Getting started can be the hardest thing for student writers. It's a little too easy to stare at a blank page. Luckily, there are published authors who share their writing and brainstorming techniques to help inspire our students to dive into the magic of the writing process. In a 2010 interview with Sam Weller, published in The Paris Review, author Ray Bradbury described his method of brainstorming the novel Fahrenheit 451: “Three things are in your head: First, everything y

Authors are the best teachers. Middle and high school students have stories to tell, stories bursting at the surface. With a teacher's guidance, the novels at students' fingertips have the power to instruct and inspire. Each story provides students with a writing model that can help them to have their voices heard. Through analysis of different elements of authors' writing, students can feel empowered to take risks and get their ideas on paper. Shift students’ thinking from r

My favorite way to celebrate writing with middle school and high school students is musical peer review. It’s easy to set up, students get the chance to dance around the classroom, and most importantly, students have the opportunity to read up to eight of their classmates’ writing. Here’s how it works and some tips for bringing musical peer review to your classroom. Musical Peer Review student guidelines: 🎶 Walk around the classroom until the music stops. 🎶 When the music

By using mentor sentences in our middle school ELA classrooms, our students have endless opportunities to learn from the experts: the authors of the young adult books that fill our classrooom library bookshelves. As ELA teachers, we can use the writing of authors our students love to improve student writing, study grammar, learn literary elements, and help young writers fine-tune their personal writing style. Here are five tips for using mentor sentences to improve student wr

As middle school ELA teachers, we all want to work to empower our young writers. They often come to us a little shaky, a little unsure. Teaching students--SHOWING THEM--that writing is a process can help middle school writers to build confidence and skill. In the age of AI, it can also help our students to avoid the temptation of having artifical intelligence write our papers and do our thinking for us. Ultimately, our job as ELA teachers is not to teach students to scaffold

(and make your students better writers in the process) Let's say you spend three minutes per essay grading 100 essays (and as English teachers we know three minutes would be a miracle). That's 300 minutes. That's FIVE hours of your life. Grading essays is the most daunting task for many educators. It is timely. It requires concentration. It requires analysis. Luckily, there is hope. Here are five tried and true methods that will help save you grading time... and maybe a littl