I never speak at a conference or work with a district where I don’t talk about the magic of flash drafting. Probably second only to mentor texts, flash drafts have utterly changed the way I teach writing. A flash draft is a super-fast, down-and-dirty draft that moves ideas from your brain to paper. It is […]
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 […]
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 […]
You don’t have to throw away everything you’ve ever taught in order to make a big change in student writing. Sometimes we want to do what we’re already doing … just better. Not a whole new plan. Not a new curriculum. Not starting-from-scratch. We want something we can insert into our regular routines that will […]
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 […]
“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 […]
Research writing has been a big part of my teaching for the past few years as I’ve moved more and more into the world of AP Seminar. In 2018 I spent most of my blogging time thinking about how to Make Research Relevant. That year and the years that have followed have yielded all kinds […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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