Category: Uncategorized
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Why I Love Essay of the Week
We are back in the building this week, so my post will be short (for me). Still, don’t mistake my brevity for lack of excitement. Today’s topic, Essay of the Week, is something that has done wonders for my students’ relationships with essay writing and writing in general, which is why I didn’t want to…
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Why This Is the Year to Get Serious About Student Self-Assessment
One of my favorite creative writing teachers in college introduced me to the iceberg theory of character design. I’m sure many of you likely know it, but, if not, here is a quick primer: The basic idea is that 90% of the mass of an iceberg sits below the waterline, and much like the secretive…
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How Grammar Became My Students’ Favorite Subject Last Year
I can’t think of a question that I disliked more as a new teacher than “How are we going to use this in the real world?” I got this question plenty in my early years, and it always felt so dismissive of the work we were doing, and, even though I didn’t yet understand why,…
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Why Teaching Students How to Listen to Each Other Is More Important Than Ever (and How to Do It)
Last week a friend of mine introduced me to an app called Radio Garden that allows you to listen to tens of thousands of local radio stations across the world. Since then my trips to the store, daycare, and the dentist have been filled with calypso from Barbados, Ghanian hip hop, and electronic tango straight…
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The Six Books I’m Reading This Summer
For many years I swam and surfed the Pacific Ocean on a near daily basis. One of the things I loved about its waters was that they were predictably unpredictable. Each night the combination of the current, tides, swells, and wind reshaped its bottom, creating a topography of the sand and movement of the sea…
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Using Writing to Cultivate a Narrative of Progress Even As We End a Year of Loss
One of the first things I tell my students each year is that writing is not simply a tool for expressing thoughts to others. It is very useful for that, but there are numerous other uses that are arguably as important as well. Writing can also be used as a tool for figuring out what…
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The Anatomy of an Effective and Efficient Piece of Feedback
Before winter break, I asked my subscribers to send me topics that they were interested in discussing in 2021. I got a lot of great suggestions, but the clear winner was to go deeper into how to provide quality feedback faster. This makes a lot of sense, as so many teachers have been pushed to…
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Annotated by the Author: Why Having Students Annotate Their Own Writing Is My New Favorite Writing Instruction Tool
Several years ago, the New York Times introduced one of my favorite writing classroom resources: Their Mentor Texts column, where seasoned writers annotate their work with the motivations, methods, and writing moves behind a piece previously published by the Times. Their first annotation, an article about a tiny T. Rex, was an instant hit in…
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Things That Are Working Right Now: Using Celebration as a Teaching Tool During the Pandemic
This is the third in a series of posts I’m running about what is working inside my pandemic classroom. If you have things that are working in your classroom right now, please reach out. We teachers are better when we work together, and I’d love to share what is working in your class with others!…
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Looking for the Poetry in Every Student During the Pandemic
A few days ago my parents, in a fit of fall-cleaning, boxed-up assorted artifacts from my youth that were collecting dust in their basement and dropped off a surprise trip down memory lane on my front porch. And so my daughter, who loves such fragments of “the old times,” as she calls them, and I…
Matthew M. Johnson 