Partnership for Inquiry Learning

Professional Development Guide for Educators

Client: Partnership for Inquiry LearningProject: 5 Strategies for Effective In-House Professional Development: A guide for administrators, coaches, and facultyInbound marketing offer My favorite projects combine all my interests—teaching, writing, and marketing—like this professional development guide for educators that was developed as an inbound marketing offer for the Partnership for Inquiry Learning at Butler University.

Conferring Course

Improve your conferences with student writers. Enroll today in the 5-day mini-workshop by email that I created for the Partnership for Inquiry Learning at Butler University. Get more info

Reading Like a Writer: Looking closely at “Speech Class”

Hear what happened when I looked closely at poems with a handful of middle grade elementary teachers and facilitated a discussion about the use of dialogue in one.

3 Things I Wish I’d Understood Sooner about Conferring with Young Writers

What I learned from visiting consultant Matt Glover that completely changed my thinking about conferring in writing workshop.

Feedback is important (and I mess up sometimes)

In the first post in this series, I was thinking about the feedback I give student writers. That leads me to another big observation: sometimes I mess up, perhaps even bad enough to set a kid back a little. Learn more about two conversations with students that I’d like to redo.

First, convince them they ARE writers

This semester, I teach writing in pre-K on Wednesdays, and writing to college students on Fridays. I’m quickly discovering that the only real difference is the texts I use.

Teaching point: writers don’t rely on punctuation to convey emotion

Good narrative writers don’t rely on punctuation to convey emotion. Good writers know that characters convey emotion. Their body language, their actions, and their speech reveal what they feel.

Conferring with Young Writers: 5 Quick Reminders

Originally published in April 2015 and updated this month, teacher/consultant Mary Roderique and I offer five quick reminders and how-tos for conferring in writing workshop.

Ways to celebrate, publish student writing

What do you do at the end of unit of study? Your students have spent weeks cultivating their texts through a complete unit of study…What do you do to reward their efforts and emulate “publishing” for an audience beyond the teacher?

Looking closely at upper grade students’ nonfiction

With Katherine Bomer’s book HIDDEN GEMS in mind, I take a close look at a text by an upper grade student and offer my analysis of what’s going well, what I’d teach next.