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Posts from the ‘PAWLP’ Category

Jun 1

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Teacher-to-Teacher: End-of-Year Epiphanies

Adobe Spark (22)

By Janice Ewing

My grad class is small this term, a seminar-like community with lots of conversation and sharing of ideas and experiences. The comfort level among the group is a welcome respite at a time when everyone is striving to fulfill end-of-year requirements and scrambling to reach unmet goals, while keeping up with grad school and family obligations.

Recently, a few of the teachers shared experiences that were unexpectedly positive and rewarding. For example, Anne (names have been changed) teaches in an alternative high school for students who have previously dropped out or taken other detours from the traditional path to graduation. Most, if not all, have had struggles and negative experiences with reading, robbing them of the pleasurable experience of getting caught up in a book. By chance, Anne acquired a large enough collection of Walter Dean Myers’ Monster to accommodate her small class. She had not read the book, but had read reviews and commentaries and it seemed like a great fit for her students. She decided to jump in without reading it ahead, which was not her usual practice. Next issue: a well-meaning colleague pointed out that there were related “packets’ available, which would provide questions, prompts, discussion points, etc. An inner voice told her to forgo the packets, and she listened to it.  Read more

Apr 22

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Author’s Corner: Dianne Salerni

We are thrilled to introduce a new series to our blog site—The Author’s Corner. We are so fortunate to have so many PAWLP friends and fellows who are authors willing to share their writing processes with us and our readers. For our first entry in our Author’s Corner, please welcome Dianne Salerni. . . 

Six Stages of Accepting Editorial Feedback

By Dianne Salerni

I’m sure I’m not the only writer who hyperventilates when an email with feedback turns up in my in-box. It might be from a critique partner, a trusted beta reader, or feedback won in a contest from someone you don’t even know. Further down the road, it might be from your agent, or an official revision letter from the editor who acquired your book.
Read more

Apr 20

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From the Classroom: Second Draft Reading

by Tricia Ebarvia

As I walk around the room, I notice students talking—generally enthusiastically—about the book we are reading. They have a few discussion questions on a handout to take notes, which they dutifully fill out. What I don’t notice are any books open on their desks. In fact, I see many students with no books out at all, and what books are out are closed on their desks.

“Mrs. Ebarvia, do you know remember what Piggy said to Jack when they went to Castle Rock?”

“Sure, I remember.”

Pause. Expectant looks.

“You know, you could open your book to find out,” I suggest. My students smile and begin searching their books.

Years ago, when I first read Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading during the PAWLP summer institute, one particular section that stood out to me was the chapter on “Deepening Comprehension through Second-Draft Reading.” In this chapter, Gallagher emphasizes the importance of getting students to go back to the text to reread:

Students need to return to the text to help them overcome their initial confusion, to work through the unfamiliarity of the work, to move beyond the literal, and to free up cognitive space for higher-level thinking. They need both a “down” reading draft to comprehend the basics and an “up” reading draft to explore the meaning. (80)

Those who have been teaching English long enough know that getting students to go back to the text can often be a difficult task. Having gotten the “jist” of the story on their first reading, students often see no need to go back to the text unless prompted.

Yet we also know that rereading is one of the first steps towards a deeper understanding of a text. When students reread, they can better appreciate craft—they can see the choices that an author made and question why. When a text is complex and students don’t “get it” the first time, rereading is not only a valuable but necessary move that students can make.

So how do we encourage students to go back to the text—to explore the text a second, or even third time?  Read more

Apr 19

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Celebrate with Poetry! Plus a Treasure Chest of Poetry Books

by Lynne R. Dorfman

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. 
~W.H. Auden

It is sometimes hard to define something, even when we feel we know it fairly well. Emily Dickinson, once confided in a letter, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”   We might offer these ideas: Poetry is a story, the painting of a scene, a thought, a small moment in time. The trouble is that most dictionary definitions of poetry are dry, limiting, and vague; and so we are left scratching our heads.  What, then, is this magical writing that has such power and range, capable of ever-renewing our spirits? Read more

Apr 6

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Teacher-to-Teacher: Poetry as Noticing

By Janice Ewing

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver (from “Sometimes”)

These are among my favorite lines from Mary Oliver, and I think that these “instructions” apply to poetry, too.  Once again we find ourselves in April, Poetry Month. Many of us have considered the value of giving poetry its special twelfth of the year, versus reading, writing and enjoying it all the time. This year, I’m feeling a little more mellow about that issue. I’ve come to believe that we can immerse ourselves and our students in poetry through all seasons, and still take the month of April to celebrate it with fun and fanfare. Read more

Mar 23

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From the Classroom: Organization is an Act of Revision

By Brian Kelley

CaptureI’ve always admired my father’s garage. It is organized. Utility shelves on the left. Steel pegboards and hooks on the rear and right walls. Every tool has its place. He knows where everything is, yet he is constantly revising the content of the garage.

My mother keeps adding stuff to the house, and older stuff is belched out to my father into the garage. So, my father makes decisions. He replaces and rearranges. He adds what he must. And he deletes. I know for a fact that he would love to delete a lot more.

When I teach organization to middle school writers, the lessons of my father’s garage must be in the DNA of my methods. Everything has its place. Nothing starts organized, and this includes writing.

Organization is an act of revision.  Read more

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