Summary: Developed collaboratively among representatives from the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project, Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing describes the rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills that are critical for college success based on current research in writing and writing...
Author: Patrick Hartwell Summary: This article offers a recap of understandings of the concept of grammar: what it is, and when, why, and how it matters. The author, alluding to the relationship between grammar and power, suggests that we should consider how to support students in communicating strategically. This foundational...
Author: Janis Cramer Summary: By engaging children in a collaborative workshop environment to help them learn to develop characters, consider word choice, and interweave dialogue and description, the author simultaneously helped her students to strengthen social and independent writing skills. Opportunities to perform their dialogues in front of the class...
Summary: This national survey (2009) looks at public opinion related to the importance of writing for work and personal life and how well we are preparing young Americans to write. Along with expressing dissatisfaction with their own writing ability and with the job high schools are currently doing to train...
Author: Douglas James Joyce Summary: In this short article, the author proposes a strategy to support college composition students to develop an awareness of grammatical patterns underlying their writing including their errors. The article includes an assignment and student examples, and may be useful in discussions among high school teachers...
Author: Phip Ross Summary: This article offers several suggestions for how rural teachers can involve parents in literacy projects that impact student learning and engagement. Successful strategies include “parent-teacher-student journals.” These strategies may spark ideas for inquiry projects or study groups focused on developing family and community engagement.
Author: Casey Olsen Summary: In this article, Casey Olsen, a high school teacher involved in the NWP’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP), describes an approach to teaching argument that helps his students “develop understandings and skills that change the way they experience the conversations that surround them.” Olsen...
Author: John Warnock Summary: These brief sketches emphasize ideas for classroom practice found in the works of James Moffett, a writer and theorist in the areas of language and literacy and curriculum integration whose work has informed the practice of many NWP teachers. For teachers in any advanced institute or...
Author: National Writing Project Summary: Rural Voices Radio, Volume III completes the Rural Voices Radio series with dispatches from four more Writing Project sites as part of the Rural Voices, Country Schools program. Each episode paints a portrait of a rural school, as told by the students and teachers themselves,...
Author: Mary Ehrenworth Summary: Teaching grammar through inquiry and seduction? In this piece, Mary Ehrenworth shares strategies for moving away from direct instruction (which seldom works) to making it possible for students to “have an apprenticeship relation with great authors, even at the sentence structure level.” By honoring diverse dialects...