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Three Meaningful Ways to Incorporate Drawing into English Class

Gretchen Schroeder shares three meaningful ways to incorporate drawing into her high school English classes, and the purpose behind each strategy.

Combining Personal Narratives and Comics

Katherine Sokolowski combines personal narratives and comics to encourage students to go deeper in their storytelling.

Teaching Students How to Email

Katherine Sokolowski outlines the nitty-gritty on how to teach students to organize, manage, and compose email.

Crafting Argumentative Essays

Gretchen Schroeder shares a summative assessment inspired by Song Exploder in which her high school students craft an argumentative essay defending a choice of a great song.

Writers’ Club

In her high school writing workshop, Julie Cox noticed that students wrote eagerly, but struggled to give and accept feedback. To increase student ownership and trust, she started Writers’ Club, and it affected transfer of learning in big ways!

Finding the Purpose in Antiracist Literature Instruction

Gretchen Schroeder shares her failures in preparing for antiracist literature instruction, and the principles she uses to empower meaningful conversations about race.

Making Connections with Sociograms

Gretchen Schroeder taps into the connections between characters by creating sociograms with her high school students.

Online Writing Notebooks

Gretchen Schroeder makes the leap to digital notebooks and finds new life in a tried-and-true practice.

What Do Readers Need?

Christy Rush-Levine offers a close look into the needs of readers by considering engagement, enrichment, and nourishment. She offers three examples of reading conferences with students.

Honoring Student Identity

Christy Rush-Levine considers how to communicate to all students that their presence and their identities are valued and appreciated.

A Student Book of Awesome

Gretchen Schroeder’s high school students build community by creating a shared text of things they love.

Using Picture Books for Rhetorical Analysis

Gretchen Schroeder finds that picture books are the perfect tool for rhetorical analysis with her high school students.

Fostering Cultural Awareness Through Book Clubs

Gretchen Schroeder’s students are almost all white and live in a rural community. She finds book clubs are a wonderful tool for expanding cultural awareness.

Flipping Literature Discussions

Gretchen Schroeder realizes her experiences from decades ago as a student are clouding her perspective on “flipped” literature discussions. Once she gets over her biases, she finds that online discussion of literature is a powerful equalizer for student voices.

Picture Books for Persona Poems

Gretchen Schroeder uses picture books to help her high school students understand and write persona poems.

Dealing with Lists in Style

Polysyndeton, asyndeton—if you are a writer and a word nerd, you will love Gretchen Schroeder’s suggestions for helping your students create lists with style in their writing.

Appointment Clocks

Gretchen Schroeder uses “appointment clocks” to ensure her students meet with a variety of peers for partner work.

Speed Reading

Adolescent learners can face daunting reading loads in high school that they need to tackle at home. Jen Schwanke has tips for how teachers and parents can work together to help teens develop strategies for dealing with a lot of complex reading quickly.

Forgetting and Remembering

In the end classroom management often comes down to students valuing the same things we do. Jen Schwanke has tips for how high school teachers can create a culture where there is better communication and more shared values.

Key Elements of Short Stories

Gretchen Schroeder finds her students’ enthusiasm for writing short stories flags quickly without some instruction and guidance.

Writer’s Notebook Tweaks

Gretchen Schroeder analyzes the use of writing notebooks in her classroom, focusing on what’s confusing or frustrating for students. She makes some small changes that yield big results.

The Power of Similes

If you want stronger poetry from students, a good starting point might be to explore how to write a powerful simile. Gretchen Schroeder explains how she helps her high school students play with and create better similes.

The Third (or More) Time Is the Charm

Gretchen Schroeder finds helping her students see the value in rereading poems is all about helping them pay close attention to imagery.

Hunting for Textual Evidence

Gretchen Schroeder finds just telling her high school class to include textual evidence when making points and arming them with sticky notes leaves many students bewildered. She regroups and comes up with activities to scaffold their understanding of what makes for valid evidence.

Teaching Tone: Deal Me In

Gretchen Schroeder’s high school students are surprised to see a deck of cards on their supply list. The cards are a tool for teaching the vocabulary of tone in creative ways.

Fear of Reading

Gretchen Schroeder reflects on why some of her students have developed a fear of reading by the time they reach high school.

When One Door Closes

Gretchen Schroeder finds new routines in her high school workshop means letting go of old expectations.

Flipping Negative Teacher Emotions

Gretchen Schroeder struggles to understand the meaning and value of her teaching when two former students overdose and die in separate incidents, and another is indicted on murder charges. These events lead to deep reflection on how teachers can move beyond feelings of sadness, apathy, and envy.

 

A Community Reads “Wonder”

Katherine Sokolowski had a dream — her whole community reading and celebrating the same book. She explains how she helped coordinate, organize, and purchase hundreds of books for a community-wide reading of Wonder.

Spoken Word Poetry

Gretchen Schroeder uses online videos as resources to teach her high school students to appreciate spoken-word poetry and write their own.

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