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If you're on the fence on this topic, read this piece that provides clear reasons for not supporting it...

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Dennis Allen doesn't think the five-paragraph essay is dead.

In the years before his retirement in May from West Virginia University, the Professor Emeritus did not assign "strict" five-paragraph essays. He contends that the five-paragraph essay may be dead in the literal sense because instructors of college composition classes don't assign it, but he believes its structure is still around.

"I think a dissertation chapter is just a substantially more elaborate version of this," Allen, who taught at West Virginia University for 35 years, explains. "In other words, the first five pages are the introduction with a thesis near the end, and you have two to five points, and it just expands out."

The five-paragraph essay is a topic long debated by educators, and strong opinions abound. Ray Salazar called the five-paragraph essay an "outdated writing tradition" that "must end" in a 2012 post for his blog White Rhino. And in a 2016 blog post for the National Council of Teachers of English, Sacramento State associate professor Kim Zarins used the five-paragraph essay structure to show why she's against teaching it. She called herself a high school "survivor of this form." Despite its "long tradition, the five-paragraph essay is fatally flawed," she wrote. "It cheapens a student's thesis, essay flow and structure, and voice."

A year later, her stance hasn't budged.

"When I see five-paragraph essays come into the stack of papers, they invariably have this structural problem where the ceiling is so low, they don't have time to develop a real thesis and a truly satisfying or convincing argument," she says.

Five-paragraph essays are not the majority of what Zarins sees, but she points out that she teaches medieval literature, not composition. Regardless, she thinks high school teachers should steer clear of this approach, and instead encourage "students to give their essays the right shape for the thought that each student has."

Kristy Olin teaches English to seniors at Robert E. Lee High School in Baytown, Texas. She says sometimes educators have structures that don't allow for ideas, content or development to be flexible, and instead of focusing on what's actually being said, they become more about "the formula."

"It seems very archaic, and in some ways it doesn't really exemplify a natural flow," Olin says about the five-paragraph essay. "It doesn't exemplify how we talk, how we write or how most essays you read are actually structured."

Consider paragraphs. They should be about one subject and then naturally shift when that subject changes, Olin explains. But because the five-paragraph essay structure dictates that there be three body paragraphs, students might try to "push everything" to those body paragraphs.

Olin does think, however, that the five-paragraph essay format is useful for elementary students, adding that fourth grade is when the state of Texas starts assessing students' writing in standardized tests. But once students get into sixth, seventh and eighth grade, teachers need to break away from that five-paragraph essay format and say "'this is where we started, and this is where we need to head.'"

Hogan Hayes, who teaches first year composition at Sacramento State, is the second author of an upcoming book chapter about the "myth" that the five-paragraph essay will help students in the future." There's a perception that if students get good at the five-paragraph essay format, they'll hone those skills and will be good writers in other classes and writing situations, he says. But there's "overwhelming evidence to suggest that's not the case."

He doesn't think that first first year composition teachers should be spending time "hating the five-paragraph essay." Instead, they should recognize it as knowledge students are bringing with them to the classroom, and then "reconfigure it to new contexts" and use it ways that are more college-appropriate.

Hayes says college writing instructors need to get students to understand that the reason their K-12 teachers kept assigning five-paragraph essays was because they were working with "100, 120, 150 students," and a standardized writing assignment "that works the same way every time" is easier to read, assess and grade. In regards to students who leave K-12 with a "strong ability to write the five-paragraph essay," he says, ""I don't want to snap them out of it because I don't want to dismiss that knowledge."

Take McKenzie Spehar, a Writing and Rhetoric Studies major at the University of Utah. She says she learned the five-paragraph essay early on, and except in an AP English class she took in the 12th grade, the structure was pushed heavily on her at school. She can't say she's ever written a five-paragraph essay for college. Her papers have all needed to be longer, though she does note that they do tend to stick to a five-paragraph type format-an introduction, a body and a conclusion.

"In general, the consensus is you need more space than a five-paragraph essay gives you," she says, adding that it's a good place to start when learning how to write academically. She explains that later on, however, students need a looser structure that flows more with the way they're thinking, especially if they go into the humanities.

Kimberly Campbell, an Associate Professor and Chair of Teacher Education at the Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling, is strongly opposed to the five-paragraph essay structure. She thinks it stifles creativity and "takes away the thinking process that is key for good writing." And she says she's not the only one worried that the structure doesn't help students develop their writing. In Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay, a book she wrote with Kristi Latimer (who teaches English Language Arts at Tigard High School in Oregon), Campbell cites research studies that critique the approach of teaching the five-paragraph essay.

"Studies show that students who learn this formula do not develop the thinking skills needed to develop their own organizational choices as writers," she says. "In fact, it is often used with students who have been labeled as struggling. Rather than supporting these students, or younger students, it does the opposite."

For his part, Hayes thinks the five-paragraph essay makes it easy to not be creative, not that it necessarily stifles creativity. He believes creative students can work their imagination into any structure.

Allen, the retired English professor, stresses that even if writing isn't argumentative, it always needs some structure. It can't be simply uncontrolled, because the reader's not going to get the point if it's all over the map."

Rita Platt is currently a teacher librarian with classes fromPre-K to fourth grade at St. Croix Falls Elementary School in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. She still stands by a piece she wrote in 2014; in it she said she was "being really brave" by stating she believes in teaching elementary school students "the good old fashioned" five-paragraph essay format.

She thinks the five-paragraph essay format has room for creativity, such as through word choice, topic and progression of thought. Kids can use the five-paragraph essay model to organize their thoughts, she says, and once they're really comfortable, they can play around with it.

"Kids need something to start with," says Platt, who has 22 years of teaching experience across different grade levels.

Campbell's recommendation, which she says research backs, is to focus on reading good essay examples and give students in-class support while they write. She wants students to read a variety of essays, and pay close attention to structure. The students can then develop ideas in a writing workshop. As they develop their content, they consider how to structure those ideas.

"Students can explore a variety of organizational structures to determine what best supports the message of their essay," Campbell says.

Platt tells EdSurge that she thinks there's a movement in writing that says to "just let kids write from the heart." But that means the kids who aren't natural writers are left "in the dust." What's more, this approach doesn't honor the constraints of teachers' jobs, such as how much time they have to teach. And not all teachers love writing or write themselves, she says. Many elementary school teachers, she claims, never write, and not everyone has the skills of, say, Lucy Calkins or Nancy Atwell.

Campbell's not a fan of asking kids to "'just write from the heart.'" She wants kids to write about topics they care about, but at the same time, recognizes that instructors do need to teach writing. She says her mentor text method described above "is a lot of work," but it was effective when she taught middle school and high school.

"In my work with graduate students who are learning to be English Language Arts teachers, I am also seeing this approach work," she explains. She adds that her method would be easier if class sizes were smaller and teachers weren't trying to "meet the needs of 150-200 students in a year."

Most people aren't going to become professional writers, Platt continues, noting that she's not saying most people couldn't, or that schools shouldn't encourage people to think that way. She says there's a sense of elitism in education that she gets a little tired of, along with some teacher bashing that makes her feel like she has to defend her colleagues who aren't themselves natural writers yet are tasked with teaching kids to be "serviceable writers."

"It bothers me in education-particularly in my field, language arts-where everybody says, 'everybody should love reading and writing,'" she says. "Well, you know, you hope everybody loves reading and writing. You model that passion, you share that passion with your students but truth be told, our job is to make sure everybody reads and writes very well."

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Is the Five-Paragraph Essay Dead? - EdSurge News

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Dennis Allen doesn't think the five-paragraph essay is dead. In the years before his retirement in May from West Virginia University, the Professor Emeritus did not assign "strict" five-paragraph essays. He contends that the five-paragraph essay may be dead in the literal sense because instructors of college composition classes don't assign it, but he believes its structure is still around.

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Why Every Class Should Be Cross Curricular

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Why Every Class Should Be Cross Curricular

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Why every class should be cross-curricular

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Connecting one subject to another makes learning a process of discovery and teaches students the essential life skill of critical thinking.

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How Dialogue Journals Build Relationships

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How Dialogue Journals Build Relationships

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Love this idea for ALL content areas!

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Listen to my interview with Liz Galarza ( transcript):

How well do we know our students? They sit in our classrooms five days a week, we certainly spend lots of time with them, but how well do we really know them? How well do we know their thoughts, their worries, the things they obsess about? And how well do they ever get to know us beyond our role as a teacher?

I've been hammering away at the importance of the teacher-student relationship for about as long as Cult of Pedagogy has been a thing, but every now and then I come across a method or approach that can really help build those relationships more effectively.

My friend Liz Galarza, who teaches middle school writing in New York, has been telling me for ages about the dialogue journals she uses with her students and how transformational they have been in building relationships. The journals had such a profound impact that Galarza made them the focus of her doctoral dissertation.

A dialogue journal is any kind of bound notebook where students and teachers write letters back and forth to each other over a period of time. This is very similar to the kinds of journals described in Smokey and Elaine Daniels' book, The Best Kept Teaching Secret, but since Galarza has had such powerful experiences with these journals, I thought another post was merited.

In Galarza's class, students purchase whatever kind of journals they want, "as long as it's going to withstand a year's worth of back and forth," she says. "Most of them use the marble composition notebooks. I ask them to decorate with pictures or quotes, and it really does show their personality."
The First Entry
In the first few days of school, Galarza gets to know her students through intake forms (not included in the journals) where she asks students to tell her five things about themselves that she wouldn't be able to tell by looking at them or their school records. Next, she goes into the journals and writes the first entry, starting with a very general welcome, then beginning to connect with students based on things they wrote on their intake forms.

Although many teachers begin these kinds of journals by having students write the first entry, Galarza has had more success by starting them herself. "I think the kids who have less confidence when it comes to writing would feel paralyzed by that. So I try and make it very, very open."

In the sample letter below, Galarza connects with this student about her love of reading and writing, softball, and pets. "The first letter I ask more questions than any other time, but I get them to see that I'm human. We have commonalities. I'm interested in you. You're important to me. This is going to be fun."
Student Responses
Once the teacher's first letter is written, students write back. In this sample, Nick responds to Galarza's opening letter, where she mentioned Derek Jeter leaving the Yankees. "In his intake sheet, every single thing he wrote about was about baseball and the Yankees," so Galarza made sure she mentioned that in her first letter.
Time and Grading
As the school year progresses, the journals go back and forth between teacher and student. Galarza asks students to write one letter a week, although some students write more often than that. About once a week, Galarza will ask each class period to hand in their journals, staggering these on different days so she only has one class period per day to respond to. She takes about an hour to respond to a single class set of journals, so if it's a busy season, she may end up only collecting them every two weeks, rather than once a week.

As for grading, students are simply given credit for completion. Even if they don't write a lot, they get credit for doing it. And that's it. Galarza does not mark errors or evaluate the work for any kind of score. Because this journal is about building a relationship, Galarza doesn't want to take away its appeal by assigning a grade to it. "The more often you put a grade on something," she says, "the less empowering you're making it for the students."

Shifting the Power Differential: Because dialogue journals allow students to see their teachers as people, they shift the teacher from the "all powerful" role and create a stronger, more meaningful connection between teacher and student. "As a teacher we always have that authoritative stance: We're the teacher, and they're the student, and they know that," Galarza explains. "I think the more you use that as leverage, the less you're going to get out of students."

Writing Fluency: When students write in dialogue journals, there's no pressure to fulfill an assignment or construct perfect sentences. Students just write. And the more a person writes, the more confident they become and the better their writing gets. If the teacher can identify topics that are important to the student, this can inspire far more writing than a student would ever produce for an assignment. Nick, the student above who wrote about Derek Jeter, initially told Galarza he hated to write. After their first exchange about the Yankees, Galarza says the topic stayed with them for the rest of the year, and Nick ended up filling more pages than any other student that year.

Formative Assessment: Although the journals are not designed for this purpose, having students write regularly allows the teacher to spot errors or weaknesses that can inform teaching. "I can use the multiple language errors that I find in many of the journals as a basis for my mini-lessons," Galarza explains. "So if I see that many of my students are not using commas when they're offsetting a list, that might become a grammar mini-lesson."

