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You Teach What You Grade What you grade is what you’ll teach.  Recently I saw a scoring tool, a rubric, that consisted of these items:   What will that teacher focus her instruction on?  Clearly, it will be the items on the rubric.  But what is the teacher NOT assessing (and therefore probably not teaching)?  Even […]

Grading or Assessing? Thinking about this article, I intentionally decided to use the word “grading” instead of “assessing”.  If you are using an approach to writing instruction that I describe in this blog, you are constantly assessing.  More than that, you are teaching your students to assess, and to bring that assessment into revising and

Spelling!  It’s everyone’s demon! If your school has a dynamic phonics/spelling program in K-2, then spelling may not be such an issue.   However, many schools don’t, and anyway, you’re teaching 3-8.  Your daily schedule may have 0 minutes allotted for spelling instruction, so now what? 1. Teach students how to use spell checkers.  I know

Before we talk about writing instruction, give some thought to the behavioral expectations you want to establish for your writing class.     A typical writing lesson includes a teacher-directed portion,  independent writing or revising, and a brief sharing at the end.  This article discusses expectations for the teacher directed section.   What do you expect? 

We’ve all heard of writer’s block, but what about “writing teacher’s block”?     Let’s face it, few of us are in line for a Pullitzer.  Maybe you didn’t like writing as an elementary student.  Maybe in college, you got help with your papers.  Maybe the sight of a blank page  produces a cold sweat.  But

Writing instruction is an uncomfortable topic for many of us.  Students can be resistant, parents don’t know how to help, and as teachers, we don’t always know exactly what we’re supposed to be teaching.  What is writing instruction and what isn’t? To ramp up your writing instruction, you need to get one principle clearly in