Presents excerpts from the journal of a writing laboratory teacher about her work over one semester with a student who produced wonderful images and insights, yet struggled to write and struggled to succeed in college. (SR)

Argues that poetry can enhance the reading and writing skills of poor readers, while it helps them develop confidence with language. Shows how poetry can work in an Adult Basic Education literacy class, by looking at the writing of one particular student. (SR)

Describes a developmental writing course taught in prison. Describes how the teaching styles took into account the presumed learning preferences of the African Americans in this group of inmates and resulted in a boost of both their self-confidence and the level of their writing. (SR)

Describes the use of character journals (a written diary kept by the reader who assumes the role of the main character) with a group of eighth-grade students. Shows how students think more about what they are reading and come away with a better sense of their own identity. (SR)

Relates the author's experiences in a year-long creative writing workshop with a third-grade class, focusing especially on working with one child with a remarkable narrative imagination. Describes how it slowly dawned on the author and the classroom teacher that the boy was not sorting out the real from the imaginary in his descriptions to them of…

Describes a method the author has used successfully with elementary school classes that enables students to enjoy the process of revision in their prose-writing. Notes that the exercises can be used in any time frame or circumstance. (SR)

Describes how one teacher uses life writing (reading and writing about transformative life experiences) in her basic writing class to engage students and to help them understand the power and purpose of reaching out to a variety of audiences. Discusses grading life writing. (SR)

Discusses Tolstoy's nearly lifelong career as a teacher. Quotes from Tolstoy's own writings about teaching: his accounts of his interactions with the peasant children at his school; his own theories about teaching; and how the teacher should follow the child. Draws parallels to the author's experiences teaching writing workshops at a soup kitchen…

Describes a framework that helps seventh- and eight-grade readers write about what they notice, question, feel, and relate to (about the book they are reading) in reader response journals. Shows how, as a result, they deepen their involvement with and understanding and enjoyment of literature. (SR)

This guide presents scoring criteria, the writing prompt, and sample student papers for the grade 8 end of grade persuasive/argumentative composition statewide writing achievement test. The introductory section presents background information on statewide writing tests in North Carolina, scoring writing samples, and the scoring process. The next…

The purpose of this document is to provide administrators, teachers, and students with samples of students' writing that exemplify the criteria used to score students' written responses on the June 1993 Grade 3 Language Learning Achievement Test and the written component of the performance assessment administered to a provincial sample of grade 3…

Suggesting that instructors approach literature from a multidisciplinary life-based stance, this paper presents syllabi, pedagogical techniques, and a student essay which illustrates a life-based approach to literary themes. The first section of the paper deals with creative curricular re-packaging of great literature in which traditional course…

Suggesting that all phases of writing, including revision, have a great deal in common across age groups and levels of accomplishment, this book presents 196 specific revision exercises, as well as numerous examples from students and from literature. The first part of the book looks at how the ability to revise develops, and at how people can use…

A multicultural literature course at Loyola Marymount University (California) was designed to complicate ideas of culture with gender issues and explored a common but largely unexplored phenomenon--writers who write outside their own personal backgrounds and identities. The course drew from research on "women's way of knowing" and…

Aimed at junior and senior high school teachers and artists in residence, this book urges teachers and students to read and write poetry "as though their lives depended upon it," and to breathe life into classroom writing traditions that are not hands-on or intense. Each chapter is set in the classroom. Poems by students and teacher…