Teaching on the secondary level can be challenging with the number of students that we are required to teach each year. Therefore, it is essential as a secondary teacher to develop strategies for more efficient grading practices and to rethink our roles as auditors rather than graders.
9 Tips for Teaching AP Literature
Prompt Sticks Reflection Game: An Interactive Way to Reflect Back on the School Year
The Art of the One-Pager
Thanksgiving & Abraham Lincoln: A Rhetorical Analysis Activity
The Logline: A Screenwriting Tool that Helps Students with Textual Analysis in both Fiction and Nonfiction
In screenwriting (writing for movies and TV), the logline is key to brainstorming story ideas and also selling them or "pitching" them to buyers. Crafting loglines can help the writer to flesh out new plot ideas before writing the entire script. It's much easier to revise the logline rather than an entire hundred page script!
The Worst Essay of Your LIFE: A Unique Approach to Assessing Writing at the Beginning of the School Year
The Most Important Essay for High School Seniors: The Personal Philosophy Statement
10 Songs for the END of the School Year to Inspire Reflection
Playing Devil’s Advocate: A Game for Practicing Argument Skills in Secondary ELA
Grading Essays: A Strategy that Reflects Writing as a Process
Writing is a process. It is recursive. No piece of writing is ever "final." Something can always be better. I often feel this way whenever I read back over my own old essays and inevitably find a sentence that could be better, a paragraph that could be stronger, or a word that could be more precise.