I am fortunate to be on friendly-emailing terms with the great Tom Romano, from whom I’ve learned much about good writing instruction, multigenre, and student voice. So when I received an email from him the other day, asking for book recommendations, I laughed aloud. My most excellent writing mentor, asking me what to read next? I …
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#FridayReads: Learning to WRITE WHAT MATTERS with Tom Romano
“Both the writing and the working have been worth it. They are fine passions.” -Tom Romano
Friday Night Quickwrite 6/25
This week I spent some time rereading parts of Tom Romano’s book, Write What Matters. This book is an invitation. An invitation to seek advice about creating a writing habit, to find ways to build your confidence as a writer, and to find your voice through writing activites and examples. I want to share a …
Advice Poems: A Way to Wrap-Up
I love giving people advice (my sisters tell me I like it a little too much). Some of my favorite social media posts involve creative ways of giving advice, like this one I saw just this morning. I notice that students like giving advice too, so as the year starts rounding third base to home, …
Three Reasons We Should Stop Teaching the 5-Paragraph Essay (and what we can do instead)
Wait! Before you get ticked off, hear me out. I had never heard of a “5-Paragraph Essay” when I was a student. We wrote essays. Sometimes stories, sometimes research, sometimes about the books we read. In college, my professors wanted me to have a strong thesis, but never did they talk to me about how many …
Will You Write With Us?
Six years ago, Amy Rasmussen looked at me and said, “I’d love for you to write for our blog.” It wasn’t a casual offer–it was said with levity, marking me as a Writer, a Teacher With Things to Say. At first, I wanted to shake my head and demur, as so many teachers are taught …
Q & A: How do you grade the writer’s notebook?
For all the years of my teaching career, my students have always kept writer’s notebooks. We personalize our covers and create our own book lists and dictionaries, practice writing, sketching, and glue-ins to make every writer feel at home, and then go about the work of filling those empty pages with ideas, practice, drafts, and …
Q & A: How do I do this on my own without other colleagues teaching this way? #3TTWorkshop
Believe me when I say I understand. Completely. I think many other teachers who took off the old shoes of making all the choices in their English classes and tiptoed, stomped, or danced into workshop instruction understand, too. Sometimes we are the only one hearing the music. This was me most of the time. Of …
Managing Feedback: A Tool for Teachers
Whenever I talk to a group of teachers about writing instruction, we talk about the core elements of writing workshop: choice, time, and teaching. We hone in on this idea of how much practice writers need. As Kelly Gallagher writes in his blog post “Moving Beyond the 4 x 4 Classroom,” volume is essential: Within …
Gifts of Writing
It’s that time of year where the kids are restless, teachers are exhausted, and gift-giving season looms. What if I told you we could use our writer’s workshop time to help us in all three areas? Whether you have some days this upcoming week with students where you’re still not sure what you’re doing, or …
Three Teachers Talk 