For the duration of the author's fifteen-year career, she has used authentic writing opportunities to engage students. She begins as their teammate, and invites each student to work with her on a poem. In working collaboratively, students realize the author is there not to downgrade their piece, to chastise mistakes or to belittle errors; she is…

As an educator, according to the author, the most important objective is to know what they want students to take away with them after the unit ends, the enduring understandings that will stay with them long after they leave the classroom. The author states they wanted their students to understand that writing is a journey, one that starts with the…

Process and product are always in tension. In authentic writing, they can be messy and hard to assess. Because writing is recursive and generative, every word written opens new possibilities. Not only that, but writing is influenced by ability, time allowed, task definition, rhetorical situation, relationship to reading, and helpful thinking…

In his foundational work, "English Composition and Rhetoric," Alexander Bain set forth the framework for what students and teachers now routinely refer to as the five-paragraph essay. Teachers were so inculcated with Bain's paradigm for the "perfect" essay format, they in turn have inculcated their students, and they just say now, "Write an…

In this "prosumer" era in which people seem always to be producing and consuming texts, words matter as much as--or more than--they ever have. Learning how grammar works in the texts they read and write is essential to students' literacy. It is time to reframe English teachers' view to include both writing "and" reading as contexts for grammar…

High school teacher Bonnie Mary Warne facilitates students' ease and awareness of their writing processes as they learn to apply knowledge of it on state assessment tests. Through ongoing discussion, practice, observations of patterns in their writing, and shared terminology, students begin to understand how individualized writing processes are,…

The wiki is an excellent tool for student collaboration and teacher assessment. Students' comfort with online social networking makes the wiki a perfect forum for students to coauthor works and to respond to each other's writing. In this article, the author discusses how to use a wiki to promote discussion and aid students with writing. He tested…

In this article, the author describes her experiences teaching a large-scale, book-club wiki project she designed for her students. She conducted the wiki project in order to try out this new technology. The wiki format allows teachers to provide ongoing response to assess student performance in conjunction with peer-to-peer evaluations,…

Sarah Irwin and Cyndi Knodle believe that by replacing the confines of content and form in writing instruction and assignments with ample "time and space for invention and arrangement, writing teachers can help to inspire student thinking rather than chopping it off to fit a required format." They elaborate on students' eagerness to be guided by a…

In a montage of genres, Helen Collins Sitler illuminates the subtle yet powerful, often detrimental messages we send to girls that silence their public and private voices and diminish their opportunities to question and learn.

Teachers across the country consider the best methods to teach writing in the middle school and high school. They aspire for students to produce writing aimed at real audiences and purposes, writing that follows the author's thinking and leads readers to discoveries about the topic. Many teachers believe that a formula in writing could offer…

Considers how with no training in how to teach vocabulary skills, many teachers transfer to their classroom the same techniques that they see test makers using. Offers a chart to encourage thinking about the ways that standardized testing techniques differ from good teaching and learning practices. Argues that educators should provide students…

The author, a high school teacher and forensics coach, describes ways to teach writing--including on-demand essays--that draw on successful practices she developed in coaching. Students learn the importance of using personal conviction and qualified thesis statements to build arguments, as well as learning "The Debater Four-Step," an effective…

Explains how a teacher teaches process writing in her mainstream high school classes, despite her obligation to cover grammar, literature, vocabulary, research, and communication. Shows how some approaches to process writing can be modified to fit it into a tighter, more structured course. (TB)

Asserts that writing assessment should reflect current composition pedagogy, and offers a design to assess process writing. Discusses the development of the scoring criteria and the selection of range finders, as well as the standardization of training and scoring procedures. (PRA)