Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by that stack of essays just waiting to be graded? *Raises hand high* You pick up the first essay assuring yourself that this will go quicker than you think. As you begin, the reader in you tries to focus on the content, but the teacher in you just ...
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How to Create an Essay Comment Bank for Quick and Effective Feedback
A comment bank is a pre-written list of essay feedback comments that you can use to quickly leave feedback on student essays. The goal is to pre-create comments for points that you find yourself making repeatedly on student essays. In addition, if created strategically, the comment bank can be an ...
How to Plan A Successful Writing Unit by Focusing on Revision
While I was working on my dissertation, I learned one of the most valuable teaching practices of my career: the art of revision. My dissertation committee didn’t set out to teach me this strategy, but perhaps, that’s why it impacted me in such a powerful way. Rather, I learned it through doing. The ...
How to Plan a Writing Unit for Manageable Grading and Student Success
During my first three years of teaching, I was completely and utterly overwhelmed with planning, teaching, and grading essays. Whenever I would look ahead at my plan book, I would immediately feel nervous thinking of how to plan the next writing unit. In college, my professors assigned a paper, and ...
How a Biographical Lens Can Improve Any Literature Unit
When I first started teaching, I assigned a research paper that was an author biography. Students were tasked with researching an author’s life and influences. The intended objective of the paper was to teach research skills, and it just so happened that at the time, our library had a lot of books ...
Why Should English Teachers Use a Historical Lens to Teach Literary Analysis?
As an English teacher who is married to a history teacher, I can say with confidence the two subjects are beautifully interconnected. Afterall, English and history are both disciplines in the humanities. Though I wouldn’t consider myself a historian, I am a student of history, as are many English ...
