Author: Charles Bazerman Summary: In this key reading, Bazerman describes the various things writers do with words, explaining how writers enter a complex and deepening engagement with a “symbolic environment” that coincides with the culture’s social, economic, and civic possibilities. He describes the many purposes, forms, and impacts of writing,...
Author: Willow McCormick Summary: What happens when teachers asks elementary students to conduct research about relatively recent history? In this article, a writing project teacher offers a wonderful model for integrating authentic writing and social studies instruction. By exchanging letters with grandparents, her students build a deeper, personal connection to...
Authors: Bruce M. Penniman, Leslie Skantz-Hodgson, Jane Baer-Leighton, Maria José Botelho, Richard Cairn, Karen Miele, Lawrence O’Brien, Momodou Sarr, Laura St. Pierre, Chris Tolpa, Susan Connell Biggs, Karen Diaz, Kevin Hodgson, Hollington Lee, Karen Pleasant, Christopher Rea, Lisa Rice Summary: Written as part of the Building New Pathways to Leadership...
Author: Nancy Lilly Summary: A fourth-grade science teacher, Nancy Lilly, describes how she helps her students recognize that the skills that elevate fiction are the very skills that can be useful in writing strong nonfiction, including science writing. Lilly shares her student writing conferences and details her process when working with...
Author: ASU News Frame: Girls Writing Science, a program of the Central Arizona Writing Project that is funded by an NWP/NSF Intersections grant, aims to improve participants’ science writing and encourages them to consider professions in a science-related field.
Author: Judith Rodby Summary: Elizabeth Birr Moje offers some of the most provocative viewpoints in content area literacy research. This annotated bibliography was prepared as a companion to her keynote address at NWP’s National Reading Initiative conference featured at Disciplinary Literacy: Why It Matters and What We Should Do About It.
Author: KaaVonia Hinton, Yonghee Suh, Lourdes Colón-Brown, and Maria O’Hearn Summary: What happens when history and ELA teachers form a study group to develop understandings of disciplinary literacy and ways this new knowledge might affect each person’s practice? As members read and reflected together on historical fiction and nonfiction, they...
Summary: Guests on this radio program were part of NWP’s College-Ready Writers Program (CRWP) who participated in an online version of a lesson study focused on two mini-units. Guests talk about how the structure of the lesson study has impacted their practice, their experience with teaching the mini-units in their...
Author: Laura Robb Summary: Offering a vivid glimpse into her middle school classroom, author Laura Robb illustrates how making available a range of texts at different reading levels and from a variety of perspectives promotes student engagement and success in her heterogeneously grouped classroom. Robb also shares a list of...
Summary: This resource from the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) features one-minute videos that define mini-units and explain the value of using nonfiction sources/texts. There are links to related pages on the C3WP website that focus on creating text sets and on developing and sequencing mini-units. These resources...