I did it because I know that students needed more time to pursue their own writing interests, because I know it will build students’ writing muscles, because I know some of my own teacher […]
Tonight at 7:30 pm EST on Heinemann’s Facebook page, I am going LIVE to give you a sneak peek at the features of our new book Beyond Literary Analysis, to give you a sense of how this book might help you and help your students, and to answer your questions! Join me!
Today, I’ll get back to a series of posts I started in December, sharing how we revisited and remixed the study of memoir in our Grade 12 courses. When we sat and discussed what we felt we wanted to “get” out of studying a memoir, my awesome teaching homie Rachelle was emphatic that we wanted […]
If you’re like us, you have taught literary analysis because it seems important, necessary. It seems like the thing we secondary writing teachers do. And yet, if you’re like us, the results haven’t been the stunning works of boundary-breaking criticism you’d like. We’d like to introduce you to our new book (just out today!), Beyond Literary […]
Like most teachers, I’ve had a estranged relationship with the AP exam—and any standardized test. Do we have an obligation to prepare students for the “test”? I think so. But that obligation can never supplant the greater responsibility we bear to build our students’ literacy lives in an increasingly challenging world. Or put another way—do […]
IB exams begin in early May, and I’m a teacher who loves to settle into a discussion when the ideas are good and they just keep coming, so if you asked my students to identify an external conflict in the drama of senior year of IB Literature, they would say “Ms. Jochman vs. the calendar.” […]
There aren’t any cheat sheets or formulas to help students do well on the SAT essay. But as it turns out, that might actually be a good thing.
moving writers 