Were you aware that for the last very many years, people who love writing poetry have been getting together Saturday night at NCTE to read poetry, workshop poetry, and talk about writing? Going to Fountain of the Muse was the … Continue reading
We had a group of teachers from another school visit us yesterday (Z gets all the credit for making that happen, I just show up and talk). They spent the day hanging out in our classes, asking questions, sharing ideas. … Continue reading
Doc Z and I presented yesterday at the Colorado Language Arts Society conference on getting away from grading, and using feedback to teach/encourage reflective practice in our students. We packed a lot into 75 minutes, and the teachers in our … Continue reading
Whoever says teachers don’t work in the summer has no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve spent most of the last week at my computer in various locations working to wrap my head around my new prep for next year: … Continue reading
I’ve had this post on my to-do list for months. To be honest, this is the piece of this whole process that I have the most questions about, so I just kept putting off writing it. I’m in a book … Continue reading
We were lucky this year to be able to do two presentations. Today’s was about surviving teaching. We intended an interactive session where our attendees talked more than we did. We wanted them to have space for conversation about … Continue reading
I got to the point last Tuesday while watching election returns that I couldn’t focus anymore on what was unfolding on the US maps the news commentators kept describing, so I wrote a few emails, shopped for some new running … Continue reading
As a follow up to a previous post about the process my students and I went through to craft our grade agreement for this year, I wanted to share the finalized grade agreement we ended up with. Here it is. … Continue reading
My colleagues and I did our #StopGrading presentation at our state ELA conference a few weeks ago. Seeing as we’ll be doing the same presentation later this month at NCTE in Atlanta, we distributed notecards to the teachers who came … Continue reading
The first semester I went gradeless, I didn’t have in place any kind of agreement with students regarding what would make an A, B, C, etc. once we had to put something in the gradebook at the end of the … Continue reading
