This semester I’ve been chronicling my first-ever experiment with Genius Hour and its intersection with the regular machinations of our writing workshop. You can catch up on the other posts in this series before diving into this wrap up! ________________________________________________________________________________________ Genius Hour, and the school year, are almost over. My students are writing their final […]
As much as I hate to admit it, I was not much of a reader in high school. It’s not that I didn’t like reading. I did. I just didn’t know what to read. My friend would buy books every now and then and pass them along to me. I would read them and enjoy […]
I’m spending the next few posts sharing how I’m using Genius Hour to help kids follow their passions to deeper research, learning, and, of course, writing! You can see past posts here: Introduction + Context Finding, Developing, and Pitching Ideas Beyond conferring with students, blogging is the only formal accountability system I am using in […]
For the next few weeks, I am going to share about how my experiment with Genius Hour intersects writing workshop — and how giving kids choice and freedom to access their passion helps you do it all! If you need to get caught up, I gave an introduction and overview in my first post in […]
Paige’s post today reminds us that our very best teaching with one group of students isn’t our best teaching with a different group — we must constantly bend our teaching to meet the needs of the students in front of us. Many of us cringe at the leveling of students and especially at the titles […]
Reading and Writing Workshop are my teaching superpowers and my kryptonite. While the workshop model enables me to be the teacher I want to be to empower my students to be the kind of students they are truly capable of being, they can occasionally make me hesitant to try new models. I love consistency (so do […]
You might know Paige from this guest post or this guest post! We loved her and her perspective and her voice so much that we invited her along for the ride as our newest contributing writer! Welcome her in the comments below! *** “It has got to stop!” These words, spoken by Kylene Beers at […]
Last time, I encouraged you to have LOUD, boisterous writing workshops full of writerly talk between writers and between writers and teachers. Our confident writers benefit from identifying sounding boards in the classroom; our insecure writers can often do more in their speech than they can through their written language, so intentional classroom talk time […]
At first glance, it might seem like we are “just hanging out”: I am wildly waving my arms in the corner of the classroom, talking to a student about his latest, greatest idea. Meanwhile, Charles and Bowen are in the hall talk-writing. (Talk-Writing (n.) — the condition of chatting and writing at the same time.) […]
Today’s guest post is from Paige Timmerman, a high school English teacher in Salem, Illinois. She has guest written for Moving Writers before as she explored audience and the college essay! You can connect with her on Twitter at @pbrink12 or via e-mail at timmermanp@salemhigh.com. Senior English can be a beautiful and frustrating thing. For […]
