If you truly want to improve student writing, then write every day. The end. That’s the big secret. Ignore the consultants and calls for complicated plans. Ignore the former-teacher textbook salesman and AI-everything merchants. Ignore ‘em all. Building basic skills for writing requires far fewer resources than you might think.

So how do you build a strong foundation for writing?

The supply list and ideals are simple. For supplies, you need a notebook and a pen, a timer, and a good question. For ideals, writing for 180 days requires a simple ideal: Integration. As a maxim, Students should discuss what they write about literature. Once writing flows naturally from reading, then writing itself ceases to be a separate topic.

In early 2025 I wrote a three-part series about student writing notebooks, including the basis, example polices, grading rubrics, starting scripts, and 50+ example prompts. I warned against acronyms and time-wasting show and tell. I advised weekly side-by-side conferences and suggested grace for mistakes. Since then, I’ve been experimenting and expanding and wanted to reflect on twelve uses for student writing notebooks.

Nothing has fundamentally changed. I’d still say 80% of my notebooks preview and reviewing topics. But beyond that, I’ve added several things. One, daily writing now flows into explicit vocabulary instruction. Students use pages for Greek and Latin roots from the Merriam-Webster’s Vocabulary Builder. Two, students engage in daily brain dumps for their readings, composing short chapter summaries during longer reads. Three, I’ve added even more variety to that other 20% of notebook topics.

As you read I’ll describe the topic, present challenges, and give example questions. If you’d like to know more, ask away in the comment section!

Ready to get started?

📓 The Twelve Uses

#1. Previewing Themes

Students connect personal experience to literature.

Description: Pretend you’re reading “Flowers for Algernon.” As an introduction you preview a universal theme: “What if you could be the best at anything? But what if you had to give something up in return?” The first question taps into desires, be they sports, hobbies, and so on. But the second question exacts a cost: What if success came with a price? We know Charlie’s success will be temporary, but this question previews themes without spoiling the twist.

Previewing themes increases receptivity by connecting life to literature. For “Algernon,” we might spend two days learning about intelligence, IQ, and personality tests. Yet background knowledge alone doesn’t tap into the yearnings of the heart. Background knowledge alone doesn’t speak to feeling trapped. So students reflect on where they yearn to improve yet can’t. Yes, knowledge helps comprehension, but relevance and receptivity are multi-dimensional.

Challenges: Sometimes you encounter the student who lives under a rock. You know the type: They’re always a step behind and rarely know what day it is. You desperately want to help and they wiggle away on instinct. You ask a favorite movie and they’ve never watched a movie ever. How do you help here? If you know the answer, we can both retire. Until then, I widen my topics, shrug my shoulders, and move on.

• Examples: “Flowers for Algernon”: What if you could be the best at anything? But what if you were forced to give something up in return? A Mango Shaped Space: Describe a time when you’ve been embarrassed at school. Of Mice and Men: What qualities make a good friend?

#2. Reviewing Topics

Students recall the previous reading

Description: Once you’ve started reading, shift from preview to review through retrieval practice. Simply start by asking what they read the prior day. Direct their focus. This not only creates continuity between classes, but functions as built-in review. Sometimes you discuss the topic in-depth, while other times you make a mention and move on. Regardless, never underestimate the power of writing about literature. Don’t overthink: What did kids read yesterday? What details connect to today?

Challenges: Pretend you’ve had two stellar classes for “Algernon.” Charlie’s had his surgery and his intelligence goes from budding to blooming. And then she shows up. She’s been marked absent for two days and has no clue what’s happening. You posted readings online yet she read nothing. (Sleeping during class has the same impact.) How do you handle these cases? How can you review what students have not learned?

In short, I rewind and give them the preview topic. Band-Aids can’t fixed missed time and opportunities. If readings were posted and they still did nothing, that’s on them. But rather than yell or dwell, you can build receptivity while they catch up. As for the student sleepers, they’ve squandered opportunities. Let them fail. Encourage natural consequences. You get what you work for. Where the stable is clean, you starve.

• Examples: “Flowers for Algernon”: Why did Charlie get the surgery? What will happen to him? A Mango Shaped Space: What happened to Mia in the third grade? Who is Jenna? How do they spend their time before school starts? Of Mice and Men: Who are George and Lenny?

#3. Calendar Writing

Students write about their lives including school events, weekends, breaks, and holidays.

