In Vietnam's 2018 Literacy Education Curriculum Guideline, creative writing is a new requirement, emphasized for its goals of developing primary students' language competencies, critical thinking, and problem-solving. This new requirement offers teachers an opportunity to help students enhance their writing competencies and presents a challenge,…

In 2019, a new English Senior Secondary syllabus (QCAA, 2019) was implemented in all schools across Queensland, Australia. This syllabus, incorporating high-stakes external examinations and supporting documents, instigated a shift in the teaching and assessing of senior secondary English that has been both challenging and revitalising for…

This essay considers the relative merits of critical writing and writing in role as a means of enabling and assessing students' responses to literary texts. Drawing largely on the author's experience of teaching "Frankenstein," it argues that the distinction between critical and creative writing is not as absolute as is sometimes…

Presents an assessment rubric that allows teachers to consistently assess children's work over time. The rubric focuses on 3 features of writing (surface features, inner layers, and creativity), within which are 18 specific competencies. The article describes how to use the rubric to assess creative writing. (SM)

Provides teachers with instructions on effectively using student journals in classes at all levels. Gives examples of different types of personal writing students can engage in, suggests ways to respond to them, and lists benefits of and reservations about using journals in writing classes. (SKC)

A product of Hawaii's Poets-in-the-Schools program, this second volume of a compilation of essays and poems addresses diverse artistic and educational concerns about poetry writing and is divided into two sections. Section I consists of essays by three of the poets who were involved in the program: (1) "Evaluating Student Poems" by Tim…

Day-by-day lesson ideas are given for an eight-day writing unit in which students study literary conventions and write their own short stories. Evaluation of the stories is continuous throughout the unit and partly done by other students. (SJL)

The 22 articles in this collection, written by experienced teachers of English, present effective learning activities for developing a variety of skills, qualities, and attitudes in writing. Demonstrating different teaching methods, the articles relate to key principles advocated by the National Writing Project: attention to fluency, peer…

This article describes how a mathematics teacher uses literature and creative writing in her ninth-grade classes to motivate, instruct, and assess her students. (Contains 4 figures.)

This study used poems written by fifth graders to determine any differences in the quality of children's writing which might have been induced by the "broad exposure" approach to teaching poetry, the "analytical" approach, or the "non-exposure" approach. A story-writing pretest was given to 93 fifth grade children who were then randomly assigned…

The purpose of this study was to determine what kind of feedback would be most effective in helping students improve their writing and in what manner it should be provided. Feedback was provided on a specific writing task, the short autobiographical narrative. Improvement was measured by scales of the three variables: completeness, development,…

Describes the results of a classroom trial activity to encourage communication in mathematics. Students were asked to write a short story or a joke or to create a cartoon about an aspect of mathematics, which was in this case isolating the variable or property of negative 1. The activity revealed creativity and allowed the teacher to determine how…

Based upon the conviction that children can be taught many of the aspects of writing unique to the preparation of professional writers, this book offers ideas for the teaching of creative writing to children. "Creative" writing is defined and its values for children are discussed. Specific suggestions to promote imaginative writing are proposed in…

Two studies illustrate the concern that the connection between teachers' beliefs and their instructional practices can be a troublesome one if beliefs are informed by formalist thinking related to truth and caring in the teaching conversation. Subjects, 21 middle school language arts teachers and 216 eighth-grade students were asked what they…