Matt
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Why Teaching Students How to Listen to Each Other Is More Important Than Ever (and How to Do It)
Last week a friend of mine introduced me to an app called Radio Garden that allows you to listen to tens of thousands of local radio stations across the world. Since then my trips to the store, daycare, and the… Continue reading
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The Six Books I’m Reading This Summer
For many years I swam and surfed the Pacific Ocean on a near daily basis. One of the things I loved about its waters was that they were predictably unpredictable. Each night the combination of the current, tides, swells, and… Continue reading
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Using Writing to Cultivate a Narrative of Progress Even As We End a Year of Loss
One of the first things I tell my students each year is that writing is not simply a tool for expressing thoughts to others. It is very useful for that, but there are numerous other uses that are arguably as… Continue reading
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The Anatomy of an Effective and Efficient Piece of Feedback
Before winter break, I asked my subscribers to send me topics that they were interested in discussing in 2021. I got a lot of great suggestions, but the clear winner was to go deeper into how to provide quality feedback… Continue reading
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Annotated by the Author: Why Having Students Annotate Their Own Writing Is My New Favorite Writing Instruction Tool
Several years ago, the New York Times introduced one of my favorite writing classroom resources: Their Mentor Texts column, where seasoned writers annotate their work with the motivations, methods, and writing moves behind a piece previously published by the Times.… Continue reading
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Things That Are Working Right Now: Using Celebration as a Teaching Tool During the Pandemic
This is the third in a series of posts I’m running about what is working inside my pandemic classroom. If you have things that are working in your classroom right now, please reach out. We teachers are better when we… Continue reading
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Looking for the Poetry in Every Student During the Pandemic
A few days ago my parents, in a fit of fall-cleaning, boxed-up assorted artifacts from my youth that were collecting dust in their basement and dropped off a surprise trip down memory lane on my front porch. And so my… Continue reading
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Three Things That Are Working
I originally planned to take a few weeks–maybe a month at most–off from writing at the start of the school year to get accustomed to being a remote teacher (we have been online the whole school year). That was over… Continue reading
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What the Life Cycle of a Star Can Teach Us About This School Year
If I remember my high school science classes correctly, stars like our sun spend a good long time burning brightly at the center of their solar systems, providing the light and heat and gravity that keep everything moving and, in… Continue reading
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How Can I Connect with Students and Build a Classroom Community From a Distance?
Many once-in-a-generation challenges await educators this fall. With that in mind, the blog will be a little different this summer. It will still have a writing instruction focus, but it will also focus a great deal on how we might… Continue reading