Note from Dave: This post and its pyramid of writing priorities has been polished, improved, and incorporated into the writing chapter of my best-selling book, These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most. If you like my blog, you’ll love the book — it’s a condensed and coherent version of all that I’ve been […]
Instruction
Want More Writing Across the Content Areas? Validate the Content
The first step to improving the percentage of our kids who are capable writers is to increase how much writing they do. Typically, the classes with the greatest opportunities to do this are the non-ELA ones. Unfortunately, content area teachers are often given the impression, when a writing initiative comes into town, that writing is more […]
Writing: The Most Underrated Twenty-First Century Skill
I struggle to imagine putting together a solid argument for why we wouldn’t want all of our students to be capable writers when they graduate. Writing well is an obvious good. While much fuss was made about newfangled twenty-first-century skills, one very old skill that seems to be only increasing in importance is writing. Here we have the importance from an […]
Improving Pop-Up Debates: Better Prompts
I’ve held more than a few pop-up debates that went badly, and I could trace the badness back to before the debate started. What am I talking about? The Plague of the Poorly Formulated Pop-Up Debate Prompt. Recently, I was reading through Les Lynn’s blog (Les founded Argument-Centered Education, and his blog is the Debatifier) and […]
Learning ≠ Familiarity
Here are two scenarios we can all probably relate to: In both cases, the speaker is confused about the difference between learning and familiarity. If something is learned, it can be produced (or, in the case of skill, executed) by the learner, without any aid. Learning means, “I can do it myself.” Familiarity, on the […]