Archive

As a writing teacher, I’m sure your students write a lot, right? But how often do you give them time to ‘make’ their writing? How often do you let them get lost in the ‘parts’ of writing instead of merely plugging out draft after draft? How often do you let them create? In this Facebook […]

Coined in the 1950s and popularized by his 1960s publication, Applied Imagination, advertising executive + businessman Alex Osborn’s  brainstorming concept has since made its way through the boardroom and into the high school classroom as a standard means for essay preparation. Prior to drafting the various elements of their essay, we typically encourage students to […]

How do we take our writers to the next level?  Sure, we can teach them to generate and organize ideas, but how do we get them to engage with these ideas on a more critical level? It’s all about perspective, brave teachers.  Getting our students to appreciate just how intricate the conversation is involves an awareness of […]

No matter what track they’re on, all high school students are expected to master the art of argumentative writing before they get that coveted diploma.  As English Language Arts teachers, well, teaching this skill is our specialty.  But the content I’ll share in this post also plays nicely with other content areas as well, so long as you’re […]

The art of summarizing is a lot harder than it sounds, but it’s an essential part of the note taking process… Being able to effectively summarize information will help students expeditiously unpack their research to the reader.   To this end, I’d like to share a few useful activities for teaching summary-writing with your scholars. Tweet […]

IMPORTANT NOTE: I originally wrote this post when I was pioneering several brand new,advanced-level curriculums being made available to high school students: AP Seminar, AS Level Global Perspectives & Research, and AS Level English General Paper.  And though I will mention these course names during the course of this post, it shouldn’t be off-putting if […]

Quarter 1 has a lot to do with getting your students acquainted with global issues, filling the “blank slate”–so to speak—with those basics that’ll lay the groundwork for deeper research later. While it’s true you simply can’t cover every contemporary and/or controversial issue out there, you do have the Quarter 1 obligation of helping students feel […]

When they first arrive on our doorstep, our students are convinced that they’re masters of argumentation: So confident they are (I say this in love), that when we tell them we’re going to write argumentative essays this year, they challenge our very intelligence and purpose altogether: “‘Persuasive,’ Miss, you mean persuasive essays.  We learned those in middle school.” …to which […]