I love stories. I am at my happiest when I am completely immersed in reading or writing them. If I don’t have the time or the isolation I need to read or write, the next best thing is conversation. Have two minutes? Tell me a tale. There are a few drawbacks to this lifelong obsession with stories. I often get lost in them. For example, last weekend I read Gone Girl from cover to cover. It was a despicable tale [...]
One of the (relative) downsides to my involvement in IWP is my exposure to the wider world of education. In the past few years, the circle of educators I’ve come to know and learn from has grown, and as a result I am much more reflective about my practice. These amazing people push me to think critically about education in general and literacy education in particular. How can this be a bad thing, you might wonder… Well… I’ve been in [...]
Tonight I facilitated the first in a series of discussions about the book 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know by Jeff Anderson. The teachers gathered around the table were a mixture of literacy coaches, reading recovery teachers, and classroom teachers. We spanned grades 3-8 and had a wide range of experience. I’m lucky to teach in a school district that encourages and supports professional learning through district-provided workshops and book studies. The professional development I find most powerful and [...]
Not so very long ago, if you had asked me if I was a writer, I would have answered with an emphatic “NO!” even though writing is something I’ve enjoyed doing since I was at least in junior high school. I was not, however, a person who wrote for myself. My writing was always something I did because it was assigned, and very rarely did I have a choice in that writing. In junior high, I remember being assigned my [...]