Individualized Instruction: "You can literally teach them something within the journal without anyone knowing that you're doing it," Galarza says. "I've said something like, 'You know, you can use a semicolon in your sentence' ... I might even highlight it. 'You know in this sentence up here? You don't need a period there. You could use a semicolon.' I'll just throw in a little grammar instruction as we're going along only if I think that they would be receptive to it."

Mentor Texts: As the teacher and student go back and forth, students pick up on the teacher's style of writing, and the teacher's letters effectively become mentor texts. For example, when Galarza responds to her more advanced writers, "I might use a more complex sentence structure. I might combine sentences or use phrases and just more sophisticated language." Often she notices students using these same structures in their own responses.

Funds of Knowledge: Keeping dialogue journals with students over time helps teachers discover students' unique funds of knowledge, areas of expertise they might not have known about otherwise. "I had this student this year who was into taxidermy and hunting," Galarza says. "I was so interested in it, so I asked him to give me information on it, and he really did. Like technical. Like it belongs in a book. And then he drew pictures." She asked him if he ever thought about writing a comic book about hunting or taxidermy, and in his response, he considered it:

Relationships: Ultimately, the most important benefit of the journals is the relationships they build. When students feel they have a trusted adult in school, when they feel heard and seen, that makes school a place they want to come to.

"I don't look at teaching the way many people do," Galarza says. "I know that they could learn anything they need to learn from their homes with a device on their lap still in their pajamas. They don't need me to learn. They need me to care." ♦

There's a lot more where this came from.
Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading. If you are already a subscriber and want this resource, just check your most recent email for a link to the Members-Only Library-it's in there!

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How Dialogue Journals Build Teacher-Student Relationships

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Listen to my interview with Liz Galarza ( transcript): How well do we know our students? They sit in our classrooms five days a week, we certainly spend lots of time with them, but how well do we really know them? How well do we know their thoughts, their worries, the things they obsess about?

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A MUST read!!

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Has the five-paragraph essay, long a staple in school writing curricula, outlived its usefulness?

The venerable writing tool has largely fallen out of favor among influential English/language arts researchers and professional associations. "Rigid" and "constraining" are the two words critics often use to describe the format.

There's no denying that a five-paragraph essay-comprising an introduction with a thesis, three paragraphs each with a topic sentence and supporting details, and a conclusion-is highly structured, even artificial, in format. Yet many teachers still rely on it at least to some degree. Supporters of the method argue that, used judiciously, it can be a helpful step on the road to better writing for emerging writers.

"You can't break the rules until you know the rules. That's why for me, we definitely teach it and we teach it pretty strongly," said Mark Anderson, a teacher at the Jonas Bronck Academy in New York City, who recently helped devise a framework for grading student writing based on the five-paragraph form.

Classical Origins

Long before "graphic organizers" and other writing tools entered teachers' toolkits, students whittled away at five-paragraph essays.

Just where the form originated seems to be something of a mystery, with some scholars pointing to origins as far back as classical rhetoric. Today, the debate about the form is intertwined with broader arguments about literacy instruction: Should it be based on a formally taught set of skills and strategies? Should it be based on a somewhat looser approach, as in free-writing "workshop" models, which are sometimes oriented around student choice of topics and less around matters of grammar and form?

Surprisingly, not much research on writing instruction compares the five-paragraph essay with other tools for teaching writing, said Steve Graham, a professor of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University, who has studied writing instruction for more than 30 years.

Instead, meta-analyses seem to point out general features of effective writing instruction. Among other things, they include supportive classroom environments in which students can work together as they learn how to draft, revise, and edit their work; some specific teaching of skills, such as learning to combine sentences; and finally, connecting reading and content acquisition to writing, he said.

As a result, the five-paragraph essay remains a point of passionate debate.

A quick Google search turns up hundreds of articles, both academic and personal, pro and con, with titles like "If You Teach or Write the 5-Paragraph Essay-Stop It!" duking it out with "In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay."

Structure or Straitjacket?

One basic reason why the form lives on is that writing instruction does not appear to be widely or systematically taught in teacher-preparation programs, Graham said, citing surveys of writing teachers he's conducted.

"It's used a lot because it provides a structure teachers are familiar with," he said. "They were introduced to it as students and they didn't get a lot of preparation on how to teach writing."

The advent of standardized accountability assessments also seems to have contributed, as teachers sought ways of helping students respond to time-limited prompts, said Catherine Snow, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

"It simplified the tasks in the classroom and it gives you structures across students that are comparable and gradable, because you have real expectations for structure," she said.

It's not clear whether the Common Core State Standards' new emphases in writing expectations have impacted the five-paragraph essay's popularity one way or another.

"I don't connect the two in my mind," Anderson said. "There is more informational writing and analytical writing, but I haven't got a sense that the five paragraph format is necessarily the best way to teach it."

Still, Anderson argues that structure matters a great deal when teaching writing, and the five-paragraph essay has that in spades.

At a prior school, Anderson found that a more free-form workshop model in use tended to fall short for students with disabilities and those who came without a strong foundation in spelling and grammar. The format of a five-paragraph essay provided them with useful scaffolds.

"The structure guides them to organizing their ideas in a way that is very clear, and even if they're very much at a literal level, they're at least clearly stating what their ideas are," he said. "Yes, it is very formulaic. But that's not to say you can't have a really good question, with really rich text, and engage students in that question."

On the other hand, scholars who harbor reservations about the five-paragraph essay argue that it can quickly morph from support to straitjacket. The five-paragraph essay lends itself to persuasive or argumentative writing, but many other types of writing aren't well served by it, Snow pointed out. You would not use a five-paragraph essay to structure a book review or a work memorandum.

"To teach it extensively I think undermines the whole point of writing," she said. "You write to communicate something, and that means you have to adapt the form to the function."

A Balanced Approach

Melissa Mazzaferro, a middle school writing teacher in East Hartford, Conn., tries to draw from the potential strengths of the five-paragraph essay when she teaches writing, without adhering slavishly to it.

A former high school teacher, Mazzaferro heard a lot of complaints from her peers about the weak writing skills of entering high school students and ultimately moved to middle school to look into the problem herself.

Her take on the debate: It's worth walking students through some of the classic five-paragraph-essay strategies-compare and contrast, cause and effect-but not worth insisting that students limit themselves to three points, if they can extend an idea through multiple scenarios.

"Middle school especially is where they start to learn those building blocks: how you come up with a controlling idea for a writing piece and how you support it with details and examples," she said. "You want to draw your reader in, to have supportive details, whether it's five paragraphs or 20. That is where it's a great starting point."

But, she adds, it shouldn't be an ending point. By the time students enter 9th grade, Mazzaferro says that students should be developing more sophisticated arguments.

"I used to help a lot of kids write their college essays, and whenever I saw a five-paragraph essay, I'd make them throw it out and start over," she said. "At that point, you should be able to break the rules."

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Has the five-paragraph essay, long a staple in school writing curricula, outlived its usefulness? The venerable writing tool has largely fallen out of favor among influential English/language arts researchers and professional associations. "Rigid" and "constraining" are the two words critics often use to describe the format.

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Netflix is now producing its own version of the 1970s sitcom One Day a Time, featuring three generations of a Cuban-American family living together. While this updated go-round tackles some current issues facing such families, such as diversity and equity, it seems like the perfect time to take a look back at the original series, which was groundbreaking for featuring such then-controversial topics as suicide, premarital sex, and teen pregnancy. Here are 10 surprising facts about the show that started it all.

1. IT WAS PARTLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.

Whitney Blake was an actress probably best known for her role as Dorothy Baxter on the 1960s sitcom Hazel. Blake was also the mother of three children-one of whom is actress Meredith Baxter-who left her husband after 10 years of marriage and worked several day jobs at age 26 while taking drama classes at night in an effort to achieve her long-time dream of becoming a professional actress. In her 2011 memoir, Meredith Baxter described her upbringing as unconventional-she and her siblings, for example, were forbidden to refer to their mother as "Mom" and were instructed to always address her as "Whitney"- but Blake decided that her devotion to her career while being a single mom was the perfect premise for a TV series.

2. IT WAS ONLY THE SECOND SITCOM TO FEATURE A DIVORCED MOM.

Whitney Blake married TV producer Allan Manings in 1968. Manings had previously worked on the TV sitcom Good Times, so he had a direct pipeline to Norman Lear when he pitched Blake's divorced single mom idea. Lear, who was known for pushing the TV envelope on such series as All in the Family and Maude, agreed that a divorcée with children might attract viewers who were in a similar situation but also press enough controversy buttons in Middle America to make another hit. Yes, it sounds ever-so-benign today, but in 1975 (when the series debuted), Bonnie Franklin's Ann Romano was only the second-ever divorced mother to feature on a TV sitcom. Though Vivian Vance's character on The Lucy Show was the first divorced mom character, many considered Romano to be the "first realistic portrayal of a divorced mother struggling to raise her teenage daughters."

3. THERE WAS ONLY ONE DAUGHTER IN THE ORIGINAL PILOT.

The original pilot Lear filmed starred Franklin as a divorced nurse raising a teenaged daughter (played by Mackenzie Phillips). The proposed series was called Three to Get Ready and also featured Pat Harrington Jr. as Schneider, the apartment building superintendent, and Marcia Rodd as Romano's neighbor and friend. That particular pilot didn't sell, but Lear retooled it to ditch the hospital setting and added a second daughter. He also decided that Marcia Rodd wasn't the right fit for the neighbor and hired Mary Louise Wilson instead. Now called One Day at a Time, the series got a green light from CBS and debuted in December 1975.

4. A COUPLE OF KEY CHARACTERS WENT MISSING.

Richard Masur played attorney David Kane, a love interest for the newly-divorced Ann Romano in the first season. However, the actor realized after half a dozen episodes that his character was being "painted into a corner." In a 2016 interview with The A.V. Club, the noted character actor explained that David seemed to be constantly proposing marriage to Ann and she refused him every time. He was becoming a one-note character, and the actor became even further frustrated when Lear insisted that David and Ann's romance be chaste; it was made very clear via the scripts that they had done nothing more than hold hands and occasionally kiss. "I said, 'Write me off the show,'" Masur recalled of his conversation with Lear. "He said, 'Well, I don't really want ...' I said, 'Yes, you do, Norman. That's why you're here. Write me off the show.' He says, 'Okay.'"

Another character who seemingly disappeared without explanation was neighbor Ginny Wroblicki, a brassy cocktail waitress played by Mary Louise Wilson. Wilson had been appearing on and off Broadway since 1962, and it was while she was appearing in a revival of Gypsy that Lear offered her the role of Ginny. Wilson accepted the job based on Lear's track record, but she quickly decided that One Day at a Time was no All in the Family. She and Bonnie Franklin never saw eye-to-eye (pun intended: in her 2015 autobiography, Wilson described Franklin as constantly giving her a glassy, semi-cross-eyed gaze as she critiqued Wilson's performance), and she never got comfortable with the four-camera filming process. Like Masur, she pleaded her case to Lear and was released from her contract at the end of season two.

5. THE ACTOR WHO PLAYED SCHNEIDER ADDED HIS EVER-PRESENT TOOL BELT.

Pat Harrington Jr. had an impressive television pedigree (including a stint working with Steve Allen's comedy troupe) when he was hired to play the role of apartment building superintendent Dwayne Schneider. Harrington took his new gig very seriously and grew a Clark Gable-style mustache, since Schneider was supposed to be a notorious Lothario. He also decided-just half an hour before taping the first episode-that something was missing from his character's wardrobe. He paid a studio electrician for his well-worn tool belt, complete with hammer, which he then slung around his hips, John Wayne-style.

6. THE STUDIO HAD TROUBLE KEEPING UP WITH VALERIE BERTINELLI'S FAN MAIL.

Valerie Bertinelli, who was cast as Ann Romano's youngest daughter Barbara, became the breakout star of the series after just one season. With her girl-next-door face, button nose, and lush main of hair, she was suddenly America's Sweetheart, and-as Harrington mentioned in TV Guide's Behind the Sitcom-the studio could barely cope with the sacks of fan mail addressed to Bertinelli. Interestingly enough, even though she was featured in almost every teen fan magazine of the era-not to mention some People magazine covers-Valerie confessed in her autobiography that for many years she felt unattractive when compared to co-star Mackenzie Phillips. Meanwhile, Phillips was secretly envious of not only Bertinelli's media popularity, but also her wholesome upbringing and family life. Bertinelli was brought up in a closely-knit Italian Catholic family, while Phillips's childhood (as detailed in her own book) was unconventional, to say the least. Ultimately, it was announced that her departure from the show was by "mutual decision." (Though she did pop up in a few more episodes over the next few years.)