Description: Sometimes daily writing calls for going beyond the page. Since relevance helps word counts, students write about school events, weekends, breaks, and holidays. This works the best between major topics and breaks. So ask about life outside school. If we ask the right questions, writing seems easy.

Challenges: Just like literature, students may point and find topics themselves self-evident. If you stayed home, you did nothing. But what does it mean to do nothing? This could include seeing friends, playing video games, and so on, but unless they turn the mirror properly, doing nothing means writing nothing. This applies to travel as well. (Insert eye roll.).

• Example: List three ways the pep session could have gone better. What happened during Christmas Break? List three activities from Fall Break. Describe the most boring day from Spring Break.

#4. Vocabulary

Students record vocabulary terms.

Description: If you sequence vocabulary after daily writing, then writing notebooks become a natural word sponge. So whether you spend time with SAT words, Greek and Latin roots, Tier 2 words, story-related words, and so on, why not use your notebooks? Over time, minimizing the places for vocabulary becomes a logistical blessing. “If you can’t find such and such, look either in your notebook or your folder.”

Challenges: To be honest, copying vocabulary suffers from lack of following directions: not labeling dates, not including vocabulary on separate pages, or writing vocabulary on random pages. But the kids who lose things just lose things in general, right?

• Examples: —

#5. Open Topics

Students write about anything. They can switch topics as many times as they want, but they must write the entire time.

Description: Never expect progress towards fluency with paragraph acronyms. Likewise, never expect progress with literature questions alone. Once my students adjust to journals about literature, I shift my focus, loosen my restraints, and simply let them write. Over time I include at least one open topic per week, and as they catch on, they create their own repeating topics: writing about hobbies, sports statistics, and gossip; writing their own short stories; and so on.

That said, open topics contain small print. I will not give credit to doodling, writing numbers, writing song lyrics, and so on. I want actual thought, not yodeling between the ears. Stream of consciousness is fine. Descriptions are fine. And oftentimes I suggest topics. (Just see calendar writing or creative writing.) But if you want to accelerate progress, loosen the restraints and let them write.

In Fall 2019, I experimented: What if I treated Open Topics like Sustained Silent Reading? What if I quietly added more and more time? In January 2020 we got to ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. In February 2020 they wrote for twenty-five minutes. As their fluency skyrocketed, their essays gained new sharpness and academic success flowered in the midst of winter. Then March 2020 happened and those gains were erased overnight. I think about that lost progress all the time.

Challenges: If I set a five minute timer, someone will slam their notebook shut after three minutes and walk around the room. You know, just because. If the goal means writing for extended times, then this explicitly targets attention spans. If you want a secret, though, I’ve found an amazing sentence starter: “I hate open journals. I have nothing to write about.” Once they go stream of consciousness, then the journals write themselves.

• Example. Open Topic. Write about anything you want, but write the entire time. You finish when the timer stops.

#6. Repeating Prompts

Students check their grades, reflect on the week, reflect on other tasks, and so on.

Description: The average middle school student has the self-awareness of a retiree blocking a crowded Walmart aisle on a busy Saturday afternoon. With this in mind, sometimes journals act as mirrors. They help students set weekly goals, reflect on their grades, record missing assignments, and more. Over time journals have acted like rudders, small questions redirecting the grade book before grades are due.

Challenges: How often do students simply tell adults what they want to hear and then not do anything? If you pair a reflection prompt with a work day, immaturity still remains. You can give some students every opportunity and they won’t act until their X-Box becomes endangered. So expect to hear what you want to hear but see no changes from the students who need it the most.

• Examples: Gratitude: Describe someone or something you are grateful for. Grade Check: My grade in English is a… I have ___ missing assignments. I need to… Monday Planning. How was your weekend? What do you want to accomplish this week?

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Intermission. Practice Writing and Peer Review

While students receive regular teacher feedback, this doesn’t exclude peer feedback. If some mistakes become common, then crowdsource. Trading and grading works wonders! Don’t overthink here: Simply trade journals and spend sixty seconds looking for mistakes. The more concrete the mistake, the better. (My rule: Can they point to the mistake?)

How else does this work? Pretend you’ve just learned about citations. As a ten minute activity, students read an article, create a citation, and list 2-3 bullet points with things they’ve learned. Afterwards they trade notebooks, correct mistakes (with an answer key on the board), and a whole class discussion seals the deal. As activities they’re low stakes, ungraded, and provide important learning feedback.

