This guide introduces silent conversations, a collaborative learning technique that has students
thinking, sharing, and reflecting about important questions—but through writing rather than talk.
Facilitating Participation with Silent Conversations
The Art of the Doodle: Writing with Imagination
Use independent, imaginative artwork and varied writing prompts to assess understanding of a given topic for a student body with differentiated needs.
ICED: The Key to Elaboration
Most students struggle when adding detail to their body paragraphs. This guide serves as a means of instruction and provides models for the students to master development.
Developing Evidence-Based Arguments from Texts
This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text.
Teaching with Zooming Slideshows through Prezi
Through Prezi, a web application, students create "zooming" presentations for various purposes, such as presenting research, defending an opinion, or sharing a digital story.
Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto
Using Animoto, a free Web 2.0 tool, students can develop short digital videos that include music, photos, video clips, and text as well as share their creations electronically.
Speak to Me: Teaching with Voki
Through Voki, a Web 2.0 tool, students create customizable avatars for class presentations for various purposes, such as presenting biographical information, expressing an opinion, or reading a poem.
Promoting Student-Directed Inquiry with the I-Search Paper
The sense of curiosity behind research writing gets lost in some school-based assignments. This Strategy Guide provides the foundation for cultivating interest and authority through I-Search writing, including publishing online.
Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Power Notes
The strategy examined in this Strategy Guide teaches students an outlining technique to help them differentiate between main ideas and details in their reading and writing.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
Roots and Branches: A Resource of Native American Literature
This valuable resource book offers teachers an opportunity to learn and to teach about Native American literatures in context. Susag examines the historical and literary contexts that frame the literary work of Native peoples.
Planning for Inquiry: It's Not an Oxymoron!
Planning for Inquiry shows you how to get an inquiry-based curriculum started, how to keep it going, and how to do so while remaining accountable to mandated curricula, standards, and programs.
Literary Terms: A Practical Glossary
Literary Terms: A Practical Glossary provides up-to-date definitions, drawing on recent developments in literary theory and emphasizing the role of reading practices in the reproduction of literary meanings. Unlike other glossaries, it includes brief activities to help students develop a working knowledge of the concepts.
Designing Writing Assignments
Traci Gardner offers practical tips, starting points, and a companion website to help secondary and college teachers design effective writing assignments.
Preventing Plagiarism: Tips and Techniques
DeSena offers a practical guide on how high school and college teachers can structure assignments and guide students so that students don't plagiarize.
Talking in Class: Using Discussion to Enhance Teaching and Learning
The authors guide high school teachers in developing skills in promoting and facilitating authentic discussion in the English language arts classroom.
Writing at the Threshold: Featuring 56 Ways to Prepare High School and College Students to Think and Write at the College Level
This book offers both an eloquent philosophy of composition instruction and a useful set of classroom-tested teaching ideas distilled from the author's 28 years of teaching writing.
What Is "College-Level" Writing?
Just what defines "college-level" writing? This collection seeks to engage this essential question with care, patience, and pragmatism.
Lesson Plans for Teaching Writing
This collection of lesson plans will help prepare high school and college students for college-level writing.