7. MACKENZIE PHILLIPS LEFT AT THE HEIGHT OF THE SHOW'S POPULARITY.

Throughout the first five seasons of One Day at a Time, Phillips's struggles with addiction were hardly an onset secret. Though the show was a ratings juggernaut, and viewers loved her Julie Cooper character, the young actress' erratic behavior eventually became cause for concern. In late 1979, People Magazine reported that "the show's producers, agreeing that Mackenzie was suffering from fatigue, ordered her to take six weeks off to 'rest and put on some weight'-in brief, shape up or else." Just a few weeks after returning to the set early 1980, she was reportedly given the choice to either say she was leaving the show "for personal reasons" or be fired.

8. BERTINELLI AND ELTON JOHN WERE MUTUAL ADMIRERS.

Barbara Cooper was an Elton John fan on the show, just as Bertinelli was in real life. In fact, after she and Phillips sang "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" in costume as John and Kiki Dee on an episode, someone sent a tape of their performance to the rock star. He mailed Bertinelli an autographed photo that read "You look more like me than I do!"

9. BONNIE FRANKLIN GOT DUMPED FOR ANN JILLIAN.

As happens on all TV shows that use teen actors, the kids grow up. As Bertinelli and Phillips got older and more independent, their characters did the same and eventually Ann Romano needed someone else to guide and nurture. Glenn Scarpelli joined the cast in season six as Alex, the son of Nick Handris, Ann's new boyfriend. Nick was played by Ron Rifkin, who left after one season (once again, the producers decided it was better if Ann didn't have a steady love interest). Nick was killed by a drunk driver and Alex came to live with Ann for three seasons. His was written out at the end of the eighth season because Scarpelli had accepted a role on the Ann Jillian sitcom Jennifer Slept Here, which ended up lasting just one season (as opposed to One Day at a Time's nine). He also tried his hand at a singing career:

10. SCHNEIDER ALMOST GOT A SPINOFF.

After nine seasons, Franklin and Bertinelli decided not to renew their contracts. But the ratings for One Day at a Time were still strong enough that the network wanted to keep the show going somehow. Their solution was to spin off the Schneider character into his own show. The episode entitled "Another Man's Shoes" was a backdoor pilot for a proposed series in which Schneider moves to Florida to care for his orphaned niece and nephew. That show was never picked up, leaving Harrington to hang up his tool belt for good.

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4 Reasons to Write by Hand Rather Than Type

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Netflix is now producing its own version of the 1970s sitcom One Day a Time, featuring three generations of a Cuban-American family living together. While this updated go-round tackles some current issues facing such families, such as diversity and equity, it seems like the perfect time to take a look back at the original series, which was groundbreaking for featuring such then-controversial topics as suicide, premarital sex, and teen pregnancy.

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from Three Teachers Talk, this is actually from an article by Penny Kittle.

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Mini-Lesson Monday: Reader's Response to Frame a Unit

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Penny Kittle recently shared this article about the diminishing attention span of humans, thanks to the plethora of instant-gratification stimuli that burdens our plugged-in students. I was reminded of my vow to help my kids simplify their lives, slow down their minds, and just...be.

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Argumentative Essay:  Editing and Revising

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Argumentative Essay:  Editing and Revising

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Includes video and article from PBS Learning Media

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Argumentative Essay: Editing and Revising

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Getting to the final draft takes a keen editorial eye and skillful editing. This demonstrative video uses a highlighting strategy that will help ensure that your rough draft encompasses the important parts.

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from Heinemann, a summary of the research that ALL English teachers--and anyone worried about teaching writing--should read!

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The most common reason for teaching grammar as a system for analyzing and labeling sentences has been to accomplish some practical aim or aims, typically the improvement of writing. For decades, however, research has demonstrated that the teaching of grammar rarely accomplishes such practical goals.

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Some great resources on a variety of writing topics, including argument writing.

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10 Surefire Ways to Remove Writing Roadblocks

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10 Surefire Ways to Remove Writing Roadblocks

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From Regie Routman, one of my favorite experts on writing.

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By Regie Routman
So you want to teach writing well. It's not as hard as you think. Yes, it's a challenge, but it can be exhilarating.

I believe writing - more than anything we teach - has the power to change students' lives, for them to see themselves, sometimes for the first time, as smart thinkers and writers across the curriculum. As one student proudly proclaimed when he put research notes into his own words, "I thought groundbreaking thoughts! Hooray for me!"

Come along on a drive with me. Not a drive-by, but a relaxing drive where we slow down and notice the signs that make writing doable, effective, and gratifying. We'll make some stops along the way, learning how to avoid some common barriers and hazards.

In your travels ahead, despite your best efforts, you will likely make some wrong turns. Don't despair. There are always alternate routes. Trust yourself, inform yourself, and enjoy the journey. Here are my 10 surefire ideas to pave the way.

1. See yourself as a writer.

Writing is scary. The blank page or screen calls to us to say something, and often the words don't come. Come clean with your students. If you hate and fear writing, tell them. If it's a struggle every time, share that struggle. They will appreciate and admire you for your honesty, and they will relate. You already are a writer. No doubt you have authored some of the following: emails, blogs, messages, tweets, cards, notes, letters, assignments, and more.

2. Write for real-world audiences and purposes.

Writing for audience and purpose is the number one recommendation that encompasses and trumps all the others. Writers write for readers. You already know this even if you haven't yet gone down this road. Everything you write has a genuine audience even if that audience is yourself, such as in a reflection or journal entry. Or you may write a newsletter where the audience is your students' families. The point is your audience is real. When students write solely for the teacher or the bulletin board, they don't invest full effort and energy, and we get lackluster results.

Aim for writing that engages students' hearts and minds. That engagement will lead to all-out efforts by your students. Look at required curriculum and standards with an eye and effort for real-world connections and student engagement. Ask yourself: "How can I make this writing relevant for students?" "Why does this writing matter?" "Is it worth our time and effort?" "Who are our readers?" Rethink and reroute as needed.

3. Put the writer before the writing.

Ask the writer to read his piece aloud. Just listen for the whole of the piece. Then read it aloud again. Adopt a mindset of strengths and celebrations. Ignore that hazardous warning sign, "needs improvement." Force yourself - you can do it! - to focus on the writer's language, message, and intentions. Sit on your hands, if necessary; put aside that pen or red pencil. Ignore spelling and grammar issues - for now. Notice the craft, the risks taken, and all that seems significant for this writer.

Generously comment on the actual language that moved you and all that the writer has done well or attempted to do. Only then, go down the road of making suggestions. Limit those suggestions to one or two that seem most important for moving the writer forward at this time.

I know what you're thinking. What about all those spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes? Observe the stop sign, and save those for last. If the writer leaves a conference feeling deflated, the student's commitment and energy to go on writing may be lost - and not just for this one piece of writing. Observe the writer's facial expressions and posture. Ensure your feedback has created the will, support, and confidence to go on writing. And, when you tackle those editing issues later, ensure the writer holds the pencil.

Editing doesn't matter much if the writing is "correct" but the content isn't worth reading.

Finally, for efficiency and giving students in-depth feedback, rely on public writing conferences. The whole class listens in to one student's writing conference and is expected to apply what they learn. Separate content and editing conferences, and do the latter last. Editing doesn't matter much if the writing is "correct" but the content isn't worth reading.

4. Expand choice and format.

Remember the last time someone required you to write something to exact specifications. Not much fun, was it? Five-paragraph essays and other rigid formats and formulas are hazardous to writing freely and joyfully. Outside of school, today's students are used to writing blogs and texts, interacting with social media, and incorporating photos, video, and multi-media in their presentations and writing.

We need to catch up, and at the very least provide some choice and student input within any writing structure we set up for them. Not comfortable with total free choice in writing? Me neither. Adopt choice within structure - choice with some non-negotiables, as in the story that follows.
Regie talks with students who are getting ready to write a memoir
5. Start with stories.

All of us love stories. Stories are what connect us to each other, humanize us, and give us a window into a deeper truth. Students love to hear family stories, their peers' stories, and our own stories. In a fifth grade classroom, where we were focusing on memoir and students were to write a memoir snippet, that is, choose the most memorable part of one significant life experience and expand on that with elaboration and detail, I shared a precious memory with my grandmother.

See the demonstration video above ( or follow this link) for my storytelling to the students before writing. Among other things, I talk about who my audience for the piece is and why and how writers invent dialogue that is emotionally true to their story.

6. Demonstrate your writing process.

Tell the whole story first, and pull out all the stops. As you are telling your story, the most important part will reveal itself to you. Then, take the plunge and start making your writing visible to your students. Take a deep breath, try to relax, and don't think about correctness. Put all your energy and thinking into your content and ideas. Unless you're demonstrating for emerging writers, this is not the time to comment on punctuation and capital letters. Just do it!

If students see us write a perfect piece in front of them, we are taking them down the wrong road.

For your preparation, create ahead of time a skeletal roadmap with the major signposts to prompt your thinking and keep you moving along. I generally use a Post-it or two. Even if you are fearful and lack confidence, do not write the story at home the night before! If students see us write a perfect piece in front of them, we are taking them down the wrong road.

They need to see our back and forth struggle, the rereading, rearranging, revising, thinking out loud process that is the messy work of almost all writers. Plus, all that planning time at home could have been used for doing something you love! Very important: before you send students off to write, check to see that they noticed what you did as a writer. For tips on effective demonstrations, see my guidelines.

7. Use rubrics judiciously.

Caution sign needed! While students absolutely need to know the criteria by which they and we evaluate their writing, an overreliance on rubrics breaks writing into bits and pieces, encourages superficiality, and sends the message that the presence of individual traits of writing in a piece - such as sentence fluency, organization, and word choice - add up to effective writing.

An overreliance on rubrics breaks writing into bits and pieces and encourages superficiality.

Use rubrics to set expectations but not as a writing program. Also, try this out: After you do your demonstration writing, go back and analyze which traits you included and how you used them. You'll be surprised. All the traits will be there. The whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.

8. Notice what authors do.

Connect writing with reading. Good writers read a lot, and they read like writers. Especially with a captivating text, they ask themselves something like, "What has this writer done to create this incredible lead, sense of suspense, humor, and so on?"

Through reading aloud, free choice independent reading, examining student exemplars saved from a previous class, and wide reading, guide students to notice the craft of writing - language play, literary language, dialogue, style, and so on - and to try those elements out in their own writing. The next time you are reading a book you love, try reading like a writer.

9. Write short.

We run out of fuel when we require so many long pieces. Have students write lots of short pieces, such as book recommendations, reviews, blurbs, explanations of posted school writing, poems, and so on. Writing short encourages ongoing practice on revision and editing, necessary for writing well and for publishing. Also, in a short piece we can teach just about all the writing essentials, for example, engaging leads, presenting ideas logically, applying correct conventions, and satisfying endings.

My favorite genre for writing short is free verse poetry, which is also a great equalizer for students who struggle. Everyone succeeds, and students love that they can break the usual rules of the road on punctuation, capitalization, format, font, white space, word choice, and more. Writing short gives our students and us energy!

10. Provide sustained time.

Time is our biggest roadblock to writing. None of the ideas discussed will matter much if we don't make writing high priority and schedule it daily, preferably at the same time. Then ensure that most of that time is given over to students to write uninterrupted, in a peaceful and organized space.

Limit the length of demonstrations and mini-lessons; the main event is students engaged in writing. Use that time to confer with students, either quick 1-3 minute roving conferences and/or a few in depth one-on-one conferences.

Finally, the only way to fit writing in each day is to integrate writing, with reading, into the content areas. Once your students routinely write to think, problem solve, create and explore, writing becomes many students' favorite subject, and you have a more joyful classroom.
Regie Routman (@regieroutman) is a longtime teacher, author, and speaker who is committed to improving the literacy and learning lives of children, especially those in high-challenge schools. Her professional development series from Heinemann, Regie Routman in Residence, captures the essence of this experience. For further ideas and lessons on writing well, or to contact Regie, visit her website.
Her latest book, Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success (ASCD, 2014) focuses on the critical role of instructional leadership in creating strong literacy programs. Her next book, Literacy Essentials: Engagement, Excellence, and Equity for ALL Students, will be published by Stenhouse in the spring of 2017.

