Category: Uncategorized
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Three Things That Are Working
I originally planned to take a few weeks–maybe a month at most–off from writing at the start of the school year to get accustomed to being a remote teacher (we have been online the whole school year). That was over two months ago, and yet only recently have I started to feel that I am,…
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What the Life Cycle of a Star Can Teach Us About This School Year
If I remember my high school science classes correctly, stars like our sun spend a good long time burning brightly at the center of their solar systems, providing the light and heat and gravity that keep everything moving and, in our case, alive. But as many a poet reminds us, all good things must come…
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How Can I Connect with Students and Build a Classroom Community From a Distance?
Many once-in-a-generation challenges await educators this fall. With that in mind, the blog will be a little different this summer. It will still have a writing instruction focus, but it will also focus a great deal on how we might continue to have relationship-based, workshop-style instruction in classrooms that, if COVID cases aren’t significantly lowered,…
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Using Storytelling to Keep Students Engaged in the Last Month of School
T.S. Eliot states in The Wasteland that “April is the cruelest month.” He is close, but he misses the mark by a month, at least in my opinion. In normal years, I find May to be the cruelest month by a fair margin, at least when it comes to my teaching life. The problem is…
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Best Practices for Teaching When One Has Little Time and Even Less Bandwidth
Teaching in normal times is not a profession that lends itself to balance. A study by the Gates Foundation and Scholastic found that teachers on across the country work over 53 hours a week on average, and it seems that every year the number of tasks, students, and papers grows larger and larger. And even…
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The Essential Role of Feedback in Distance Learning
Some of the strangest images of how Covid-19 has affected the world are the early pictures of professional and college sports teams around the world playing in front of empty stands. Those images were my first major indication that something different and scary was heading our way, and they perfectly capture the feeling of the…
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What Story Does Your Feedback Tell?
Stories are one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Few things are more effective at persuasion, better for promoting engagement, or more memorable than a good story. This is why politicians and advertisers speak in stories and why Fortune 500 companies pay big money for storytelling consultants to come train their workers. It…
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Why I Teach Shel Silverstein to High Schoolers (And What It Means for How We Choose Texts and Mentor Texts)
Three years ago I realized that my poetry unit needed help. While I gushed about the thoughtful symbolism of “Ozymandias” or the elegant simplicity of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” I looked out and found far too many worried or blank looks on the faces of my students–looks that spoke to them being lost, indifferent,…
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Why Poetry Should Be a Daily Part of All Writing Classrooms
As a middle and high schooler, I felt that poetry was something akin to a doily: a frilly, ornamental, and somewhat useless thing that was cool for people who were into that kind of thing (aka, not me). Whenever a teacher said it was time for poetry, I sighed internally, held my nose, and got…
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How to Make Student Goal Setting Actually Work
This post is adapted from my upcoming book Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster – Without Burning Out from Corwin Literacy. I’ve discussed the power of student goal setting before—how having students set regular writing goals comes in at or near the top of a number of meta-studies focused on effective teaching…
Matthew M. Johnson 