Elementary school is where a child’s love of writing formulates and blossoms. For some of those schools, including my Florida Title I school, writing instruction has become more complex and inconsistent. A survey I conducted about professional development with my teachers revealed that 69% of them dreaded teaching writing and wished they had more support. […]
Writing
Posted inEnglish Language Learners
Writing in Reverse: A strategy to strengthen student writing
In the high school English classroom, one assessment continues to reign supreme: the essay. Informative, argumentative, and narrative essays have stood the test of time and for good reason. Essays allow students to showcase a multitude of skills across the common core, from research to literary analysis, creative writing to conventions. Not to mention the metacognitive […]
Posted inWriting
The Power of Authentic Audiences
Authentic Audiences: Late one Wednesday morning, my seventh- and eighth-grade multilingual learners with emerging English language skills were emphatically complaining about the amount of writing required of them as we read and answered questions about teenage screen time usage. This work prepared them for an argumentative paragraph assignment on whether kids have too much screen […]
Posted inEnglish Language Learners
Using editorials to engage students in writing in middle and high school
As a high school English teacher, it was nothing for me to grade 120 five-paragraph essays every week. If it was a particularly rigorous unit, you find me wading through five to seven-page literary analysis in my Advanced Placement Literature class. If I was quick, I could have the papers graded within a two-week period. […]
Posted inPedagogy
The Building Blocks for Strong Middle and High School Writers
It was year five in my teaching career, and our principal called us in to bemoan our writing scores from the previous year. It was all the same buzzwords (fidelity, accountability, etc.), and I remember asking a question that changed my teaching beliefs. “If we want kids to be better writers, why aren’t we making […]