One of the greatest things about being active online as a teacher is that you get to interact with, and learn from, a lot of different people. I would never go as far to tell anyone that they absolutely have to be on Twitter to be a good teacher, but I can comfortably say that […]
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Steal Like An Artist: A Swipe File of Mentor Texts
One of the books that my AP Lang students read is Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist (the other is 1984; they make an interesting pair). I actually had the opportunity to meet Kleon briefly and hear him speak when he came to my school district as the keynote speaker for our in-service day earlier this month. […]
“Word by Word”: Thinking About Close Reading, Revision, and NCTE
The title of Anne Lamott’s book on writing, Bird by Bird, comes from a family story that a favorite colleague of mine also liked to tell when she was helping students get started with their writing. As Lamott tells it, when her father saw her brother overwhelmed by the task of a report on birds […]
Archives of 11/12 #movingwriters Chat
It’s #NCTE week, and the #movingwriters team couldn’t be more excited! Because we pretty much can’t take our mind off of #NCTE, we had a little pre-NCTE celebratory chat last night exploring some of the themes we’ll be uncovering in our presentation on Sunday at 12:45! Here are the questions we considered: Missed the chat? […]
Extreme Classroom Makeover: Student Writing Portfolios
I have been using writing portfolios to assess my students’ writing in December and June for as long as I’ve been teaching. Portfolios are wonderful for so many reasons: they invite students to compile a body of work, encourage revision, show growth over time, and so forth. But sometimes they feel a little stale, a […]
Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” as Mentor Text
We’ve been excitedly sitting on today’s guest post for nearly a year! We are so happy to finally share this lesson with you — perfect for the late fall and early winter as you scramble to engage your students in meaningful work before Winter Break! Adrian Nester is an AP English teacher and journalism adviser […]
Moving Writers at #NCTE17
It’s hard (and exhilarating!) to believe that one week from today, many of us will be traveling to St. Louis for NCTE, a.k.a. the Best Weekend of the Year. For the first time ever, members of the Moving Writers team (Karla, Mike, Hattie, Tricia, Stefanie, Megan, and Rebekah) are presenting TOGETHER! A grab bag of […]
GRIT: A Reflection Protocol for Risk-Taking
As a Curriculum and Instruction Consultant in my district, when I’m not working with students as learners, I’m working with their teachers. Over the past few years, we’ve been digging into some really hard work. I mean really hard. We’re working on moving away from teaching novels to teaching reading, away from prescribing a formula […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Dead Game
Mentor Text: Dead Game by Andrew Vachss Writing Techniques: Using Story to Explore an Issue Foreshadowing Personification Focusing a Narrative Background: I pulled this story out in my class this week, not as a mentor text, but as a tool to help us discuss our writing variables. There is a question on my Grade 12s’ […]
3 Steps to Creating Word Nerds
When I started teaching AP Lang, we did a lot of vocab. I gave a monstrous list of “tone words” and students learned 20 each week. I quizzed them weekly, and then we marched on to 20 more. It was not good. Some kids adored it. It was concrete, and they could pad their grades. […]
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