My Favorite Pre-Break Lesson
Yesterday I got the question for the first time: We aren’t going to do anything today, are we? The question gave me a good laugh. It was Tuesday morning and the break the student referenced as a reason to kick back and do nothing didn’t start until Friday afternoon. Even still, I think the question speaks for a lot of us this time of year. I always forget how tired they are, how tired I am, after 17 demanding weeks. As the student said it, truth be told, I could feel the break—still four days away—nudging at my mind too. …
Continue ReadingBetter, Faster Feedback Part 1: Feedback Literacy Revisited
One of the funny things about writing educational books is that, once published, each book stays a snapshot in time. The same is not true for the author though; the author continues to experiment and evolve, to try new things and grow in philosophy and practice. That is why over the next few weeks I plan to do a mini-series on the powerful lessons about giving better and faster feedback that I’ve learned since writing Flash Feedback. The core of what I do is still the same as it is in Flash Feedback, but as a little mid-winter gift, I’m…
Continue ReadingLet’s Talk About How to Give Better, Faster Feedback
I was at the National Council of Teachers of English conference* a couple weeks ago, and as I walked through the showroom I heard the pitch from edu-AI companies, over and over and over again: “Save time by providing instant feedback to your students.” As a full-time teacher with nearly 150 students, it isn’t too hard to figure out why companies would lead with this pitch: As I’ve discussed in this newsletter for nearly a decade, the logistics of providing feedback are nearly nonsensical for the modern teacher. Multiply my 150 students by the length of an essay/narrative (about 3…
Continue ReadingAll That Glitters Is Not Good Teaching
Keys to Engaging Lesson Design and a New Lesson Plan Drop! In their wonderful book 100% Engagement, Susan Barber and Brian Sztabnik begin by saying the following: There is a myth that says engagement is the purview of young, fun, and modern teachers. They draw students in by building rapport around fashion, music, or sports. They turn everything into a Kahoot! or Quizlet so all facets of learning become gamified. They pluck the best samples from their future Rembrandts and Picassos and post them on Instagram, making everyone green with envy. They then follow this up by saying this: If…
Continue ReadingTeaching the Why: A Quick, Effective Strategy for Increasing Student Engagement
I have a rule that I tell students on the first week: If you don’t know why we are studying something, why we are studying something in the way we are, or why I’m assessing you in a certain way, please ask. I will always answer, and I will never answer (as I sometimes did early in my career) with Because I’m the Teacher… This little speech is admittedly a bit theatrical, but theater can be useful to make a point, and I really want my students to hear an important message: What we do in here matters. It is…
Continue ReadingMore Than a Name: Four Quick Tools to Increase Student Engagement by Helping Them to Feel Seen
My topic for the last few posts, Gen AI, may be the large, loud, and ostentatious elephant sitting in the corner of teachers’ rooms across the world right now, but I’ve found that many teachers’ rooms also have a second elephant these days, equally large but a bit more subtle: Student engagement, or more accurately the lack of student engagement. Engagement is an internal state, which makes it hard to measure and study. But to use a more modern metric, the vibes around it right now aren’t good, and the limited data we have mostly supports these troubled feelings. A…
Continue ReadingHow I Plan to Cut Down on Student AI Misuse This Year
During our first departmental meeting of the year, a teacher offhandedly bemoaned the new paywall for Draftback, a tool for investigating the revision histories of students suspected of using AI. Another teacher responded by bringing up a new tool she is using instead for tracking revision history, and it was like a record scratched to halt. After a brief moment of silence, the room erupted with questions for the teacher about the new tracking tool, and then everyone was talking all at once concerning their worries about student’s using AI when they shouldn’t in the year to come. This scene…
Continue ReadingAI Post #1: One Way I Plan to Use AI to Improve My Writing Instruction This Year
I remember sitting down to read a student paper last year and instantly feeling the beginnings of that whispered question that many teachers have come to know so well: Hmm, I wonder if this was written by AI? Sadly, this was not a novel experience for me, but what made this experience different was that it got me thinking about a second, more existential question: What does it mean to live in a world where everything we write from now on comes with a whispered question of AI authorship hovering over it like a digital spectre? Because everything—everything—that our students…
Continue ReadingYear 10 of the Re-Write Newsletter Begins and Exciting News!
A few weeks back I was scrolling through photos, and I stumbled upon a photo I’d long forgotten. It was from a class trip late in 2019, and in it my entire advisory class is piled together on a small merry-go-round—an action that, while normal at the time, would have been inconceivable by the socially-distanced middle of the next semester. As I looked at the photo, I thought about my class and the tectonic changes the students would face in a few short months, but I also found myself thinking about the late 2019 version of me behind the camera…
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Matthew M. Johnson 