A few years ago, I started to rethink my classroom space. I wondered, What does this room say about me as a teacher, or my students as learners? Is the space working in the best ways in can? Although I don’t think I realized it… Read More
All posts filed under “Blog”
A Place to Belong
Recently, I was honored to be among the contributors to Education Week’s Classroom Q & A with Larry Ferlazzo. This week’s question was, “What’s the best way to start the school year?” Below was my response. Be sure to follow the link at the end… Read More
Zen Teaching
NOTE: This post was originally published on MovingWriters.org. Follow the link at the end to continue reading. Now that it’s officially August, I’m starting to feel what I suspect many teachers feel this time of year—the all too familiar mix of anxiety and anticipation. While I… Read More
Multigenre and Visual Tools for Composition
Click HERE to see the presentation, given at the West Chester University PA Writing & Literature Project Summer Institute, July 2016.
What do we hope for our student readers?
I‘ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about how our beliefs about students, learning, and teaching influence our practices. Part of this reflection has stemmed from my own instructional practice and how it has shifted—in subtle but also dramatic ways. How, for example, the nagging… Read More
The Pressure to Do Versus the Possibilities of Doing
Whenever I blog, especially for PAWLP, I try to offer fellow teachers some practical strategies to use in the classroom. After all, I know how I much I appreciate picking up ideas that I can try with my own students right away, sometimes even the very next day.… Read More
Writing as Questioning and Choosing
This weekend, I was browsing through my Feedly and came across Adam Grant’s current piece in the New York Times Sunday Review. I first discovered Grant’s work a few months ago when I was at school late browsing through the TED website, looking for a talk to show… Read More
Is School Becoming Irrelevant? (Part 2): How Our Beliefs Shape Our Practices
Beliefs are powerful. What we believe—about school, learning, learning in schools, and learning for the world—shapes every instructional decision made on behalf of students. For example, the belief that teachers need to be held accountable for student test scores is behind value-added teacher evaluation. The… Read More
Discovering a Writing Process that Works
I knew I wasn’t doing things as well as I could. My instruction felt fragmented. For example, when my students and I were working on a memoir essay, I used one process for instruction. When we worked on a book review, we used another process.… Read More
Teachers are Learners, too.
Every now and then, I hear teachers express less than positive reviews of their teacher education programs and coursework. Too much theory, not enough practical advice. The result? Walking into a class full of students on the first day only to quickly realize that you don’t know… Read More


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