Write in the Middle: Teaching Multigenre Writing
Multigenre writing offers students a wide range of options for expressing ideas and communicating knowledge. In this course, educators examine two different, but equally successful, examples of this eclectic and engaging writing approach. Also featured in this course is Tom Romano, a national expert on multi genre writing.
Write in the Middle: Teacher to Student
This workshop focuses on how to make student-teacher conferences as effective as possible. It shows that teachers need to be intentional in their planning and practice. At the same time, they must balance the benefits of conferencing with the challenges of fitting it into their busy classroom schedules.
Write in the Middle: Peer to Peer
This workshop explores how peer responses provide a tremendous learning opportunity for young writers. These interactions help students with topic generation and idea development, increase their confidence about sharing their work, force them to look more objectively at their own writing, give them valuable feedback for possible revisions, and allow them to learn from the writing successes and challenges of their peers. Peer response also helps students learn how to give constructive feedback to others, an important life skill.
Write in the Middle: Teaching the Power of Revision
In this course, educators visit the classrooms of three language arts teachers to examine strategies that help even reluctant writers see the power and purpose of revision. Throughout the course, educators hear reflections on revision from both teachers and students, as well as discussions among the teachers about dealing with student resistance to revision, planning mini-lessons, and other issues related to the revision process.
Developing Writers: First Steps
The Developing Writers workshops for high school teachers present practical and philosophical advice for teaching writing. In this introductory session, master teachers will discuss principles of writing instruction and give examples of how they instruct students to write both formally and informally. You will see the teachers in their classrooms, where you can observe how they work with their students and how they tie their lessons to local, state, and national standards. By developing a clear understanding of what needs to be accomplished, these teachers are able to anticipate developing needs as well as plan for productive instruction throughout the school year.
Developing Writers: A Shared Path
The Developing Writers workshops for high school teachers present practical and philosophical advice for teaching writing. This course explores the benefits and uses of creating a writing community within the classroom. Many professional writers are members of groups that discuss writing and share their works in progress in order to benefit from peer feedback. Classroom writing communities have similar goals to help students learn how to respond to one another's work and how to benefit from the feedback provided by an expanded audience. Teachers in such classrooms often write when their students do and occasionally share their work and their struggles with their students.
Developing Writers: Different Audiences
The Developing Writers workshops for high school teachers present practical and philosophical advice for teaching writing. This session suggests ways in which teachers can help students develop an awareness of diverse audiences and appropriate strategies for meeting audience expectations. Writing for personal purposes, whether to record life experiences, explore thoughts and feelings about a subject, or assimilate new information and concepts, comes easily to most students because they do not have to consider the intellectual needs of anyone other than themselves. However, learning to consider the audience or the intended reader of a piece of writing is central to every writer's broader development. Much school-based writing is aimed toward teacher-as-examiner, and students have to meet the various requirements and expectations of a number of different teachers. Beyond school, the range of audiences expands greatly to include family, friends, employers, and perhaps even a general public readership, all of which place different demands on writers.
Developing Writers: Different Purposes
The Developing Writers workshops for high school teachers present practical and philosophical advice for teaching writing. "Form follows function" is a common adage among writing teachers as they encourage students to consider what they want their writing to accomplish. Students are encouraged to choose a genre and an appropriate level of formality that meets their goals. This session focuses on teaching students useful guidelines to apply when making these choices and it demonstrates that mixing styles or genres can be effective in various circumstances.
Developing Writers: Usage and Mechanics
The Developing Writers workshops for high school teachers present practical and philosophical advice for teaching writing. This workshop answers several important questions about teaching usage and mechanics. What are the most effective ways to teach students the accepted conventions of formal written English? What does research teach us about direct grammar instruction and its transfer to student writing? We have probably all had experiences where a well-crafted argument was rejected because of significant mechanical errors. This session demonstrates methods for helping students produce clear, mechanically sound writing by addressing issues of usage in the context of the students' own writing.
Developing Writers: Providing Feedback on Student Writing
The Developing Writers workshops for high school teachers present practical and philosophical advice for teaching writing. The title of this particular session refers to the peer responses that support student writers in writing classrooms, to the instructional and evaluative feedback students receive from teachers, and to the student self-evaluations that help teachers assess and revise instruction to meet developing student needs. This workshop addresses the topics of peer review, portfolio assessment, rubrics, and methods for managing the paper load of the typical writing classroom.