Empowering students with the skills to find their own answers.
When I think about my goals as a teacher, I think about how I want to empower my students to go out into the world and think for themselves. Creating independent, confident, life-long learners who aren’t afraid to try to new things is really the ultimate dream. But figuring out how best to spend the limited time that I have in class in order to achieve those dreams is not always easy. I have found, over the years, that teaching
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For most students, Romeo and Juliet is their first experience reading a Shakespeare play, and so it can be a make-it-or-break-it situation. The pressure is on—not only are you expected to get them excited about reading the 500-year-old words in this play, but their time spent with the two tragic teenagers will set the tone for their experience with other Shakespeare plays during their high school career. One of the best ways to insure that your Romeo and Juliet unit
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Students working quickly, striving to gather evidence, formulate their own ideas, and shape them into a coherent essay—this is how I like to end all of my thematic units, with a timed essay. Students will never really be able to avoid timed writing—from state tests to the SAT to AP and later college exams, they will be required to write intelligent pieces within a limited time frame. Real writing happens in the revision process, and many people believe that that’s
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When you think about what you want students to learn from a powerful unit on The Crucible , think about five years from now. In other words, if you were to run into these kids in five years what would you want them to remember? Would you really care if they remember that Mary’s last name is Warren or how many people were accused of witchcraft or if the residents of Salem owned cows or sheep? If you’re going to spend
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Starting a writing unit by examining great examples of the kinds of writing we’ll be doing is one of those ideas that I seem to forget and remember over and over again. Maybe it’s because I rush through writing plans, anxious to get to the assignment so that students can start working. Maybe it’s the effort of looking for good examples. Perhaps it’s the mistake of believing that my explanation is plenty and students shouldn’t need anything more. Or possibly
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As a teacher, you might have just a few goals for the beginning of the school year: set the tone for your classroom; inspire students to work harder; establish rigor and expectations; teach students to think independently. Oh, and don’t forget win over students by showing them how much fun they’ll be having this year, and, when you teach high school, getting to know over 100 new people as fast as possible. Seems simple, right? Every year, I have tried
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In doing a little keyword research for my Teachers Pay Teachers products and the guest blog posts that I write in hopes that people will find and buy those products, I have found that an often searched for term is “writing prompts.” I continue to be almost shocked that people just look for writing prompts, without any tie to content or units of study or texts. I don’t think, though, that they are simply looking for someone to give them
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I have to admit that I resisted teaching a research based argument essay in my ELA classes for over twelve years. Each year, I would “forget” or “not get to it” or “sort of do an assignment that fulfills the requirement.” The requirement, as I understood it, was for students to click around on the internet for a few hours, put some facts together in a new format, and then say where they had gotten that information. It seemed like
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Once students are comfortable reading and analyzing mentor texts in order to improve their own writing, it’s nice to be able to let them work through a text independently. Still, they might appreciate some scaffolding or reminders of what to look for. These fourteen questions will work for just about any kind of writing—from cutting edge journalism to revealing personal essays to experimental poetry. For a printable version of this handout that you can use tomorrow as well as
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I’ve recently created a resource that combines all of my writing lesson plans—prompts, creative assignments, units on persuasive essays and personal essays and some just weird fun stuff that I think is pretty innovative. So I have been thinking a little about my philosophies on teaching writing. I remember early on in my career as a teacher, when I realized that I was doing fine with the literature and books, but that I was really lagging behind with the writing
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