Category: Uncategorized
-
Pausing for Poetry with Brett Vogelsinger
I have talked before about how Brett Vogelsinger’s work with finding ways to bring more poetry in the language arts classroom and use poetry beyond the classic poetry explications or once-or-twice-a-year freewrites has been transformational to my practice. This last week, Vogelsinger’s long-anticipated (at least for me) book Poetry Pauses was released, and I am…
-
Having Your Cake and Time to Eat It Too: Five Places We Can Save a Lot of Time and Provide Better Instruction by Letting Students Lead
Writing teachers have never had it easy. Pick any era and dig into its literature around writing instruction and it won’t take long before you find those who teach composition bemoaning how Herculean their task is. My favorite historical example (which I also begin Flash Feedback with) was when Dr. Edwin M. Hopkins asked the…
-
Building a Sequoia Root System
The largest tree in the world is the sequoia redwood, coming in at upwards of 2,600,000 pounds and heights taller than a football field. It follows that a tree that big must have an enormous root system to stay upright, especially in the face of the earthquakes, forest fires, and atmospheric rivers of California, right?…
-
How I Introduced My Class to ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the bot that launched a thousand thought pieces (here is a primer on it, if you somehow haven’t encountered it). The takes I’ve seen have ranged from declarations that it will bring about the death of the college essay and high school English to it being an indispensable tool for realtors or those…
-
Postcard from NCTE #3: Why I’m Making 2023 the Year of Poetry in My Classes
This is the third and final of my reflections from the NCTE Convention. For the first two, click here and here. “Poems give us something to hold up to the light, to examine from different angles” –Brett Vogelsinger Before winter break, I began my final unit of this quickly waning semester on Living Poets, and,…
-
Postcard from NCTE #2: Building Better, Stronger Classroom Communities in 2023
This is the second in a series of postcards of my key takeaways from the National Teacher’s of English Conference in November. It also marks my last post of 2022. I hope all those reading have a good, healthy, and restful break! Regular readers will know that Matt Kay, one of my co-authors of Answers…
-
Letting Them Drive: How to Help Students Through the Beautiful Messiness of the Writing Process
A few weeks ago at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Convention, I sat next to a teacher from Palmdale, California for an afternoon session. The teacher was buzzing with excitement as he told me the story of how he’d come to be there that day: His district, being local, had an…
-
My Favorite Lessons of the Fall
I’m not sure about you, but for me, these pre-Thanksgiving November weeks are always some of the hardest times of the school year. The heady energy and optimism of the new year have waned and the cumulative impact of the seemingly endless back-to-school requirements—cookouts and capsule night and conferences—combined with this being the longest stretch…
-
A Quick Guide to Praise, Compliments, and Asset-Focused Instruction
Educators are some of the most positive people I know, and yet studies from the last 40 years have consistently shown that when teachers respond to students, both in person and in writing, they tend to overwhelmingly focus on the negatives and deficits: The praise to criticism/reprimand ratios seen in these and similar studies can…
-
How a Simple Notebook Revolutionized My Ability to Track Student Data
Every night before bed, my wife takes a few minutes to document the ups, downs, advances, and milestones of our children. I have to admit that at first I was somewhat agnostic about the practice. I’ve always had a pretty good memory, so I think at some level I was certain that I would remember…
Matthew M. Johnson 