Month: August 2017
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Planning for Success: Four Prewriting Activities That Can Jumpstart Student Writing
As a student, I hated being required to show my work in math class. If I could produce the correct answer at the end, why should it matter how I came to it? Of course, now that I am a teacher, I understand that while seeing the students’ processes does help teachers, it is not…
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Writing Is Revising
“Published authors know that revision is the heart of producing effective writing…Developing writers don’t know this. They think of revising as a chore assigned because they aren’t good writers and can’t get their writing right the first time.” –Kathleen Dudden Rowlands in “Slay the Monster! Replacing Form-First Pedagogy with Effective Writing Instruction”
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The Problems and Power of Peer Response: How to Get Students Deeply Engaging With Each Other’s Writing
For the first five years of my career, nothing frustrated me more than peer response. On the surface, peer response seemed like the likely answer to what I believe is writing instruction’s hardest question: we know that direct personal feedback is essential in the writing instruction process, but how is one teacher supposed to offer regular…
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The Power of Positivity in a Writing Class
Five years ago I was lucky enough to do the Oregon Writing Project with the incredible Linda Christensen, and during one of our sessions, a fellow teacher mentioned something about having a 50/50 blend of praise and constructive criticism when responding to student papers. The offhanded nature of the remark made it clear that for…
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The Importance of a Writing Sketchbook
Writing is dangerous. Silence leaves everything up the imagination. Spoken words fade as soon as uttered. But writing lasts forever as a concrete monument to one’s persona, knowledge, and ideas. It can be closely examined, dissected, and easily picked apart. This is a major issue for writing teachers because teens, while they may throw caution to…
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Why Your Students Should Write More (and How to Get Them to Do It)
Now that time has continued its march to the start of a new year, it is once again time for resolutions. In the cycle of teaching, this stage is actually one of the things I look forward to the most because it gives me another chance to look at the missteps of the previous semester and…
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Why Do So Many Students Not Like Writing?
Every semester I begin my writing classes by asking students to write a one page introduction letter that discusses their feelings and experiences surrounding writing. A pdf of the assignment is right here: The Story of Your Writing From these I tend to find my classes to be made up of the following:
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Why a Writing Instruction Blog?
I doubt if the memory will ever leave me. It happened on a sunny Monday in late September during my first year of teaching. On my desk sat a four inch stack of slightly crumpled computer paper–the first student essays of the year–covered in blue ink and ready to go back to the students. Over…
Matthew M. Johnson 