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Reflections of a high school writing teacher on the day his AP Seminar students submitted their Individual Written Argument Essays. A thread. 1/
In a class where skills are its core, let the kids pick the content. They’ll be way more bought into class. Since the skills are transferable, it doesn’t matter what content they use to learn them. We talked about love, ghosting, toxic masculinity, etc, as writing skills grew 2/
Teach formats, not formulas. I find formulaic writing hard to break. If a kid knows what goes where, generally, it allows them to get creative and toy with style. Writing formulas should be scaffolds, though, not ruled out fully. 3/
Explicitly teach a citation style. Like, full lessons on in-text citations, bibliography, headings, footnotes. Otherwise, you’ll be like me wondering how the hell it’s May and kids still aren’t using hanging indents on Works Cited pages 4/
Explicitly teach how to peer review. Teach them the difference between proofreading and editing. They’re different and require different thinking. 5/
Let. Kids. Struggle (or even fail). Yes, it’s hard to see kids doing something incorrectly and it’s natural to want to jump in and help. However the best learning comes from failure and struggle. It makes the learning more sticky in the long run. Also, keep expectations high 6/
Expose kids to a variety of writing styles. I’m personally guilty selecting my favorite @nytimes editorialists over and over for kids to read (ahem: @CharlesMBlow) but the exposure allows kids to copy elements of each writer’s style to develop their own. 7/
Teach kids how to use JStor/Ebsco. If you have a librarian (man, I wish we had one!!), have them help you. The amount of times kids think a google search is sufficient. Phew! It’s like I never taught em. Also explicitly teach kids how to read scholarly writing. 8/
Give kids specific, actionable feedback and have them point out how they fixed their mistake. Also, don’t mark everything up. You need to know ahead of them what you’re looking for and check for that ONLY. All them damn marks on their paper is overwhelming 9/
Teaching writing is liberation work. Remember that when you teach our Black babies. So much more but the end for now. 10/
