Matt
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Using Storytelling to Keep Students Engaged in the Last Month of School
T.S. Eliot states in The Wasteland that “April is the cruelest month.” He is close, but he misses the mark by a month, at least in my opinion. In normal years, I find May to be the cruelest month by… Continue reading
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Best Practices for Teaching When One Has Little Time and Even Less Bandwidth
Teaching in normal times is not a profession that lends itself to balance. A study by the Gates Foundation and Scholastic found that teachers on across the country work over 53 hours a week on average, and it seems that… Continue reading
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The Essential Role of Feedback in Distance Learning
Some of the strangest images of how Covid-19 has affected the world are the early pictures of professional and college sports teams around the world playing in front of empty stands. Those images were my first major indication that something… Continue reading
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What Story Does Your Feedback Tell?
Stories are one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Few things are more effective at persuasion, better for promoting engagement, or more memorable than a good story. This is why politicians and advertisers speak in stories and why… Continue reading
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Why I Teach Shel Silverstein to High Schoolers (And What It Means for How We Choose Texts and Mentor Texts)
Three years ago I realized that my poetry unit needed help. While I gushed about the thoughtful symbolism of “Ozymandias” or the elegant simplicity of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” I looked out and found far too many worried or… Continue reading
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Why Poetry Should Be a Daily Part of All Writing Classrooms
As a middle and high schooler, I felt that poetry was something akin to a doily: a frilly, ornamental, and somewhat useless thing that was cool for people who were into that kind of thing (aka, not me). Whenever a… Continue reading
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How to Make Student Goal Setting Actually Work
This post is adapted from my upcoming book Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster – Without Burning Out from Corwin Literacy. I’ve discussed the power of student goal setting before—how having students set regular writing goals comes… Continue reading
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Using the Fresh Start Effect to Improve Student Motivation, Habits, and Beliefs
I was lucky enough to recently read an advance copy of Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn’s upcoming book, Creating Confident Writers, and while I will undoubtedly be posting about it again once it comes out (it is wonderfully smart and… Continue reading
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The Remarkable Power of Surprise as a Teaching Tool
One of the most important landmark literature reviews in recent memory, Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners, poses the following, all too common, situation: Consider the example of a ninth-grader who enters high school unsure of his academic ability and worried… Continue reading
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The Best EdTech Tool For Improving Writing Instruction
In 1966, Ellis Page, often referred to as the father of computerized grading, published an essay (see right) in Phi Delta Kaplan where he argued that “We will soon be grading essays by computer, and this development will have an… Continue reading