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10 Surefire Ideas to Remove Writing Roadblocks

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By Regie Routman So you want to teach writing well. It's not as hard as you think. Yes, it's a challenge, but it can be exhilarating. I believe writing - more than anything we teach - has the power to change students' lives, for them to see themselves, sometimes for the first time, as smart thinkers and writers across the curriculum.

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10 Pedagogical Must-Reads for Workshop Teachers

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10 Pedagogical Must-Reads for Workshop Teachers

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from Three Teachers Talk: Readers and Writers Workshop. Includes the BEST books on secondary writing...not only for English teachers!

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10 Pedagogical Must-Reads for Workshop Teachers

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I met with my new student teacher a few weeks ago, and he asked me to borrow any books that might help him get going on the readers-writers workshop-the "theory" version of Jackie's starter kit.

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writingisthinking.org

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Today, the last day of our trip, we are energized by the Borders and Identity Unit that we have built and will use to launch the year with our students. We are flooded with all that we've seen in our seven cities. We are entrenched in the creative part of teaching, the part that involves being an interesting, engaged individual to better support the interesting, engaged individuals in our classrooms. The part that means we learn something new in order to teach something new. The experience of being a learner better prepares a teacher to teach, and this summer was an opportunity for us to authentically learn about murals on different borders, to confront not knowing and to investigate, to use art as a lens into community.

This trip made space for us to be learners. After the 12th grade, those opportunities almost always come with one (or many) literal costs. And Fund for Teachers (along with the school year calendar) gave us the time, space, and finances to learn more in a way that will support our students, but also in a way that sustains us as teachers, professionals, and individuals. It made it possible for us to end the trip feeling rejuvenated rather than depleted. There is a constant push for teachers to continue professional development; it is indeed essential. But driving this profession development experience (and literally driving more than 900 miles) meant that we could pace our learning and reflection, and that we could intentionally choose meaningful experiences that hit our " zone of proximal development."

This month, we immersed ourselves in adult project-based learning. We've tried lots of new things, from food to cloud-mountain hiking to driving to places we'd never been (while blogging) to talking about art from sunrise to sunset. And we've done the whole thing together. Often, in our classrooms, we create groups that we believe will benefit from the individuality of each member. We build in scaffolds meant to allow the group to discover each individual's strengths and to make empathy a non-negotiable. Though we embarked with empathy and respect already in place, our twenty-six days together have illuminated the strengths and areas of growth (thanks, BPS, for the language) of our partnership. We both value efficiency, and, in the face of less-than-such (e.g., when the internet goes as turtle-pace, when people get motion sick, when you walk up the wrong side of the mountain, etc), we have learned much about each other. That knowledge has made us better collaborators and better friends.

In San Francisco, where we started our trip, we were oriented to the idea of looking. This was not just because there was so much to look at in The Mission, but also because we did our first day with a guide, who was able to re-frame what we had seen and interpreted in the context of history and community. Carla made us cognizant of how much we needed other people's knowledge and understanding to build our own. The Pacoima (L.A.) murals added a layer of "looking around corners" to that concept. On the hottest day of our trip, we spent the majority of it seeking out art on the walls of automotive dealerships and in the parking lots of community centers. It wasn't always going to be all in one alley. In San Diego, a park once occupied by people and now occupied by art, had us looking for four hours and not seeing enough. We returned home those nights googling Aztec symbols and stories, trying to learn enough to know something.

Tucson and Dr. Acosta gave us yet another frame through which to experience our learning. Freedom of education does not mean freedom to learn about the American Revolution and the Civil War through a lens of whiteness. Precious Knowledge, to our generation of "urban baby teachers," is a reflection of our intentions. Though we (the generation of "urban baby teachers") are in no way united in our vision or our understanding of social justice, the power of conviction in ideas, history, and lifting stories and voices drove us into the work of education. We wonder if he knows how many teachers who are only five or six years in are tracking his legal battle and celebrating his victories.

In Santa Fe, we absorbed the International Folk Art Market, how artists envision and reimagine, how tradition can morph modern and can accommodate the present day without reneging its roots. This mirrors the murals we've seen and the art of Frida Kahlo, taking symbols from the past and bringing them to life in the now. In Mexico City, we saw so much. Teotihuacan, Frida, Diego, the Anthropology Museum, street art, the culinary art of Pujol, the stained glass and craters of Toluca. With American eyes and feet, we navigated the city, and learned all that we still had to learn.

It is hard to classify this trip, and even harder to know all that it will bring to our classrooms. It falls somewhere in the vicinity of sabbatical-an intentional, purposeful break that brings new insight-but also touches the realm of professional development, continuing education, and creative project. We vision a unit with three parts. First, with our students, we will read several memoirs that broadly address the topic of borders and walls, thinking with our students about potential barriers and how to scale them. Second, we will all generate and share memoirs from our own lives on the same topic. The author of each memoir will formulate his or her own theme about the topic, communicating a piece of knowledge gained from navigating-either adeptly or crudely-a border. Finally, after examining many primary sources collected on our trip and within Boston, students will co-construct a mural combining the themes of their memoirs to create a community creation.

The idea of "insider and outsider" has been, in many ways, the crux of our travels. We asked questions and navigated our identity as visitor, as white visitor, as American visitor. In our classrooms we are often the the outsiders to the communities in which we teach. However our ethnicities and upbringing reflect the dominant histories and tools that are demanded from dominant culture. In this unit, we hope to illuminate these walls, supporting students to name them, scale them, and ultimately paint them. As humanities teachers, we believe that providing students vocabulary and time to think and discuss the world and its issues leads to a brighter, more creative, and smarter future than the two of us can imagine. Solutions lie in the writing, in the art, in the conversations, and in the relationships that students create. Just as we wrote in our FFT proposal, students must see themselves reflected in curriculum, in physical space, and in pedagogy in order to be successful. Because we do not physically reflect our students' identities, we think constantly about how to make all other facets of our teaching affirming. This unit and this project will be a launching point for discussions about personal identity, community, and what comes next.

In Solidarity,
Kat + Alice

Thank Yous:

To Jenn, for extending opportunities and providing support to those who choose them; to Erica Herman and Pauline Lugira, for being principals who support and encourage teacher learning and leadership; to our families and hosts along the way, thank you for your support, trust, and generosity while we adventured; and to the Writing Is Thinking team, whose Mission, Vision, and Foundational Beliefs propel collaboration and innovative teaching.

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Today, the last day of our trip, we are energized by the Borders and Identity Unit that we have built and will use to launch the year with our students. We are flooded with all that we've seen in our seven cities.

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Five Effective Tools

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Editor's Note: Teaching Channel has partnered with Student Achievement Partners on a blog series about digital literacy tools and their effective use by educators.
The Common Core English Language Arts Standards for Writing focus on building college and career readiness by having students demonstrate the ability to write in a variety of formats. As educators, we need to facilitate authentic experiences for students to practice and take risks during the writing process.

With that in mind, we're going to discuss several valuable digital tools to help teachers create a more engaging and dynamic writing classroom for students to meet the rigorous demands of the Common Core.

1. Kaizena

Kaizena is an amazing free tool that educators can use in conjunction with Google Docs to provide real time feedback with their own voice! Teachers can record audio comments that can be heard and responded to directly within a document.

Providing written feedback can be a cold, impersonal process. Consider the power of this for a moment: Students put their heart and soul into a submitted assignment only to be slightly crushed when it's returned marked up - all they see is someone telling them what they did wrong. Tone can't be translated through text. And despite the best intentions of the teacher to be constructive, students are inevitably disappointed... as if their efforts weren't good enough.

Enter Kaizena, which helps potentially eliminate this feeling as the feedback is delivered in the teacher's voice via technology. Rather than sifting through the comments on the page, students can hear a teacher's nurturing and encouraging tone as feedback is delivered orally. The tone isn't misconstrued and the student's effort is recognized.

Kaizena also provides teachers an opportunity to extend the school day. One of the most valuable components to solid writing instruction is the one-on-one conferences teachers facilitate with students to guide, scaffold, and push their thinking. Only problem? There's never enough time! Kaizena is a vehicle to conduct these conferences through technology by providing two-way, real-time conversation.

This tool isn't limited to only teacher-to-student. Student feedback is vital. Use Kaizena to empower kids to improve their writing and editing skills by giving and receiving verbal feedback from their peers.

2. DraftBack

DraftBack is a free tool designed for use with the Google Chrome browser and the Google Docs environment that allows you to play back the revision history in any doc that you can edit. It's like being able to go back and watch your student's writing process as it's happening. This tool can be utilized with students to help them reflect on their writing process, and with parents and special services team members to make the student's writing process visible.

For example, the Teacher's College writer's workshop model focuses instruction on the process instead of the product to develop lifelong writers. Students are given the opportunity to practice specific writing strategies over several pieces, instead of the traditional approach of students working on one piece throughout a unit. This promotes metacognition by pushing students to think critically about why they are using specific writing strategies. DraftBack encourages students to take a look back through their writing. It's a perfect tool to use with students during individual conferences.

We've also found that this tool is helpful during parent and/or special services meetings as a means to examine a student's writing progress. In playing back the revision history, it's like seeing a piece written in real time and helps to give more insight in providing targeted strategies for our struggling students.

3. No Red Ink

Grammar is credibility, especially online. Words carry a tremendous amount of weight in a virtual world where judgement is often cast based on accurate syntax. No Red Ink is a grammar solution created by two teachers to help students. It provides high-interest content with authentic assessments that adapts as students interact with the technology.

Teachers can use the program as part of a blended learning environment. It gives learners immediate, differentiated feedback as they practice the necessary skills to demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage - a tenet explicitly required by the Common Core.

No Red Ink affords students the opportunity to select their interests, so all of the work is personalized and relevant, and the tool provides teachers the ability to track their students' progress in real time. The program empowers students to take ownership over their learning by identifying strengths and areas of need as they work to master individual skills. Teachers can create customized assignments to assess specific grammar skills. The assignments are graded instantly and students receive feedback as soon as they are done.

4. Virtual Debate

Virtual Debate is a project that was started by Melissa Butler and Elissa Malespina. The project began as a way to infuse technology into an authentic argumentative writing experience by giving students an audience.

To get started with the Virtual Debate, two classes agree to engage with one another and select a topic based on the interests/passions of the students. Past topics have included police presence in schools, competitive sports, and homework, to name a few.

Once a topic is selected, the two sides face off in a coin toss through Google Hangouts to decide the pro and con sides. Students then conduct research and even have the opportunity to contact experts to formulate arguments. The great news for teachers wishing to participate in the virtual debate, is that Melissa and Elissa provide all the mini lessons, anchor charts, and resources that they've developed.

The final debate is judged by experts from around the country, and it's recorded using Google Hangouts On Air so parents can tune in and see their child's hard work. You can sign up and join the Virtual Debate Project, or connect with teachers and colleagues through Twitter to start your own. Not only does the experience give students a competitive opportunity to share their argument writing, but it also hones their speaking and listening skills while having some fun!

5. Blogging

Connecting students with the world is an imperative in the modern classroom. As Josh Stumpenhorst, the 2012 Illinois Teacher of the Year, stated, "The refrigerator at home can no longer be the showcase for student work. Connect, share, and give your students a real audience."

The Common Core State Standards call on teachers to implement innovative and exciting ways to engage students by making use of the global community. Technology provides the tools to seize this opportunity.

The voices of our students need to be heard, and blogging is a strategy that provides the platform. Kidblog, Edublogs, and Blogger (integrated with Google Apps For Education) are three of our favorite blogging tools for classrooms. All are safe, free, intuitive to use, and provide a network for students and teachers to communicate with others around the world.

Blogging can be used as a powerful means of ongoing reflection - both for students and for yourself, as a teacher or administrator. An environment that values the art of reflection places emphasis on the importance of making meaning from experience - a crucial component in the learning process.

Quadblogging is another effective strategy for teachers to leverage when using blogs in the classroom. Essentially, a group of four classrooms come together virtually to gain a genuine audience for their students. Each week, a different class is the "focus class," affording the other three classes the opportunity to visit and comment on the focus class blog. Over the course of four weeks, each class has their chance as the focus class, ensuring all voices are heard. Check out an example from fifth grade classes across four schools in Middletown Township Public Schools.