Remember: Notebooks provide both easy paper and easy locations. Skip the hassle of printing worksheets and fetching papers for the equivalent of slips. If you need to collect a paragraph’s worth of work, then start on paper and move to Google Forms. Spreadsheets effortlessly house the contents of hundreds of paper slips. Check out my posts on Google Forms for more!

Teaching Writing with Google Forms

• GF: How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (For Writing) (8/10/2025)

• GF: Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

• GF: How Google Forms Automate Grading (6/5/2025)

• GF: Google Forms for Teachers: A Primer (+ Templates) (5/29/2025)

• GF: Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (9/2024)

#7. Chunked Tasks

Students practice upcoming, larger tasks through smaller, spaced reflections.

Description: Chunked journals break future writing tasks into smaller questions. This not only addresses bigger questions part by part, but creates the space to think between questions. This works well with many tasks—essay tests, reflection letters, and so on. With reflection letters, this encourages students to muse about successes, failures, places to improve, and so on. And why not practice introductions and conclusions early?

Challenges: Despite practicing ideas days or weeks ahead, many fail to connect journals and tasks. Let’s be real: I don’t expect them to recall every journal. That’s reasonable. But when students write ahead, they write with amnesia. Getting them to make that simple connection—between what they wrote then and need now—takes effort.

• Examples: Describe this past nine weeks in one word. What went well this nine weeks? What could have gone better this nine weeks? What goals do you have for the next nine weeks?

#8. Creative Writing

Students engage with the imaginative, the silly, and the crazy.

Description: I hesitate to include this category, given the burden of defining the term. But this writing includes the imaginative, the silly, and the crazy. There’s nothing wrong with straying outside literature questions, but you don’t want to stray too far. For some, not being on topic means being a terrible teacher. And no, I don’t write the script there. Sometimes people without imaginations exert too much influence.

Challenges: Creative writing harbors a massive challenge: lack of imagination. Creative writing will not make students creative. To some extent, questions encourage thinking here. But after so many years teaching, I’m just not convinced everyone has that muscle.

• Examples: —

#9. Quick Outlines

Students create quick lists and practice organizing longer responses. These outlines are not formal or binding.

Description: While many favor formal outlines to forecast major essays, I’m becoming more and more convinced students need shorter, more frequent exposures. This means extending outlines as low stakes, informal lists. This also plays into retrieval practice through listing. In the grand scheme of the year, the occasional list as variety keeps things moving.

Challenges: Like anything else, absences, naps, and discipline play into not knowing content. As with literature, if, after a time they recall nothing, I bend and allow students to use their books.

• Examples: “What happened in [story]. List five main details”. To Kill a Mockingbird: List three points from Atticus’ defense of Tom Robinson. “Flowers for Algernon”: List three changes to Charlie after his intelligence surgery. “The Diary of Anne Frank”: List three rules Mr. Frank created for the Secret Annex.

#10. Formulating Questions

Students write questions as review or preview. This branches from the regular review and preview work.

Description: English thrives on comprehension questions. To some extent, without them we’d be at fault for negligence. But if you read my blog regularly, I tend to mention this strategy periodically. If you ask your students to ask questions, this will initially lead to confusion and anger. Over time, though, it becomes an invaluable strategy—especially for discussions!

Challenges: While students love to question teachers—“Why are we doing this? Why are we reading this?”—questioning texts takes practice. My favorite frameworks include Taffy Raphael’s QAR strategy, Marilyn Pryle’s 5 Questions (for media), and so on. As students write questions, I would highly highly suggest a Google Forms Discussion to crowdsource and compile them for later.

• Examples: List five questions about the conclusion of the novel. List five unanswered questions from the reading. List five things you’d like to know about [topic].

#11. Graphic Organizers

Students practice organization simply and visually.

Description: According to dual coding theory, we process information both visually and verbally. While processing verbal information takes time (think the time bar on a song), processing visual information works all at once (think looking at images). Since images relay relationships spatially, they help process better than words alone. Sometimes as writers, images help process words.

If you haven’t read Oliver Caviglioli, his books are worth their weight in gold. In Dual Coding with Teachers he highlights overlapping and redundant takes on text structure. (Unless you’ve spent hours pouring over literature in composition, most ignore this screaming problem.) As such, he focuses on four organizational patterns: chunking (topical), chronological, compare and contrast, and cause and effect. Paired with Joanna P. Williams Close Analysis of Texts with Structure (CATS) program, and organization becomes an indispensable tool for both composition and comprehension.

