If you’ve read my blog, or subscribed to my newsletter, you’re probably familiar with my attitude towards analytic rating scales. As I wrote in “Essay Rubrics: Why They are Hell, and how to Design Them Better:” Essay rubrics are supposed to pull the evaluation of writing into the realm of the objective. A rubric is …
What Will Fall Look Like for Teachers? For me, Distance Learning, or Remote Instruction, or whatever your institution called it, has been “building the plane while we’re flying it,” as one colleague put it. Will be flying steady by Fall 2020, though? We teachers know things won’t be normal, but we also know we don’t …
Distance Learning: Anyone Else Skeptical? When I was a kid I remembered reading about life in the Australian Outback. Kids there grew up on remote cattle stations or small towns, hundreds of miles from the nearest teacher. Apparently, lessons were broadcast over the radio. Even as a kid, I wondered how the hell this was …
Here’s a question I’m always asking myself: how can I steal methods from design to improve my classroom work? Well, here’s one method we can steal from the discipline of design. The sticky note session. Folks who follow the methods of Tim Brown, the Stanford dSchool, and anybody who chants the phrase “design thinking” with …
So, on the second day of class, I put a poem in front of my sophomore English students. Well, not exactly. I put the shape of a poem in front of them. It looked like this: I told them, “Take a couple minutes to read this over.” Immediately, they began asking whether or not they …
My first day of classes is soon. Very soon. I’m up at four A.M. writing this, having woken from an anxiety dream about not having enough chairs in my classroom. Writing seemed like a good way to quiet my teacher-specific demons. I’ve been meaning to write this post, anyway. Because I want to share a …
The value in teaching expository writing lies solely in the exercise of translating writer-oriented writing to reader-oriented writing. Knowing the difference and how to move between the two–that’s a way more important skill that supporting a thesis with three points.
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the whole purpose of written feedback. For one thing, it can be frustrating, spending time on articulating suggestions for improvement, and then watching the student flip to the end of their draft to read the grade. Then put the paper away. Or flat-out chuck it in the trash. Even more …
I’m one of those writers who loves plot for plot’s sake. (Which is probably one reason I’m drawn to genre fiction.) But one thing I’ve found is that outlining a plot is a wretched place to begin. I’ve known since my NaNoWriMo days that I’m not a plotter. But I’m a not a seat-of-my-pantser, either. …
I want to offer you something that I developed in my sophomore English class last year. I’m always trying to get my students to revise. Revision is where all the creative decision-making happens in writing. I came up with a method for pushing a freewriting through seven drafts, and into a focused, straightforward expression of …