Finally, give students the opportunity to author a blog about your classroom or about your school. Share your story with the world and empower the voices of your students along the way.

And when you jump in, be sure to share your students' blogs on Twitter and invite a global audience to view their genius. Use and follow #Comments4Kids to connect with other educators and their students across the world.

Continue The Conversation

To continue the conversation, please join our class via Remind: Digital Tools for TCHrs. Text @4TCHrs to 81010 from your mobile device. We will continue to share one new digital tool per week throughout the school year to augment your literacy instruction.
Natalie Franzi is part of the Middletown Township Public School leadership team as an Elementary Supervisor of Curriculum and Instruction. She has previously taught middle school reading and special education in an inclusive elementary setting. Natalie is involved in EDCampNJ, EDCamp Jersey Shore, EDCamp Leadership, NJ/PA ECET2, and NJASCD. She is also a Student Achievement Partner Core Advocate and Google Educator. Follow her on Twitter: @NatalieFranzi. Steve Figurelli serves as a Supervisor of Elementary Education with the Public Schools of Edison Township in New Jersey, overseeing the district's K-5 Science and Gifted & Talented programs. In addition to his work at the local level, Figurelli also serves on Remind's Teacher Advisory Board, is a guest contributor for ASCD, is a co-author of StuVoice.org's Student Voice In A Box, co-organizer of EdTechNJ, and is a member of the steering committee for the NJ/PA Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers (ECET2) conference. Follow him on Twitter: @SteveFigurelli.

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Literacy in the Digital Age: Five Writing Tools

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Editor's Note: Teaching Channel has partnered with Student Achievement Partners on a blog series about digital literacy tools and their effective use by educators. The Common Core English Language Arts Standards for Writing focus on building college and career readiness by having students demonstrate the ability to write in a variety of formats.

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Graff and Birkenstein. Looking for way to structure argument? This little book, which includes templates, is a great resource.

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Link to Ch 1 & 2 Preview.

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writing with mentors: how to reach every writer in the room using current

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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english language - composition and exercises - study and teaching (secondary)

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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Writing with Mentors: How to Reach Every Writer in the Room Using Current, Engaging Mentor Texts

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"Writing With Mentors is one of the best books I've read on harnessing the power of mentor texts to spur authentic student writing." --Kelly Gallagher, author of Write Like This "Writing With Mentors has transformed the way I think about using exemplar pieces." --Christopher Lehman, coauthor of F...

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Move the Writer. Move the writing. Great ideas on mentor text.

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This year, my AP Literature students had the opportunity to participate in a poetry blog share with students from other AP Lit classes across the country (shout out #aplitchat squad!). I liked the idea of this writing opportunity from the get go for several reasons-students would have an authentic audience, sharpen their critical reading skills, have the opportunity to see how other students develop insights about complex texts, give and receive feedback, and have a long-term, self-directed writing opportunity.

But what appealed to me the most? The chance to turn my kids loose to write in the wild. Recently, Hattie wrote about growing independent writers through blogging and Tricia put her finger on the many ways blogging is both powerful and useful. And this week my friend Brian wrote about the ins and outs of his blogging unit.

To tailor to my students' needs, my poetry blog requirements have remained simple and flexible: Student blog posts must analyze a self-selected contemporary poem. Easy enough, right? Right. But there's a 'but.'

Our quest this year has been to narrate our ideas, insights, and conclusions about literature in our own unique and authentic voices-aiming always towards engaging, effective, sophisticated, and intentional writing that is conversational (but not a conversation), and offer readers not just proof of reading, but a depth of analysis that is interesting and thought provoking.

It's a tall order, I realize. But that's why student blogs are awesome. It gives students a chance to practice writing in a virtually fail free zone, and they learn important lessons not just about reading and writing, but themselves as writers and what it takes to craft engaging, effective writing. But the freedom of blogging is what makes this type of self-evaluation and practice possible.

My students have embraced this, too. I love the message of Ashton's headline.

Here are 5 things your students can learn from blogging. (I know, because I've learned them, too.)

Voice and style

Think of blogging as the anti in-class essay.

Of course, you can focus student blogs on any topic, theme, or style to meet any academic purpose, but for me, blogging frees my students from the constraints of what they believe assigned essays should sound like.

For starters, there's no official rubric or handbook, the style is incredibly familiar, and the pressure of page length is off. Because blogs offer students creative control of layout and themes, it's this same ownership that encourages not just a unique layout but a considered style and voice in their writing.

My students are discovering over time that who you are on paper is who you are, so they strive to show how interesting and intelligent they are with the voice and style of their writing.

Mentor text habits of mind

It will come as no surprise to you that every author I've heard speak this year has this one thing in common: all of them read. They have influences and mentors and other writers they aspire to.

The beauty of mentor texts is they're all around. In our blogging project, students have taken cues from mentor texts we've studied in class, but just as importantly, they've paid attention to the writing of others, both professional and non. They've assessed what works, what doesn't work, and what makes for an interesting and engaging post. And blogging provides them a safe space to play with different craft moves they might not try in class.

This risk-taking and awareness is difficult to teach. So the prize goes to blogging.

Quality control

Last month as I was drafting a post for WVCTE, I knew I was writing something that I was going to be proud of. Conversely, I've written plenty of posts where I've left it and let myself feel quite the opposite - sometimes a tinge of disappointment or even a cringe. My students are learning this, too.

Because of our blogging project requires students to comment on one another's posts, my kids are learning what kinds of topics, format, analysis, and style elicits comments from their readers. My students are learning that depth of thought, voice, and authenticity win over their readers far more often than fancy formats or photos.

I hope my students are discovering the awesome balance of professional and personal in their writing. That yes, they write for their audience, for me, for the grade and the assignment, but that their work and their writing is far more satisfying when it's writing they can be proud of.

Audience awareness

Speaking of readers, how great is it that blogging offers students an opportunity to be published writers? My students have shared their posts on social media, tweeted them at the poets who penned the poem they analyzed, and even extended their blogging into personal topics, as well.

What I like most about giving students a real, living, and available audience (who isn't me) is the intrinsic drive to craft quality writing.

Writing on a deadline

Students are used to copious due dates and deadlines in their academic lives. Teachers, of course, live by deadlines as well, the bells signaling us constant reminders of what we need to do and when. But writing on a deadline? That's its own animal.

I realize I'm going to contradict myself with Quality Control, but sometimes, you just have to crank out the words and get the job done. This is a fitting lesson for my seniors who are so close to crossing the threshold into demanding college majors.

I'll thank blogging once again for reminding my students of the grit it takes to meet your deadlines and get the job done the best way you can.
Are your students blogging? I'd love to have you tell me more about it!
Leave a comment below, find me on Twitter @karlahilliard, or connect with us on Facebook!
-Karla

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This year, my AP Literature students had the opportunity to participate in a poetry blog share with students from other AP Lit classes across the country (shout out #aplitchat squad!).

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Look through these images of the Great Depression and talk about what they portray. Then write captions for five of them, demonstrating your understanding of the major events, issues, and impacts of the Depression on America.

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Find the perfect Great Depression stock photos and editorial news pictures from Getty Images. Download premium images you can't get anywhere else.

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Lots of information on science notebooks and journals, including examples.

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Our students need science education to survive and thrive. Today. Tomorrow. At home. In the world.

Our mission: To be a catalyst for sustainable innovation and improvement in K-12 science education.

Washington State LASER is a state science-education program led by Pacific Science Center and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory along with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Educational Service Districts and school districts.

Since 1999, the public/private partnership has worked with 106,300 educators in more than 205 school districts to share and inspire powerful practices in science education-from student notebooks that combine science, literacy, math and art-to strategic planning that creates a shared vision from classroom to school board.

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Our students need science education to survive and thrive. Today. Tomorrow. At home. In the world. Our mission: To be a catalyst for sustainable innovation and improvement in K-12 science education. Washington State LASER is a state science-education program led by Pacific Science Center and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory along with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Educational Service Districts and school districts.

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Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers

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Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers

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Another article from Edutopia with some excellent ideas and links.

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Show Not Tell

Let's take a moment to think of ourselves when we learn: Do we understand something and apply it better when we are shown a finished product while also being told about it? I'm going to guess that most of us will say yes. Doesn't it help to scrutinize that already-assembled bookshelf display at Ikea before going home to those often confusing instructions? (Clearly, I speak from experience on this one.)

So if we want students to write a convincing persuasive essay that includes evidence, let's show them examples. If we want them to craft a descriptive story, filled with dialogue and details, we need to show them what this looks like and talk about.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: when I show them a student model it often gets copied or parroted back! And, yes this is a concern as we want all our students to work hard and create their own original and unique essay, story, or speech. Additionally, and I speak from experience as both a teacher and a writer on this one, nothing causes writer's block more than being handed an amazing model and then told, "Okay, now you write!"

So how do we keep students from mimicking or from freezing up? We have to give students time to talk about the mentor text, time to practice, and time to share their own efforts with peers for feedback.

Deconstructing Good Writing

Once you have found some good mentor texts -- student written or published pieces -- plan backwards from there. Put your lesson designer cap on and ask yourself, what are all the features that make this a solid piece of writing: the organization? the title? the sentence variety? the use of metaphor and other imagery? the evidence that supports claims? the introduction?

After you have listed these features, create mini-lessons for each one you want your students to emulate. The mini-lesson should include time after the teaching for students to practice and share in small, safe groups and when ready, with the whole class. Also, I used to create a handout with several really great introductions (from books, essays, short stories, and speeches). Together, the students I would analyze these opening sentences and discuss what made them so powerful.

The importance of what happens next should not be underestimated: Give your students time to practice writing what they just learned. And not just time but make it low-stakes -- no grading, no evaluation, no rubric -- simply time to explode on a page, take chances, be whimisical, be daring: firewrite! Let them then share what they wrote with near neighbors or read it aloud to the whole class. If they don't want to do either, give them the option to not.

Finding Mentor Texts

If you are a new teacher and don't yet have a collection of student essays and writing samples, then turn to your colleagues who might have some to share. I've also found awesome mentor text on the Internet.

Write Source offers a large collection of student writing for all grade levels and genres, and for free. What is great about this selection is that numerous teachers from all over have submitted these models so there's quite a bit of variety.

Because I support teachers who work at urban public schools in Los Angeles, a relevant resource I found to share with teachers is the publication, LA Youth. Archived on the site are countless narratives, persuasive essays, letters, and poems written by teenagers living in metropolitan areas of LA. The more students can relate to the voice and content found in a mentor text, the more it will inspire their own writing.

There are also many anthologies and books out there that offer wonderful collections of children and adolescent writing. I used this one with eleventh-graders as they were writing their college personal statements, 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays. This collection of essays offered up clever, zany, and heartfelt teenage writing that sparked creativity and bravery in my own students' writing.

How has mentor text transformed writing in your classroom? What are some websites and resources you have found helpful? Please share in the comments section below.

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Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers | Edutopia

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Let's take a moment to think of ourselves when we learn: Do we understand something and apply it better when we are shown a finished product while also being told about it? I'm going to guess that most of us will say yes.

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3 Strategies to Improve Student Writing Instantly

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3 Strategies to Improve Student Writing Instantly

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Article from Edutopia with easily implemented strategies.

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Editor's Note: A version of this post first appeared on Techie Teacher and Character Coach.

"But Miss Parrish, I can't think of anything to write!"

Haven't we all heard similar lines in our classrooms? We see hesitant writers sit with pencils in their hands and paper on their desks, almost as if they've been handicapped by the task we have set for them.

How is it that some students have so much to say when talking, but when a pencil is put into their hand they suddenly hesitate, struggle, and have nothing to say? How can we help these hesitant writers eliminate the barrier that suddenly appears when they're asked to write?

The answer is to have them produce ideas without writing at all. That's right, the way to get hesitant writers to produce as much writing as they do talking is to have them do exactly that -- talk.

Strategies That Work
1. Student Talks, Teacher Writes

Have your student stand up while you sit at the desk.

Pick up the student's pencil and say, "You talk, I'll write."

This usually catches students off-guard -- it takes them a moment to realize this is a real option.

