Category: Uncategorized
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Using the Fresh Start Effect to Improve Student Motivation, Habits, and Beliefs
I was lucky enough to recently read an advance copy of Troy Hicks and Andy Schoenborn’s upcoming book, Creating Confident Writers, and while I will undoubtedly be posting about it again once it comes out (it is wonderfully smart and practical), they reference a concept that I’d somehow never heard before that felt both timely…
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The Remarkable Power of Surprise as a Teaching Tool
One of the most important landmark literature reviews in recent memory, Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners, poses the following, all too common, situation: Consider the example of a ninth-grader who enters high school unsure of his academic ability and worried about finding friends. When he struggles with the problems on his first math assignment and…
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The Best EdTech Tool For Improving Writing Instruction
In 1966, Ellis Page, often referred to as the father of computerized grading, published an essay (see right) in Phi Delta Kaplan where he argued that “We will soon be grading essays by computer, and this development will have an astonishing impact on the educational world.” The computers he was talking about? Mainframes that took…
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The Power of Implementing a Feedback Cycle
This post is an adapted excerpt from Flash Feedback, my upcoming book from Corwin Literacy. For years I struggled with the fact that I would spend untold hours scrawling notes and suggestions through each set of student papers only to have the next set of papers feel almost as if my feedback to the previous…
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What Makes Writing Authentic?
Last spring, during my month spent blogging about teaching the essay, a teacher asked me a question that I had no ready answer for: It is one thing to have students write narratives that they share with others or practice argumentation through writing letters to real people, but how can teachers make essays about books…
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Feedback 2.0: Using Digital Resources to Give Better Feedback, Faster
I am a luddite in so many ways. I don’t own an e-reader, I prefer vinyl to my Alexa, and I look forward to the times where I can hike or travel far enough away for my phone to get no reception. This tendency sometimes follows me into my classroom as well, as I find…
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September is For Stories
Last week I was in need of some inspiration to start the school year, and so I picked up Linda Christensen’s Teaching for Joy and Justice, one of my go-tos for centering myself and finding inspiration. Teaching for Joy and Justice was the first book that helped me peer beyond the old orthodoxies of the…
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Five Ways to Spend Less Time With Papers This Year (Without Sacrificing Your Impact)
Last week I tweeted out a simple question in preparation for this post: How many students do you have on your student load for ’19-’20? I tweeted this because while teachers struggling under massive student and paper loads is a pretty well-documented problem (the very first English Journal from 1912 opens with a discussion of…
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My Favorite Grammar Hack
My last post was about how if we want grammar to stick, we need to do two things: When it comes to doing this, I have found no tool more useful than the sentence. While on the surface the definition of a sentence is rather dull… …in practice, sentences can be gorgeous laboratories of nearly…
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The Key to Teaching Grammar? Make It About Opportunities, Not Errors
My most popular posts have been the ones on grammar. This is not surprising, as grammar remains one of the most maddeningly frustrating problems of the writing classroom. We know from over 60 years of research that teaching grammar out of the context of student writing (aka, in stand-alone worksheets, diagramming, term memorization) doesn’t work…
Matthew M. Johnson 