Professional Learning for Busy Educators

“Q. Do you have tips for others trying to write?

A: I have to say that I can’t stand lists of ‘must do’s’, whether in life or in writing. Something rebels in me when I’m told what I have to do before I’m fifty, or have to buy this season, or have to write if I want to be a success.

Ten Habits All Best-Selling Writers Have In Common. These Five Tips Will Transform Your Writing! Follow J.K. Rowling’s Golden Rules For Success!

I haven’t got ten rules that guarantee success, although I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process. Male protagonists are unfashionable. Boarding schools are anathema. No kids book should be longer than 45,000 words.

So forget the ‘must do’s’ and concentrate on the ‘you probably won’t get far withouts’, which are: ...”

This model provides ways of examining the content of teaching and assessment to ensure all four resources are being addressed and taught explicitly. It encourages that reading and writing always be situated in authentic contexts and purposes and acknowledges that text goes beyond print and paper.

Middle school writers are full of imagination and creativity, and teachers can honor that while teaching writing conventions.

Anchor charts are a great way to make thinking visible as you record strategies, processes, cues, guidelines and other content during the learning process. Here are 25 of our favorite anchor charts for teaching writing.

In today's post we are sharing with you this collection of some excellent guides to help you with the teaching of writing and help your students improve their writing style. The collection comprises several classic titles and seminal works as recommended by Paul Silvia in his  popular book ‘How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing”.  We have arranged these resources into the following categories: the essentials, books on style, books on grammar and punctuation, books on academic writing.

“Polish your grammar, rate your readability, train yourself to write every day, and more.”

each a student a lesson, and they learn something. But when they have a chance to author their own learning, including picking a subject and the method of explaining that subject, they likely will master a new skill and increase their knowledge of the subject at the same time.

Podcasting is a way of telling a story through audio — using pieces of sound files, voice overs, recorded conversations and effects woven into a narrative. Educators are finding podcasts useful in delivering content to students in all subject areas, including English-as-a-second-language classrooms, where educators “can use this tool to increase student exposure to English at home and in school,” Hani Morgan, now a professor of education at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, wrote in a 2015 article in Childhood Education, citing a 2008 article, “Podcasts in Education: Let Their Voices Be Heard.”

Editor's Note: In the next five years, most of America’s most experienced teachers will retire. The Baby Boomers are leaving behind a nation of novice educators. In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just five years leading a classroom. The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project is crisscrossing the country to talk to veteran educators. This story is the second in our series. Read the first one here.

“I want to say something important about writing,” Pirette McKamey told 25 seniors in her English class at San Francisco’s Mission High School one fall afternoon in 2012. It’s incredibly hard, and always incomplete, she explained. “I’ve reread some of my essays 20 times and I still go, ‘I can’t believe I made this mistake or that mistake.’”