2. Audio Record It & Then Transcribe It

Identify a way your students can record themselves speaking their essay rather than writing it. This could be a tape recorder, a digital audio recorder, a computer with a microphone, or an audio recording feature on a phone.

Hand the recording device to your student and say, "Step out in the hall and recite your essay using this."

They can then play the recording back and write down their words.

3. Audio Transcribe It

Pick an app or tool that transcribes speaking as text. Some options: PaperPort Notes, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Dictation Pro, VoiceTranslator, or the text-to-speech tools that are built into many smartphones. Try one of these on your phone, tablet, or computer.

Tell your students, "Go ahead -- speak your paper."

After speaking, the students can email themselves the transcribed text and work on the draft from there.

Communication Before Craft

The sooner students (and teachers) see that writing has nothing to do with a pencil, a piece of paper, or a keyboard, and is simply communicating, the sooner they will start making incredible progress. Barriers will come down. The hesitation of putting the pencil on the paper to write will go away. In my view, writing is simply communicating through pencil marks rather than through speech.

Our concern is not whether a student communicates through a pencil and pen, keyboard, chalkboard, audio transcription device, or other means. Our real hope and goal is for individuals to capture their high-quality thoughts and convey them effectively to others. The strategies here break down the barriers between a student's mind and their audience. These strategies free up thinkers to express their thoughts without the hesitation that makes some students' minds go blank as they pick up that pen or pencil.

How have you helped students write without putting pen to paper (or pixel to page)?

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3 Strategies to Fire Up Hesitant Writers | Edutopia

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Editor's Note: A version of this post first appeared on Techie Teacher and Character Coach. "But Miss Parrish, I can't think of anything to write!" Haven't we all heard similar lines in our classrooms? We see hesitant writers sit with pencils in their hands and paper on their desks, almost as if they've been handicapped by the task we have set for them.

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Writing in the Content Areas:  A Pathway to Critical Thinking

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Writing in the Content Areas:  A Pathway to Critical Thinking

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An excellent practical guide with specific activities to implement in your classroom. From Wyoming Department of Education.

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North Carolina High School Handbook for Teaching Writing across the Curriculum

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North Carolina High School Handbook for Teaching Writing across the Curriculum

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This is a very thorough, lengthy document with some excellent information.

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This document by Jim Burke from Scholastic's Teacher's Essential Guide Series is a must read for teachers feeling less than qualified to teach writing in their classes.

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How Important Is Teaching Literacy in All Content Areas?

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How Important Is Teaching Literacy in All Content Areas?

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This article from Edutopia clearly identifies WHY literacy must be taught throughout the curriculum.

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Someone who has reached advanced literacy in a new language, for example, is able to engage in these four skills with their new language in any setting -- academically or casually.

Literacy is an Every-Century Skill

If you are a math, history, science, or art teacher, where does literacy fit into your classroom instruction? It's common to believe that literacy instruction is solely the charge of language arts teachers, but, frankly, this just is not so. Naysayers, please take a moment to think about this quote:

"Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives." -- Richard Vaca, author of Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum

With content standards looming, it's easy to only focus on the content we teach, and covering material. We have so much to tell students and share with them. However, are we affording students enough time daily to practice crucial communication skills?

Here's one way to look at it: Content is what we teach, but there is also the how, and this is where literacy instruction comes in. There are an endless number of engaging, effective strategies to get students to think about, write about, read about, and talk about the content you teach. The ultimate goal of literacy instruction is to build a student's comprehension, writing skills, and overall skills in communication.

Ask yourself, how do I mostly convey the information and knowledge to my students? Do I turn primarily to straight lecture, or teacher talk? Or, do I allow multiple opportunities for students to discover information on their own?

Speaking

Students having academic or high-level conversations in small and large group settings does not happen overnight. It takes time -- and scaffolding -- to create a Socratic Seminar setting in your classroom.

In order for our students to engage in academic conversation, or accountable talk, they need plenty of practice with informal conversation in pairs and triads. Use the following strategies frequently for building students' oral skills: think-pair-share, elbow partner, shoulder share, and chunk and chew. Kids need to be talking and not sitting passively in their seats. Remember, Vygotsky believed learning to be a very social act!

For every 5-8 minutes you talk, give them 1-2 minutes to talk to each other. You can walk around and listen, informally assessing and checking for understanding.

Conversation helps immensely when processing new content and concepts. Students also will surely have more fruitful answers to share (be sure to always provide think time when asking questions of students).

Writing

When was the last time your students had sore hands from writing in your class? Just like conversation, writing helps us make sense of what we are learning and helps us make connections to our own lives or others' ideas.

You can't avoid thinking when you write.

Students need to be writing every day, in every classroom. How about adding to your instruction more informal and fun writing activities like quick writes, stop and jots, one-minute essays, graffiti conversations? Not all writing assignments need be formal ones.

If you haven't heard of the National Writing Project (NWP), it's the largest-scale and longest-standing teacher development program in U.S. history. Workshops are offered nationwide (usually through a local university) where teachers of all content areas learn new and exciting strategies to encourage, support, and grow the young writers in their classrooms.

Two tenets of the NWP that I think produce wide gains in student writing: teachers writing side-by-side with students, and creating time on a regular basis in your classroom for writer's workshop that follows a type of writing process that puts the writer in charge (of content, voice, and structure).
Reading
The days of believing that we could hand informational text or a novel to a student and assume he or she makes full meaning of it on their own is a teaching mode of the past. Whether we like it or not, regardless of the content we teach, we are all reading instructors.

Scaffolding the reading by using effective strategies for pre-, during, and after reading, such as: previewing text, reading for a purpose, making predictions and connections, think alouds, and using graphic organizers will support all our students, and not just struggling readers and English learners.

Another onus not only on English teachers, but all teachers as reading instructors? We need to inspire both a love for reading, and build reading stamina in our students (this means eyes and mind on the page for more than a minute!)

But, how do we do this? A high-interest classroom library is a great place to start. If you are a Title I school, there should be funds set aside for classroom libraries. If not, advocate for all classrooms at your school site to have a library, even if it's just a handful of books to get you going.

You can make the investment yourself, or have a book-raiser party. Email all your friends a wish list for books that students have requested and those easy sells ( Twilight, Guinness Book of World Records...). Ask them to bring one or two of the books to your cocktail/appetizer party. (Read this Edutopia post for ideas on how to set up and manage your classroom library).

If you are a physics teacher, do all your books need to be about science? Absolutely not! But you might want to focus primarily on informational, non-fiction books. In fact, with the new national standards for English emphasizing more non-fiction text and quite a bit less literature, I say all K-12 teachers need to enhance their libraries with more non-fiction (this can include newspaper and magazine subscriptions as well).

(I'm not going to go into listening as a communication skill, since I think our students do plenty of that already, but here's a great Web site with characteristics of an effective listener you can share with your students and they can practice with each other.)

What role does literacy play in your classroom? What are some ways you weave instruction in reading, writing, and speaking into the content you teach? Please share!

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How Important is Teaching Literacy in All Content Areas? | Edutopia

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Someone who has reached advanced literacy in a new language, for example, is able to engage in these four skills with their new language in any setting -- academically or casually. If you are a math, history, science, or art teacher, where does literacy fit into your classroom instruction?

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An article from Reading Rockets by Fisher and Frey.

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Students have to be taught how to write. However, it's not as easy as assigning a prompt and telling students to get to writing. When teachers simply assign (or cause) writing, student achievement suffers (Fisher & Frey, 2007). In fact, there is evidence that student writing achievement has been stagnant for years.

Current expectations outlined in most state standards and the Common Core State Standards suggest that students need to write opinions and arguments with evidence, write informational pieces that include details, and write narratives that are highly descriptive. Writing is something that students should do routinely. As noted in Writing Anchor Standard 10, students should "Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audience" (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 18).

As part of the literacy block, teachers provide focused instruction on the composing process. This includes attention to genre, structure, mechanics, and voice. Teachers model the composing process for their students and provide students time to write during school. They also engage students in writing conferences and encourage peer reviews of written products (e.g., Nauman, Stirling, & Borthwick, 2011).

However, writing cannot be limited to the literacy block if students are to succeed. Writing to learn, in mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts, is an important consideration for elementary school teachers (Knipper & Duggan, 2006). Given the increased attention and focus on writing as a performance assessment tool, wise teachers frequently check for understanding through student writing, and they do so across the content areas. In this column, we focus on three instructional routines that teachers can use to facilitate student writing across the day.

Power writing: building fluency in composition

Teachers and researchers understand that fluency is an important consideration in reading development (Rasinski, 2102) but sometimes neglect writing fluency. If students do not writing enough, they don't have anything to edit. Because writing is thinking, if students are not writing fluently, they probably aren't thinking fluently, at least about the topic of study. That's not to say that writing fluency makes for a comprehensive curriculum. As with reading, fluency is one aspect that needs to be considered.

Power writing is a method for building writing fluency through brief, timed writing events (Fearn & Farnan, 2001). The purpose is to get students to put ideas down on paper quickly and accurately. During content area instruction, teachers can integrate a simple daily routine of three one-minute rounds of fluency-building experiences. This will ensure that students have daily practice with writing, which addresses part of the requirements of Writing Anchor Standard 10, the part focused on shorter time frames.

A content area word or phrase is posted on the board, and students are asked to use it somewhere in their writing. Students are reminded to "write as much as you can, as well as you can" (Fearn & Farnan, 2001, p. 196). The timer is set, and writing begins until it rings a minute later. When time is up, students reread what they have written, circling any errors they notice, then count and record the number of words in the margin.

This routine is repeated two more times, until students have three one-minute writing samples in their journals. They then record the highest number of words written (often it is the third sample) on a sheet of graph paper kept in their notebook.

This accomplishes several things for teachers and students. First, and perhaps most obviously, student writing fluency improves with practice. For example, the fourth graders who focused on fluency writing in the Kasper-Ferguson and Moxley (2002) study averaged 10 words per minute, and with graphing their fluency writing activities, they increased to 25 words written per minute, with one student consistently writing 60 words per minute. Interestingly, the authors noted, "Ceiling effects in writing rate did not appear" (p. 249), meaning that the rate was still increasing when the study ended.

Second, students think about the content while they are writing. In fact, students often report that they understand the content a bit better once they have written about it. We have had more than one student tell us, "I didn't know what I thought until I wrote it down." This also makes for good assessment of content knowledge, as it provides teachers a glimpse into students' brains. For example, the students in Mr. Morton's (all names are pseudonyms) fifth-grade class were focused on the human body and organ systems when they were asked to write about the kidney, lungs, and heart. Mutawali wrote the following: "The kidneys is the part of the body that clean the blood. We got two of them. The shape is like our reading table. They is 5 inches." It is clear that Mutawali was thinking about this organ as he was writing. Mr. Morton could tell that Mutawali remembered key details.

Third, power writing provides teachers with information about student error patterns. When pressed for speed, all writers will make errors. When students reread their written responses and notice errors, teachers don't need to worry. When students fail to notice the errors they've made, teachers should take note and design additional instruction to address those errors.

For example, in Mutawali's writing, Mr. Morton noticed the incorrect "to be" verbs and the need for the word clean to be cleans. Taking note of this allows Mr. Morton to plan subsequent instruction, likely as part of the literacy block, to help Mutawali produce academic writing. In doing so, Mr. Morton will help his students master part of Writing Anchor Standard 4, namely, to "Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience" (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 18).

Shared writing: making the composing process visible

Shared writing is a term that is used to describe collaborative writing experiences between teacher and students. Teachers using Language Experience Approach (Ashton-Warner, 1965) transcribe natural student language into the printed word so that students can begin to learn that print carries a message. Grammatical errors may be left intact because they are early attempts by students to formulate messages. Interactive writing (McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000; Williams, Sherry, Robinson, & Hungler, 2012) differs in that the students are the ones writing, and the accuracy of the message is deliberated and refined before it is written. Both emphasize the importance of oral language development within the lesson. A summary of the key elements of shared writing can be found in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Key Elements of Shared and Interactive Writing

Although it is true that interactive writing instruction was initially designed for emergent writers, teachers of older students have found success using this technique in their classes (Wall, 2008). Struggling writers and English language learners can profit from lessons on specific aspects of writing, such as composition, punctuation, and word choice (Patterson, Schaller, & Clemens, 2008). This will allow for the systematic instruction of writing development, organization, and style, all components of Writing Anchor Standard 4.

