Tag: reflections
-
Co-Director Jeremy Hyler speaks at Alma College’s First TEDx Event
What happens to students and teachers when they create, compose, and connect in the media that feels natural to them? On January 24th, Chippewa River Writing Project Co-Director Jeremy Hyler spoke at the 1st Alma College TEDx Talks. Jeremy, a 2000 graduate of Alma College and member of the 2010 CRWP cohort, spoke about his journey from feeling disconnected with students…
-
Telling One Story of the National Conferences
What a stimulating experience – the 2014 National Writing Project Annual Meeting and the National Council of Teachers of English Convention in Washington DC. So many great sessions. So many excellent ideas to take back to the Chippewa River Writing Project and my classroom. The only drawback to conferences of this size and scope is idea overload, so…
-
You Are Not in This Alone: The Importance of Cultivating Positive Professional Relationships
Having had time to reflect on my experience at the National Writing Project’s (NWP) Annual Meeting and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 2014 conference, I realize that cultivating relationships is of the utmost importance when working with students and colleagues. Even after many years of teaching, it is good to be reminded of…
-
What Is an English Teacher’s Role During SSR?
This post is the second in a series designed to connect teachers’ remembered childhood and/or YA independent reading experiences and their current teaching practices to Jeff Wilhelm, Mike Smith, and Sharon Fransen’s new book, Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want and Why We Should Let Them. As a CMU English professor,…
-
Time Well Spent
Time. There’s never enough of it, is there? Whenever I talk to teachers about my efforts to use an inquiry approach to teaching, they almost always ask, “How do you find the time?” To be honest, it isn’t easy. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, before the surprise alligator head hijacked my students’ attention,…
-
The Writing Is Small, But the Work Is Big
In my last two blog posts (21st Century Literacy and Alligator in the Classroom), I began to tell the story of a shared inquiry project on the American Alligator that my first grade students and I engaged in last winter. The project began when a parent of one of my students brought a preserved alligator head…