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.
Tag: mentor texts
Have Tos & Mights: Making Mentor Text Noticings Concrete
Last year, I began to notice a curious but recurring pattern — students’ final papers lacked many of the elements we noticed in the mentor texts. It was as though students had forgotten that we studied the mentor texts for days and days and made grand lists of noticings. It was as though they had […]
Argument in the Wild: Reading & Writing from Media-Rich Texts
The idea that “everything’s an argument” seems almost too obvious these days. After all, talk to almost any adolescent today and it’s clear how aware they are of the ways in which they are constantly being persuaded, whether it’s an editorial from the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, the latest newscast from […]
Scaffolding Authentic Literary Analysis
Sometimes we need to scaffold the thinking that goes into writing more than we need to scaffold where a topic sentence goes in a paragraph. Mentor texts can help with that!
A Definition-Essay Study: Definition is More Than a Line in a Dictionary
Melissa Surber teaches 11th grade Junior and Senior College Prep English and AP Literature and Composition at Troy Buchanan High School in Troy, Missouri, an hour north of St. Louis. She is in her 18th year of teaching and just recently became National Board Certified. Connect with her at @ELAWordsmith. Mentor Texts: Patton Oswalt Facebook […]
Teaching Each Instead of All
My journey (so far) with differentiating writing instruction to meet each learner’s needs.
No Unicorns Here: Demystifying the Hard Work of Reading with Mentor Texts
How adopting a mentor text approach to writing instruction is actually helping me teach reading comprehension
The Quest to Reduce Text
In August, I gave myself permission to leave walls blank to make way for instruction. Halfway through the school year, I’m checking back in on that work.
A New Approach to Finding Mentor Texts for Literary Analysis
In our 9th grade Reading Writing Workshop, most writing studies are genre-based. Occasionally, we center our writing studies around a writing technique. But in my 12th grade IB English class, things are a little different. We still use a workshop approach to writing — we move through writing processes in different ways and at different […]
Tiny Writing: Boosting Opportunities for Frequent Student Publication
I love swimming in writing studies for weeks at a time with my students — immersing ourselves in mentor texts, gathering information, writing off the page, talking out our ideas, drafting, revising. But when the average writing study lasts 3-5 weeks, it’s hard to keep the momentum and excitement of seeing a piece through to […]
moving writers 