Ms. Harper, a fourth-grade teacher, used interactive writing as part of her students' mathematical studies. The 32 students in the class had read How Much Is a Million? (Schwartz, 1993). The facts illustrated in the book amazed them. For instance, a goldfish bowl large enough to hold one million goldfish could also hold a whale.

Ms. Harper used an interactive writing approach for students to formulate a similar algebraic problem. She was particularly interested in focusing on students' use of accurate technical vocabulary in describing how they will solve the problem.

Ms. Harper began by explaining the purpose of the lesson and the importance of creating a mathematical investigation plan to guide their work. She reread some of How Much Is a Million? and invited discussion about other things they would like to know about.

She asked, "I've learned so much from this book about what a million of something might look like. What are some examples of things here in the school that we could multiply to a million?"

Several students offered their suggestions, and Ms. Harper kept track of them on a small note pad so she would not forget their ideas. They discussed the merits of investigating a million rulers, erasers, books, tennis balls, and lunch tickets. The teacher continued to ask questions to prompt further conversation about the possibilities and challenges of each. Over the course of several minutes, the class gradually came to consensus that they would use tennis balls in their problem.

"Let's turn that into an algebra question," she said, reminding them of their task. After some negotiation, they agreed that the precise text would read, "How much space is needed to hold one million tennis balls?" She had her students repeat the question several times so they would remember the exact wording of their guiding question. When Denny misspelled million, she used the white correction tape to cover it and directed his attention to the algebra word wall for the correct spelling. "Remember to use the word wall when you get stuck. It's there to help you."

"Now we need to create a plan," she reminded them. "We can't count a million tennis balls. Could this shoebox help?"

The class buzzed with the possibility. "Before we talk about it, turn to your partner and talk with him or her about how the shoebox might help solve our mathematical dilemma." After giving them a minute or so to talk, she brought the class discussion back to her again. "Let's hear those good ideas."

Several students offered their thoughts about filling the shoebox with tennis balls, then figuring out how many boxes they would need to hold 1,000,000 of them. Eventually, she brings the conversation back to the investigation plan. "Let's write this up as a plan. What exactly will we need to do to solve this problem? Let's be sure to use the correct vocabulary so our computations will be accurate."

Guided by Ms. Harper, the students formulated the exact wording of the investigation plan. Prompting them as needed on word choice, spelling, and punctuation, she invited students up to the front of the class to write each word of the plan. Their final version can be found in Figure 2. This interactive writing experience facilitated students thinking about the content and built their composing skills.

Figure 2. Language Chart for Interactive Writing Lesson

Writing from sources to inform and explain

Writing from sources is an important aspect of content area learning. Students must use their writing skills to produce pieces that are informative or explanatory. This is especially important in learning science and social studies. As noted in Writing Anchor Standard 7, students should "Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation" (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Offices, 2010, p. 18).

In addition to argument and narrative writing, students should "Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content" (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 18). It is important to note that this standard focuses on a specific text type that students must learn to produce. The development of students' understanding of this text type is also influenced by their reading and speaking and listening tasks. Figure 3 includes a list of standards related to this text type across reading, writing, and speaking and listening.

Figure 3. Intersection of Standards for Informing and Explaining

To write from sources, students need to be taught to carefully read texts and collect evidence from those texts. Thus, as part of their content area writing instruction, students should learn annotation skills. In their seminal text, How to Read a Book (1940/1972), Adler and Van Doren suggested that annotation is critical for deep understanding:

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake - not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you remember the thoughts of the author. (p. 49)

They next described the most common annotation marks:

When students annotate a text, they have sources that they can use to support their claims. For example, as part of their investigation about the Code of Hammurabi, sixth-grade students in George Martin's social studies class studied the list of 282 written laws. For his students to understand the ramifications of these laws, Mr. Martin used text-dependent questions to guide his students' annotations. He posed questions and asked for rulings:

Students worked with sections of the code to arrive at decisions, citing specific laws. In each of these cases, several laws were involved, and students needed to cite them in their work. "The annotations were essential for this task, because they had to cite the correct laws to build their case for a legal decision. Just like judges of the time, they had to apply formal reasoning to support their claims," he said. "It's good for them to see that even though the laws have changed, the work of logic and reasoning governs legal decisions."

Conclusion

If students are to meet the writing demands stated in the core standards, they need regular opportunities across the learning day to engage in a range of writing tasks. These should reflect a variety of purposes and audiences and should be designed to build knowledge. It isn't fair to expect that students can get by with an occasional extended writing task and little in the way of instruction and practice. Effective writing teachers know that building stamina, discussion, and knowledge are integral for developing stronger writers.

Biographies

The department editors welcome reader comments. Douglas Fisher is a professor at San Diego State University, California, USA; dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu

Nancy Frey is a professor at San Diego State University; nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu

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A Range of Writing Across the Content Areas

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Students have to be taught how to write. However, it's not as easy as assigning a prompt and telling students to get to writing. When teachers simply assign (or cause) writing, student achievement suffers (Fisher & Frey, 2007). In fact, there is evidence that student writing achievement has been stagnant for years.

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This article from ASCD offers answers to this often asked question with specific ideas for how to do it.

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Every Teacher's Guide from Harvey Daniels (Heinemann). This pdf file includes select pages with great writing ideas from the book.

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Another WAC site, but with some different links and ideas.

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Writing is not simply a process of developing an essay. Writing across the curriculum is an effort to use writing to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. At times, using writing to learn can show a disconnect in a student's understanding of a concept. Writing can also show a student's mastery of a concept.

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This website provides links to a variety of sites that provide information on issues and topics of interest. Links include New York Times, factcheck.org, Issues in Science and Technology, etc.

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A website devoted to showing two sides of popular, controversial issues.

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ProCon.org - Pros and Cons of 100+ Topics

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Explore both sides of debated issues. Presented in a non-partisan format with supporting background information, statistics, and resources.

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A great list of potential mentor texts to use in your classroom.

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Drive Brand Studio - Branding, Advertising, Marketing, Websites

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Penny Kittle is an English teacher, author and advocate dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing.

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This ASCD Ed Leadership article by Kelly Gallagher, a leading expert on secondary writing, is a must read.

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When George Lucas was making Star Wars, his special effects team was at a loss as to how to film realistic-looking dogfight scenes. They began by storyboarding them, but they found that simply drawing the scenes on paper didn’t help them understand the pacing and rhythm of the fights. They solved th

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Probably the MOST important item you can bring to your writing lesson.

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Mentor texts or anchor texts are any text that can be used as an example of good writing for writers. Writers use a mentor text to inform their own writing. Ralph Fletcher explains that mentor texts are, "... any texts that you can learn from, and every writer, no matter how skilled you are or how beginning you are, encounters and reads something that can lift and inform and infuse their own writing. I'd say anything that you can learn from - not by talking about but just looking at the actual writing itself, being used in really skillful, powerful way." To read or listen to Ralph talk more about mentor texts, you can listen this great Choice Literacy podcast.

Teach Mentor Texts focuses on using any authentic text to impact our writing. When I read, my writer's eye looks for what I can learn from a text and how it can inform my own my writing. My goal is to highlight texts that writers might use as mentor texts.

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Mentor texts or anchor texts are any text that can be used as an example of good writing for writers. Writers use a mentor text to inform their own writing. Ralph Fletcher explains that mentor texts are, "...

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Lists and links of specific WtL activities that can be easily implemented in classrooms.

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Writing Strategies for Students with ADHD

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Writing Strategies for Students with ADHD

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Some students struggle with writing more than others. This article from Edutopia provides specific strategies to use with ADHD kids who can't seem to get their ideas organized.

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As essay writing is both the most common and the most complicated assignment for students, writing instruction for students with ADHD requires special efforts. Each step of writing process may present certain difficulties for these young people. Here are some practical solutions for teachers to encourage, motivate, and focus their students on writing process.

1. Difficulty Concentrating on Assignment

Research proves that ADHD doesn't result in less intelligence, but rather in difficulties controlling emotions, staying motivated, and organizing the thoughts. So a teacher's first task is teaching students focus enough on a writing assignment.

Solution: Give clear, concise instructions.

When assigning an essay or other writing project, be specific and clear about what you expect. Don't leave a lot of room for interpretation. Instead of the assignment "Write about a joyous moment," include instructions in your writing prompt, such as:

Think about the last time you felt happy and joyful.

Describe the reasons for your happiness.

What exactly made you feel joy?

What can that feeling be compared to?

Make sure every student knows that he or she should come to you directly with any questions. Plan to take extra time reviewing the instructions with students one to one, writing down short instructions along the way.

2. Difficulty Organizing Thoughts on Paper

Several studies have found that students with ADHD struggle with organizing their thoughts and mental recall. These students can often speak well and explain their thoughts orally, but not in writing.

Solution: Get them organized from the start.

Start each project with a simple note system. Give students the freedom to take their own notes and review them together if possible. Have students pay special attention to filing these notes in a large binder, folder, or other method for making storage and retrieval simple.

To help students understand how to organize their written thoughts, teach them mind mapping. A semantic mind map for an essay may include major nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as well as phrases to use in writing each paragraph. Some introductory and transition sentences will also come in handy. Another step after mind mapping is advanced outlining. Begin and end the initial outline with the words "Intro" and "Conclusion" as placeholders. Then have students expand that outline on their own.

3. Difficulty With Sustained Work on a Single Task

ADHD can make it difficult for students to focus on long-term goals, leading to poor attention and concentration when the task requires work for an extended period of time.

Solution: Create small, manageable milestones.

Since accomplishing a five-page essay takes a lot of time, you can chop it into smaller, easier-to-manage pieces that can be worked on in rotation. Each piece may be checked separately if time allows. Treating every issue and section as an independent task will prevent students from feeling overwhelmed as they work toward a larger goal.

4. Difficulty in Meeting Deadlines

Deadlines are the things that discourage students with ADHD, as they work on assignments more slowly than their classmates, are often distracted, and tend to procrastinate.

Solution: Allow for procrastination.

It may sound ridiculous, but build procrastination into the writing process by breaking up the work and allowing for extra research, brainstorming, and other activities which diversify students' work while still focusing on the end result.

5. Spelling Issues

Students with ADHD often have difficulties with writing, especially in terms of spelling. The most common issues are reversing or omitting letters, words, or phrases. Students may spell the same word differently within the same essay. That's why lots of attention should be paid to spelling.

Solution: Encourage spell checkers, dictionaries, and thesaurus.

There are plenty of writing apps and tools available to check spelling and grammar. As a teacher, you can introduce several apps and let students choose which ones work better for writing essays. When checking the submitted papers and grading the work, highlight the spelling mistakes so that students can pay special attention to the misspelled words and remember the correct variant.

6. Final Editing Issues

Students with ADHD may experience problems during the final editing of their work since, by this time, they will have read and reviewed it several times and may not be paying attention to mistakes.

Solution: Teach them to review their writing step by step.

Take an essay template as an example and show students how to revise it. Go through the editing process slowly, explaining the "why" behind certain changes, especially when it comes to grammatical issues. Assign students the task of revising each other's essays so that when they revise their own final draft, they'll know what to pay attention to and what common mistakes to look for.

Addressing the challenges unique to students with ADHD will help these students find ways to handle their condition effectively and even use it to their advantage. Their unique perspective can be channeled into creative writing, finding new solutions to problems, and most of all, finding, reaching, and even exceeding their goals and fulfilling their full potential.

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Writing Strategies for Students With ADHD | Edutopia

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As essay writing is both the most common and the most complicated assignment for students, writing instruction for students with ADHD requires special efforts. Each step of writing process may present certain difficulties for these young people. Here are some practical solutions for teachers to encourage, motivate, and focus their students on writing process.

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A teacher's blog that includes specific titles and sections of books that he uses for mentor texts. If you haven't used mentor texts, this is a wonderful introduction and guide.

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Always Write: "Mentor Texts" are a Powerful Tool When Designing Writing Lessons

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Besides being a well-liked 6th-8th grade teacher (though I've taught writing to 3rd-12th grades), I too am a presenter of professional development. I don't like traveling away from my wife and my dogs more than five or six times in a year, so even though I have presented over a dozen times at the national conferences, I have chosen not to do much of that over the past five or six years.

