A Mentor Text for Place-Based Storytelling

Photo by Zac Ong on Unsplash During the last couple of years of teaching, making mini-zines has been a highlight.  An 8-page zine has been a go-to method for helping students shrink a narrative down to accessible compactness.  As my students plot environmental stories culminating in a call to action, the details associated with specific […]

Wandering Around: The untidy parts of a real-life writing process

If you teach writing, you’re likely very familiar with The Writing Process. Not a (lower-case) writing process: The Writing Process. The exact wording may shift slightly, but essentially it’s the same standard sequence that one must follow in order to fully be a capital W Writer: you plan, draft, revise, edit, and finally, publish. It’s […]

Google Games: 3 Quick Tips for Helping Kids Level Up Their (Re)search

Most teachers have grand aspirations when embarking upon inquiry work with their classes, but when they get to the part where the kids actually have to find out stuff…it all comes crashing down. What if there was a game you could play with students to sharpen their Google searching skills, as well as their research […]

Go Ahead! Open That Can of Worms: A Lesson for Introducing ChatGPT

“I don’t think you should be talking about this,” a ninth grader muttered under his breath as he gritted his teeth and sank a bit lower in his chair.  No, this was not the response when I started a lesson about healthy relationships during our Catcher in the Rye study (everyone likes hearing their English […]

How to Have the “Fun”, Free-Choice Writing Workshop of Students’ Dreams

In spite of my protestations to the contrary, I want to be the fun teacher. It’s just that often my definition of fun involves annotating or revising or learning etymology and that doesn’t consistently align with students’ definition of fun. After four months of what even I deemed to be not-fun work (various iterations of […]

Brave New Words: 5 Ideas for Bringing ChatGPT into Your Writing Workshop

You can hardly get online recently without seeing an article or other hand-wringing about ChatGPT and what this means for the world. Especially the English teacher world. Thankfully, Brett Vogelsinger has done some thinking about this. Instead of fighting against it, what if we could use ChatGPT and other AI to actually benefit our writers? […]

Making All Things New: Prompts for Thinking Creatively

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 Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively by Hans Ostrom, Wendy […]