Writing Based Teaching

Written by the team at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking, this book is designed to provide practical guidance regarding the challenges and potential of writing-based teaching, and suggestions for how to adapt the practices to particular classroom situations. The contributors share candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges. As teachers of literature, composition, poetry, mathematics, anthropology, and education, they offer philosophical and theoretical reflections, practical guidance, and personal stories about how to help students become better, more-fluent writers, close readers, and reflective thinkers. This book will be of interest to writing center directors, for what it says about how to do collaborative learning and revision and seeing writing as a way to build community, and to writing teachers for how it demystifies freewriting, focused freewriting, and dialectical notebooks.

Offers candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges.

At heart, learning to read and write analytically is learning to think well For Evidence-Based Writing: Nonfiction, renowned teacher Leslie Blauman combed the standards and her classroom bookshelves to craft lessons that use the best nonfiction picture books, biographies, and article excerpts to make writing about reading a clear, concrete process. Students learn to analyze and cite evidence about main idea, point of view, visuals, and words and structure. And best of all, your students gain a confidence in responding to complex texts and ideas that will serve them well in school, on tests, and in any situation when they are asked: What are you basing that on? Show me how you know.

Providing a wealth of simple, research-based strategies for teaching reading and writing, this book is designed for each chapter to be accessible to teachers, tutors, parents, and paraprofessionals. Teaching Reading and Writing demonstrates that effective literacy instruction does not have to be complicated or expensive. Each chapter provides easy-to use techniques and with Internet search terms. This guide presents teaching methods that can be implemented without having to acquire additional books, packages, or other instructional devices. All you need is paper, pencil, books, teacher creativity and imagination, and a desire to help students.

Using favorite picturebooks for her mini-lessons models, teacher Susan Lunsford shares 15 easy-to-do writing lessons. Mini-lessons include: Where do story ideas come from? Great First Lines, Exploring Settings, Painting Pictures with Words, Writing a Complete Story, and Great Endings. Her teacher-student dialogues make it all easy to replicate in your own classroom. Each mini-lessons includes follow-up strategies and activities and picturebook suggestions. Writing conference and management tips too! For use with Grades 1-3.

"Writing allows each of us to live with that special wide-awakeness that comes from knowing that our lives and our ideas are worth writing about." -Lucy Calkins Teaching Writing is Lucy Calkins at her best-a distillation of the work that's placed Lucy and her colleagues at the forefront of the teaching of writing for over thirty years. This book promises to inspire teachers to teach with renewed passion and power and to invigorate the entire school day. This is a book for readers who want an introduction to the writing workshop, and for those who've lived and breathed this work for decades. Although Lucy addresses the familiar topics-the writing process, conferring, kinds of writing, and writing assessment- she helps us see those topics with new eyes. She clears away the debris to show us the teeny details, and she shows us the majesty and meaning, too, in these simple yet powerful teaching acts. Download a sample chapter for more information.