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Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers

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Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers

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Mentor text provides rationale and relevance for writing. This resource from Edutopia is one to definitely check out.

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Show Not Tell

Let's take a moment to think of ourselves when we learn: Do we understand something and apply it better when we are shown a finished product while also being told about it? I'm going to guess that most of us will say yes. Doesn't it help to scrutinize that already-assembled bookshelf display at Ikea before going home to those often confusing instructions? (Clearly, I speak from experience on this one.)

So if we want students to write a convincing persuasive essay that includes evidence, let's show them examples. If we want them to craft a descriptive story, filled with dialogue and details, we need to show them what this looks like and talk about.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: when I show them a student model it often gets copied or parroted back! And, yes this is a concern as we want all our students to work hard and create their own original and unique essay, story, or speech. Additionally, and I speak from experience as both a teacher and a writer on this one, nothing causes writer's block more than being handed an amazing model and then told, "Okay, now you write!"

So how do we keep students from mimicking or from freezing up? We have to give students time to talk about the mentor text, time to practice, and time to share their own efforts with peers for feedback.

Deconstructing Good Writing

Once you have found some good mentor texts -- student written or published pieces -- plan backwards from there. Put your lesson designer cap on and ask yourself, what are all the features that make this a solid piece of writing: the organization? the title? the sentence variety? the use of metaphor and other imagery? the evidence that supports claims? the introduction?

After you have listed these features, create mini-lessons for each one you want your students to emulate. The mini-lesson should include time after the teaching for students to practice and share in small, safe groups and when ready, with the whole class. Also, I used to create a handout with several really great introductions (from books, essays, short stories, and speeches). Together, the students I would analyze these opening sentences and discuss what made them so powerful.

The importance of what happens next should not be underestimated: Give your students time to practice writing what they just learned. And not just time but make it low-stakes -- no grading, no evaluation, no rubric -- simply time to explode on a page, take chances, be whimisical, be daring: firewrite! Let them then share what they wrote with near neighbors or read it aloud to the whole class. If they don't want to do either, give them the option to not.

Finding Mentor Texts

If you are a new teacher and don't yet have a collection of student essays and writing samples, then turn to your colleagues who might have some to share. I've also found awesome mentor text on the Internet.

Write Source offers a large collection of student writing for all grade levels and genres, and for free. What is great about this selection is that numerous teachers from all over have submitted these models so there's quite a bit of variety.

Because I support teachers who work at urban public schools in Los Angeles, a relevant resource I found to share with teachers is the publication, LA Youth. Archived on the site are countless narratives, persuasive essays, letters, and poems written by teenagers living in metropolitan areas of LA. The more students can relate to the voice and content found in a mentor text, the more it will inspire their own writing.

There are also many anthologies and books out there that offer wonderful collections of children and adolescent writing. I used this one with eleventh-graders as they were writing their college personal statements, 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays. This collection of essays offered up clever, zany, and heartfelt teenage writing that sparked creativity and bravery in my own students' writing.

How has mentor text transformed writing in your classroom? What are some websites and resources you have found helpful? Please share in the comments section below.

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Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers | Edutopia

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Let's take a moment to think of ourselves when we learn: Do we understand something and apply it better when we are shown a finished product while also being told about it? I'm going to guess that most of us will say yes.

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Writing across the Curriculum by Steve Peha

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Writing across the Curriculum by Steve Peha

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This lengthy article provides a wealth of information about all aspects of teaching writing

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National Writing Project:  Writing across the Curriculum

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National Writing Project:  Writing across the Curriculum

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NWP is acknowledged as the forerunner for quality writing instruction. Lots of great resources here.

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Featured Resources

April 2008
Jan M. Sabin
In this chapter from Writing Intention: Prompting Professional Learning through Student Work, Jan Sabin, who is with the Upper Peninsula Writing Project, demonstrates how she pushes her second graders to write about social justice issues by focusing on familiar things like the cafeteria, the playground, and their homes. More ›

October 2008
Ken Martin
Three books on content area literacy instruction aim to help teachers think about the literacy demands of all content areas while framing their arguments in a larger discussion of 21 st century literacies. More ›

Additional Resources

July 2012
The WAC Journal continues the conversation on writing across the curriculum with their November 2011 issue and provides a collection of articles by educators exchanging practical ideas, pertinent theory, and their WAC experiences. More ›

November 2011
Elizabeth Murchison is a scientist who works on the genetics of cancer in Tasmanian devils. She stresses the importance of writing even for scientists in order to get research done and disseminate results to the scientific community. More ›

October 2011
NWP is developing a variety of resources and online spaces to help educators provide the professional development necessary to implement the work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. More ›

October 2011
Dr. Catherine Mohr, the director of Medical Research at Intuitive Surgical, is an expert in the field of robotic surgery, but writing is anything but robotic for her. She shares why she writes-to organize her thoughts and ideas, to understand, and to communicate. More ›

October 2011
Dyan deNapoli, a penguin expert and author of the award-winning book, The Great Penguin Rescue, shares her reading and writing background and how she came to write about penguins. More ›

October 2011
Ann Powers, a music critic who has written for The New York Times, National Public Radio, the LA Times, and the Village Voice, discusses the figures who have inspired her, how being female affected her perception of music, and how writing about music should be about trying to capture how it feels to listeners. More ›

October 2011
Evan Grant, a creative technologist, founder of seeper, and student of the sensory interactions between users and technology, describes the different ways he writes and the cathartic release he feels during the process. More ›

October 2011
Susan Gerhard, a San Francisco-based writer and editor, became a film critic to explore the world of ideas that films present. The best movies are those that spark arguments at dinner parties, she says. More ›

October 2011
Regenerative medicine specialist Dr. Anthony Atala's state-of-the-art lab grows human organs-from muscles to blood vessels to bladders, and more. Although he's immersed in sci-fi gizmos in his work, he says writing "is the communication vehicle that moves science forward." More ›

October 2011
Arvind Gupta, an Indian toy inventor and popularizer of science for kids, is known for turning trash into seriously entertaining, well-designed toys that kids can build themselves-while learning basic principles of science and design. He brings a similar spirit of exploratory playfulness to writing about science. More ›

October 2011
Gary Giddins, long-time columnist for the Village Voice and unarguably the world's preeminent jazz critic, writes about jazz to let the world know about America's "fecund and flowing" musical tradition, which is sometimes treated as though it doesn't exist-or exists only for those "in the know." More ›

October 2011
When people hear the name Freeman Dyson, they tend to think of breakthroughs in quantum physics, but Dyson is a prolific writer as well. He's known for bringing conscience and compassion to his books, which interweave scientific explanation and humanism. More ›

September 2011
Timothy Ferris, who has been called "the best science writer of his generation," discusses why he writes-and the importance of writing about science. More ›

September 2011
Anil Ananthaswamy
Anil Ananthaswamy, author of The Edge of Physics, says that writing is important in science to make jargon come alive with stories, to capture the precision and skepticism that's intrinsic to science, and to inform the world of the scientific truths that are so critical to our lives. More ›

The Missouri Reader: Journal of the Missouri Reading Association, July 2011
Two educators and researchers, one from a university teacher education setting and the other from an art museum, create museum-school partnerships. Drawing on sociocultural and ethnographic approaches, they argue that a co-expertise approach is required if the two institutional settings are to learn from each other and transform what is possible for the professional learning of teachers and students. More ›

July 2011
Developing creative and rigorous writing assignments can be challenging. To support teachers in planning and reflecting on writing assignments in all content areas, a group of teacher-consultants and Writing Project site directors collaborated to create this new framework for writing assignments. More ›

June 2011
This interactive version of Water Wonders / Las Maravillas del Agua features two young scientists, Sydney and Symon Starr, a sister and brother team who explore their world by asking questions and conducting experiments with help from their family and teachers. More ›

May 2011
Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher-consultant with the South Coast Writing Project, explains how the teaching of writing is important for learning based on neuroimaging and brain mapping. More ›

April 2011
The National Writing Project joined a panel of literacy and science education experts on Capitol Hill to champion a new approach to STEM education that will make these critical disciplines more accessible to young people. More ›

March 2011
Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein
Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, the authors of Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People, make the point that writing is essential for teaching the entire range of disciplines and critical to the training of innovative and successful scientists. More ›

February 2010
March is "Music in Our Schools Month," so the NWP is celebrating the intersection between music and writing by providing resources that link music, reading, and writing. More ›

March 2010
Listen to a post-conference discussion with NWP leaders about the Writing Project's work with content-area teachers and disciplinary literacy. This program follows up NWP's "What's Next: Possibilities for Literacy and Content Area Learning conference" held in March 2010 in New Orleans. More ›

March 2010
Watch the video of Elizabeth Birr Moje delivering the keynote speech on "disciplinary literacy" at the 2010 National Reading Initiative Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. More ›

January 2010
Art Peterson
Elizabeth Birr Moje makes the case for a disciplinary literacy that, rather than hewing to generic literacy "strategies," focuses on the literacy skills required of practitioners in a content field. Moje will be the keynote speaker at the 2010 National Reading Initiative Conference. More ›

December 2009
Rosalyn Finlayson
Rosalyn Finlayson, a teacher-consultant with the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writing Project, finds Writing Without Boundaries a well-ordered and expansive introduction to strategies that lead students toward multigenre writing. More ›

April 2008
Keri E. Scheidel
In this chapter from Writing Intention: Prompting Professional Learning through Student Work, Kari Scheidel, who is with the Lake Michigan Writing Project, discusses how she immerses her students in the study of American history by introducing them to writing in genres such as plays, news articles, and brochures. More ›

The Quarterly, 2003
Julie McDonnell, Jane Zeni
Julie McDonnell and Jane Zeni review A Field Guide to Using Visual Tools by David Hyerle, which consists primarily of verbal snapshots showing schools and classrooms where visual tools have been used, illustrated with thinking maps, reviews of software, and visual representations of projects by students. More ›

The Quarterly, Summer 2002
Shirley Brown
Shirley Brown, reviewing Listening Up: Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers and Students by Rachel Martin, finds that Martin writes simply and makes abstract theories such as poststructuralism and psychoanalysis accessible and applicable to the classroom. More ›

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April 2008 Jan M. Sabin In this chapter from Writing Intention: Prompting Professional Learning through Student Work, Jan Sabin, who is with the Upper Peninsula Writing Project, demonstrates how she pushes her second graders to write about social justice issues by focusing on familiar things like the cafeteria, the playground, and their homes.

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This summary lists the most important steps for improving writing.

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A summary of "Writing Next" | Adolescent Literacy Topics A-Z | AdLit.org

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What does research tell us about effective teaching techniques to help adolescents develop their writing skills? This article summarizes Writing Next , a 2007 study of adolescent writing instruction.

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What does writing to learn mean? How is that different from learning to write? Find out here.

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Music, Art, and Drama: resources and links to authentic writing in these fields.

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Writing in the Electives - WritingInDisciplines

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Think of all the articles you see on health and physical conditioning. Here's a resource that will provide lots of help for getting students to write in this content area.

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Writing in Physical Ed/Health - WritingInDisciplines

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Support for writing memoirs, essays, and about literature.

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Writing in English & Languages - WritingInDisciplines

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Videos, articles, and links to other sites that provide a wealth of information on writing in social studies.

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Writing in Social Studies - WritingInDisciplines

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Videos, articles, ideas...everything science teachers could ask for to help them teach writing in their classes.

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Writing in Science - WritingInDisciplines

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Bill Bryson talks about writing ABOUT science and another video about writing about science. In this last video you'll hear some discussion about how to weave narrative into the science story. One more: Steven Pinker talks about writing about science.

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If you haven't used mentor texts and are unfamiliar with them, you're in for a treat. Mentor texts should be the basis for all writing instruction

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Jeff Kinney's advice to young authors: "... actually start by copying somebody else's style. If there is somebody you like, an author or illustrator, what you could do is to try to write another story that's in their style, that's in that same kind of a voice, because I think that when you do that, you learn how that author or illustrator did what they did."

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The Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) Warehouse

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The Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) Warehouse

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Lots of resources and additional links on this site to answer the most common questions and provide support.

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(Even When You're Not a Writing Teacher)

Fisher and Frey with some very practical advice for all teachers!