Tag: writing instruction
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From Flipped to Blended
After having a year of flipped instruction under my belt and absorbing all of the student feedback that I received (see my 2nd blog post in the series from last summer, “Flipping English Classrooms: Grammar Instruction”), I have taken time to reflect and consider what options and changes I could explore with this teaching strategy. One…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Guiding Student Writers as They Work with Digital Tools
If asking students to develop their voice, stamina, and range of techniques as writers isn’t hard enough, we now have a variety of devices, websites, and apps that students want to use in order to enhance their writing. From Google Docs to Prezis to whatever new app will come out tomorrow, we know that students…