We love reader mail! On Monday, we began our answer to Cassie’s brilliant query. Here is the second part of our answer: How do we build our workshops & the lessons that go in them? When we first started writing workshop, we religiously referred to a chart on page 13 of Write Beside Them: “Writing: […]
Tag: high school writing workshop
2.5 Successes and a Failure
It’s June. My students will leave my classroom this week. They hope they will be successful on their exams. I hope they will take their writer’s notebooks with them and not leave them in my room, or in a locker or, God forbid, in a nearby trashcan. As I look back on this school year, […]
Year-End Digital Writing Portfolio
As our students end the year, they are preparing their final assessment — a portfolio of their work this year. Writing portfolios are nothing new, but as we thought about how we should structure the portfolio and what it should include, we considered, Since our students have submitted all of their work digitally this year, […]
An End-of-the-Year Mentor Text Workshop
You know those last two weeks of school when you feel like you’re in limbo? It’s not enough time to start another unit, and yet what to do during class while students are prepping for exams and compiling writing portfolios? I am spending two weeks (nine, 45-minute class periods) on a workshop on mentor […]
Dabbling in Standards-Based Writing Assessment
Teaching writing is not for the faint-hearted. Assessing writing is even less so. For years, I have struggled in vain to find the perfect system — “objective” one-size-fits-all trait-based rubrics, rubrics I have created, rubrics my students have created. None ever seems to accurately measure what I see in a student’s writing. And while I […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Creating Writers not Writing Automatons
Can we agree that we hate the five paragraph essay? Every time I confer with a student who says, “Well, I have two body paragraphs, but I need one more”, I shudder. FIVE IS NOT A MAGIC NUMBER has become my mantra. I’m thinking about making a poster to hang in the front of my […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Moving Past Summary in Film Analysis
Mentor Text: “Captain America on the Potomac” by Linda Holmes for NPR. April 1, 2014. Skill Taught: Moving past summary in film analysis Background: My English 9s are working on an essay on the theme of a Pixar short film of their choosing as an entry point into the world of analytical, academic writing. The films are […]
The Power of Flash Drafting: Less Thinking, More Writing
I am very late to the flash draft party. It’s not a new concept. Ralph Fletcher mentions it in What a Writer Needs, and he attributes the concept to another teacher entirely. But I hadn’t heard about it until a Twitter chat last month when a group of elementary writing teachers raved about its power […]
Moving Students from Idea to Draft: a Sticky-Note Structure
Structure seems to be something young writers innately sense … or don’t. Those who don’t tend to have explosive bursts of thought, leaving word shrapnel all over the paper. To try to combat this, one of my first mini-lessons of the year is on brainstorming — hoping that if students write their ideas down somewhere, […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Ken Tucker’s Review of Pharrell’s New Album
Mentor Text: Tucker, Ken. “Pharrell Williams: Just Exhilaratingly Happy”. 6 March 2014. npr.org. Technique: Using Figurative Language as Evidence Background: Ken Tucker read his review of Pharrell’s new album on Fresh Air as I drove home after work one Friday. “A MENTOR TEXT!” I screeched. (Literally.) And sometimes — the most wonderful times — we find mentor texts this […]
moving writers 