An archived stack of papers: 'models'

What I Won’t Do This Year

In a stack of papers called Reform.

  • Aug
  • 15
  • 2009

Collect writing and then ignore it for a month. Expect study questions answered every night. Give daily reading check quizzes worth tons of points. Skip grading blogs on a Saturday morning. Wait until April to institute a classroom after-school writing lab. Circle every single grammatical error on a given page. Assign just one piece of writing that involves student conferencing and that happens to be... read more

They Don’t Know

In a stack of papers called Writing.

  • Apr
  • 23
  • 2009

Sample videos. Model paragraphs. Professional sentences. Anchor papers. Published works. Student drafts.

Students read them. They vote on which is best. They talk about why they like them. They find identifying characteristics that explain what one does better than the other. Dead silent classes and phrases straight off a rubric that are meaningless, this almost never changes the way students... read more