This post is an adapted excerpt from Flash Feedback, my upcoming book from Corwin Literacy. For years I struggled with the fact that I would spend untold hours scrawling notes and suggestions through each set of student papers only to… Continue reading

Last spring, during my month spent blogging about teaching the essay, a teacher asked me a question that I had no ready answer for: It is one thing to have students write narratives that they share with others or practice… Continue reading

I am a luddite in so many ways. I don’t own an e-reader, I prefer vinyl to my Alexa, and I look forward to the times where I can hike or travel far enough away for my phone to get… Continue reading

Last week I was in need of some inspiration to start the school year, and so I picked up Linda Christensen’s Teaching for Joy and Justice, one of my go-tos for centering myself and finding inspiration. Teaching for Joy and… Continue reading

Last week I tweeted out a simple question in preparation for this post: How many students do you have on your student load for ’19-’20? I tweeted this because while teachers struggling under massive student and paper loads is a… Continue reading

My last post was about how if we want grammar to stick, we need to do two things: When it comes to doing this, I have found no tool more useful than the sentence. While on the surface the definition… Continue reading

My most popular posts have been the ones on grammar. This is not surprising, as grammar remains one of the most maddeningly frustrating problems of the writing classroom. We know from over 60 years of research that teaching grammar out… Continue reading

Teachers tend to be both helpers and problem solvers. In fact, if a random group of teachers were polled, my guess is that those might be the two most common traits found, as to be called to the classroom generally… Continue reading

“Before I know what to teach, I need to know whom I teach.” -Cornelius Minor Last week I finished We Got This., Cornelius Minor’s relentlessly positive and ridiculously quotable book (which is a highly recommended read), and while it has… Continue reading

So far in this month focused on the essay, I’ve spoken about the power of giving students choice to pursue their own interests in essays, we’ve looked at a student perspective on the essay, and I’ve argued that the essay… Continue reading