writing Search Results

How to Personalize Instruction with Seminars

…that most of the time they are optional — students only sign up to attend if they have an interest in or need to learn more about the topic. And yes, they could just be called mini-lessons — in fact, I heard about this same concept years ago from the high school teachers at the Apollo School — but something special is added when you call them seminars. That’s what Melanie Meehan calls them. Meehan is a Connecticut-based elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books about teaching writing and contributes to the collaborative blog Two Writing…

The Great and Powerful Graphic Organizer

…common practice in English language arts classes. If you’ve never tried it, it’s worth adding this into your writing process, especially if you teach a content area where writing isn’t a regular part of student work. A warning: Do not treat the organizers as the writing piece; have students just jot notes down in these, rather than complete sentences. The bulk of student writing time should be spent actually drafting their piece. 4. Text Illustrations When students do expository or argumentative writing, consider having them add a graphic organizer to their finished product to illustrate a concept in their piece. In…

Episode 151: Historically Responsive Literacy

…ask me, like, oh, you’re writing, we write a number of things. We write short stories, poetry, letters, essays, the first three chapters of their novels, we write narratives. We write all sorts of things. I used to get this question a lot. Like, do you work on their spelling and punctuation and grammar? I just kind of look at them, and I’m like, of course. What do you think? We’re going to do a whole writing institute with some sentences that nobody can understand? GONZALEZ: Yeah. MUHAMMAD: It’s like sometimes when we think that when we add identity or…

Contact/FAQs

…Language? Etc. Sharing Cult of Pedagogy Resources Subscriber Questions Blogging Advice Teaching Questions I need advice or resources for my specific situation. Can you help? Because I receive a lot of email, I am not able to give advice to everyone who writes in. However, I have been writing, doing podcasts, and creating videos on education-related topics since 2013, so I probably have already created something that meets your needs. Here’s what you should do before writing in: Start by clicking on the magnifying glass at the top of your screen. From there you can do a search on your…

How to Create a Project Based Learning Lesson

…novels during ELA and also learned about narrative writing techniques through writers workshop methods. The benchmark deliverable for this second section of the project was a piece of writing titled “A Day in the Life of…” which represented what daily life was like for a person from one of the groups of the “silent voices.” This deliverable showcased their narrative writing skills, textual analysis skills, and content mastery for social studies. Because the textbooks don’t provide the perspective of “the silent voices” students truly had to synthesize, analyze and apply what they were learning in ELA and social studies to…

How to Turn Rubric Scores into Grades

Gerard Dawson Jennifer…I love the way this process lives up to Kohn’s words of keeping the grade “invisible” for as long as possible. I’ve found that giving lots of feedback makes teaching writing less tedious and more rewarding for me, which I think is antithetical to some teachers’ opinions. Your system is complementary to mine, where students read each others’ work anonymously in order to set rubric criteria. I described it here if you’re interested: www.gerarddawson.org/how-to-teach-writing-by-doing-less-and-trusting-more/ Beth Thanks for this informative piece! Our school improvement process will focus on formative assessment this year AND we have a new writing curriculum….

Episode 84: How to Stop Killing the Love of Reading

…us, because we’re the ones purchasing these books, and so we need to go out and say, “We need better books.” GONZALEZ: Yeah. RIPP: “We need more diverse books and we need own author’s books, own voices books.” GONZALEZ: Right. RIPP: And so that’s the other question too: Am I purchasing books where own voices authors are writing them, and so own voices came out of the We Need Diverse Books movement, and it just was, you know, the marginally represented author writing about their marginally represented culture or set in that culture. And so I think about out our…

Using Playlists to Differentiate Instruction

…strongly that the playlist concept could be used in any content area. Argument Writing Playlist The first playlist is for a unit on argument writing. What you see here is just the first few tasks; there are 19 on the full playlist. In the first column, Enos simply names the task. The second column provides specific instructions for the task. The third column is set up for students to record any notes they have about the task, and the fourth is where students record the date they completed the task. Although much of the playlist will be exactly the same…

Episode 157: What’s Possible with Green Screens in the Classroom

…the teacher keeps modeling the writing. I consider the green screen a form of authoring, a form of writing. GONZALEZ: Yes. BRUYÈRE: So we keep going back to it, and we make it better every day. Then I say, “Gosh. Well, would a little bit of music be good for this? What do you think? Do we need a little intro? What would it look like if we added some text to this? How could we do that?” And every day we make that video better and better. GONZALEZ: Wow. BRUYÈRE: And this is an effort to help the kids…