Category: Uncategorized
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How to Make Writing Less Scary for Students
Writing is scary for pretty much everyone. For example, I as I write this sentence, I can’t help but worry that… The bulk of our students likely face these same fears, and a great many of them also likely face other fears, ranging from worries that they don’t measure up to their classmates, to anxiety…
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Want to Significantly Improve Your Feedback to Students? Stop Giving It in Isolation
The lecture long dominated the classroom. The concept behind it was simple. Teachers have information and students don’t. So the teachers give information to the students, who have the choice to absorb the information or not. These days we understand that there are often better approaches than to just throw information at students. We know…
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Why We Should Separate Grades and Feedback
Grading and feedback are often conflated. For nearly a decade I used the term “grading” as a synonym for nearly any type of response to writing without so much as flinching, but I know now that they are actually very different and in some ways opposing activities. Grades are where we rank students by placing…
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Why We Should Let Students In On Our Pedagogy
This last semester I unwittingly began what has turned out to be a rather surprising pedagogical experiment. In short, over my career I have generally tried to keep my teaching and my writing about teaching lives separate. The reasoning behind this was pretty simple. I assumed that my students would have little interest in learning…
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Why Students Often Struggle With Peer Review and What We Can Do About It
When I was an education school student, I feel quickly and deeply in love with Nancy Atwell’s In the Middle thanks to quotes like this: We laid down the old, stodgy burdens of the profession—the Warriner’s Handbooks, the forty- five minute lectures and canned assignments—and embraced new roles . . . These were heady times, as…
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I Write to Learn What I Think: Why Our Classrooms Need a Lot More Learning Through Writing
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” -Flannery O’Connor One of the biggest misconceptions that many people hold about writing is that it is mainly a vehicle for recording and sharing what we already know. While preservation and dissemination of knowledge is certainly a key reason to…
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The Most Overlooked Yet Important Writing Instruction Stat I’ve Ever Seen
The massive 2011 “Nation’s Report Card” on writing contains a number of striking statistics. Among other things it found that… But tucked in amongst all of these stats–as a mere footnote–is one of the most important stats I’ve ever seen concerning writing. Out of all of the factors measured, which do you think was the…
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Writing Essays Should Be Fun
The iconic writing resource They Say/I Say, begins with a quote by literary theorist and poet Kenneth Burke where he likens academic discussion to a dinner party… You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and…
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Why Students Brag About Not Doing Work (And What We Can Do About It)
We’ve all probably heard it. “I didn’t even study for this, and I still got a B…” “I wrote this entire thing an hour before class. I don’t even know what is in it…” “I haven’t’ read a book all year. I just look at SparkNotes, and I still pass everything…” The sounds of secondary…
Matthew M. Johnson 