That said, sometimes careful graphic organizers help clear misconceptions when reading. Recently, one of my classes has been reading The Importance of Being Earnest. Since the play involves some playful deception, we drew a simple square to chart the relationships between the protagonists. Since students housed this chart in their journals, it became an invaluable tool for understanding the basic plot as each man tried to win affection by being… earnest.

Challenges: Let’s be honest: English isn’t Art. And if kids can’t follow the board correctly, your drawings will be... badly copied. And maybe useless. Also, with absences, move-ins, and sleepers, expect to re-teach and review graphic organizers as you teach them each time. That said, this shouldn’t prove too demanding. At least theoretically, right?

• Examples: “The Importance of Being Earnest”: Explain the relationships between Jack, Gwendolen, Algernon, and Cecily. “The Diary of Anne Frank”: Draw a basic family tree from those in the Secret Annex. “Flowers for Algernon”: What factors led Charlie to agree to the surgery? How does Charlie act before and after the surgery?

#12. Chapter Summaries

Student stop after each chapter and write a short paragraph to help process.

Description: This has been an experiment for the 2025-2026 school year. While journals had traditionally been a beginning of class activity, we’ve been ending classes with them as well. The premise is simple: Finish a chapter and reflect in 3-4 sentences. I’m still working through logistics here, but funneling reflections to a single page helps. While filling this page may take weeks, each journal as data point helps to construct the bigger picture of plot across a novel.

Example: This spring I’ve used end of chapter reflections for To Kill a Mockingbird. Clocking in at thirty-one chapters, students have reflected on a majority of them, slowly constructing an in media res summary. Have I graded these journals? To be honest, I should have. But I’m more curious whether they help upcoming writing tasks. (Students wrote a summary over the Trial; reflections provided a built-in word count.) So maybe this overlaps with chunking tasks?

At the very least, chapter reflections work both as reference and robust word counts for future tasks. I just don’t find this a waste of time.

Challenges: At the moment, this exploration has teacher-induced problems: Do these journals receive additional points? Does this double the journal point total? What if students do not include them on a separate page? What if they do not label their reflections? What if they are absent?

• Examples: “In chapter NUMBER...” “Today I read...”

💬 Conclusion

What questions do you have for journals? Do you need help attempting daily writing in your class next year? Let me know in the comments section below!

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Resources

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

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The Problem. Days into writing essays, despite time spent developing ideas, many students hit brick walls with underdeveloped ideas. Their essays are short and shallow. How can students explore ideas as deep as possible with as few words as possible?

Questions. What if students wrote dialogues exploring topics? Would this allow them to be more direct in analysis (with fewer words) by moving between questions and answers? Would replacing more traditional prewriting with dialogues improve responses?

Aside. I’ve long questioned traditional prewriting. The “BOWR” approach—or brainstorm, outline, write, revise—prevents exploring ideas while writing. It alienates writing within communities. And let’s face it, BOWR practically assumes the final product before writing. For several years I’ve been experimenting with moving away from this failed approach.

Background. We spend the first month of my class exploring writing across mediums—letters, essays, and dialogues. My favorite progression moves from transcribing move clips in play from to integrating quotations.

• As activities, James Moffett suggests transcribing speech and invented speech. He likewise suggests transforming ideas across mediums rather than traditional prewriting.

• Moving between mediums teachers through contrast. But only writing in one medium—the tested essay—obscures finer details in form and convention.

• Invented dialogue relies on question and answer. This connects to question writing (QAR). Students write twenty questions, narrow them down, then connect them to generate the conversation.

Speech Games. Teaching awareness of dialogue takes minutes. I love the following speech game: Students talk naturally in groups, but follow basic rules, each for a minute or two each. Once you progress through each rule, ask which works best.

• Rule 1. Speak in statements only.

• Rule 2. Speak in questions only.

• Rule 3. Speak in a statement followed by a question.

Teaching Dialogue. While teaching dialogue departs from the norm, we should always consider writing as an extension of speech. In the first weeks of school, I love having students transcribe speech. The activity is simple: We watch a movie clip, record what they say, and rewatch for accuracy.

From there, transcription becomes the first step in a progression. With the result in script form, we then practice converting speech into regular prose. This sets the stage for teaching speech-as-evidence, summaries, and analysis (This borrows the framework from They Say, I Say.)

Workflow. Writing dialogue has many correct entrance points. Regardless, I suggest moving from transcribed dialogue to invented dialogue. Observation should follow creation, here. So how do you start? I have several suggestions

• 1. Complete dialogue. Introduce an incomplete dialogue with only five or six lines of speech. As a class, practice adding to it. Discuss how questions direct conversations.

• 2. Read student dialogues. As a Year 2 activity, begin a topic with student examples. This not only adds authenticity, but saves time in explanation.

• 3. Start with questions. Begin with a list of twenty questions about a reading. Then select ten questions and order them as question and follow up question.

Regardless, I would suggest starting with templates galore, from paper templates (for drafting) to digital templates (for typing). This step drastically increases productivity when it comes to appearance and readability.

🆓 Scripting Templates

Common Issues. Where do students struggle? Beyond expected areas, such as length and conventions, you might expect the following:

• 1. Writing statements. Some students ignore purpose entirely and write statements only. There’s nothing wrong with constantly adding ideas, but it misses the point.

• 2. Uniform question types. While I forbid yes/no questions from my 20 Questions assignments, I allow them here. However, watch for all yes/no conversations.

• 3. General Flow. Some students sequence questions awkwardly, resulting in disjointed conversations.

Yes, but. “Why waste your time writing scripts when The Test demands an essay? Isn’t that a waste of time? Scripts aren’t standards.”

• Beware the writing mono-diet. When students write only one way, they think only one way. And tested writing isn’t real writing.

• When all writing means five-paragraph essay, everything has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion, which isn’t entirely true.

• Moving between mediums teaches through contrast. Transforming conventions helps cement them better than covering one medium alone.

Instead. Essays present barriers for many: in form, style, tone, and so on. Dialogues remove these barriers, opting for natural conversation over formal convention. If I wanted the best analysis with the fewest words possible, scripting conversations helped.

• Essay responses improved after trading more traditional prewriting for transforming scripts. They both stand on their own and hold the potential for more.

• Recent reflection letters indicated students preferred scripts to essays. This calls for pause and introspection. I’m not anti-essay, but rather pro-widening the available writing.

When moving from scripts to essays, text structure serves as the on-ramp. As defined in Dual Coding for Teachers, the following questions stand out.

• Description (Analysis): How would you describe [topic]? List five things about [topic]?

• Compare and Contrast: How are these things similar? How are these things different? Which option is better and why?

• Chronological: How did this happen? What events led to this?

• Cause and Effect: Why did this happen? What factors led to this? Predict what will happen if [event]? What will happen if [event]?

Other Uses. As I’ve experimented with scripting, it’s felt freeing thinking beyond the confines of essay-centered writing. Where else should students script? Five areas stand out:

• 1. As review. What if students reflected on recent skills by narrating the steps? What if this included questions about where processes fail? Imagine scripting a how to essay.

• 2. As summaries. What if students broke up regular summarizing by chronicling main events with questions thrown in? In academic writing, summarizing serves as evidence.

• 3. As analysis. What if students analyzed ideas and literature beyond traditional essay form? What if conversation weaved through basic explanations?

• 4. As prewriting. What if students abandoned traditional prewriting by scripting a conversation first? What if students transformed the ideas into other mediums (essays)?

• 5. As literature. What if students struggled with dialogue in narratives because they don’t write it? What if they started stories as dialogue first?

Student Feedback. Recently [Spring 2025], students had to summarize chapter 18 of Mockingjay. When given the choice, many chose to write a dialogue instead. But why? Here’s what students said in an informal survey:

• “I chose to write your summary as a dialogue rather than paragraph form because it is easier and is more fun to do.”

• “I can explain more with questions to keep me on pace”

• “I choose dialogue because it is faster.”

• “Explaining the events to someone like I am in a conversation feels like I recall and explain better.”

• “Because I thought it would be easier to do, and I like doing those better because you can get your point across and it is like you are just talking to someone in person.”

• “I chose to write my summary as a dialogue rather than a paragraph because the formatting made it easy to explain my ideas and I wanted a sort of challenge. Summaries can be boring to write.”

Conclusion. So why not add more variety to your writing diet? Why not explore other means of prewriting? This one might just surprise you!

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Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• My ICTE Talk 2026 (3/28/2026)

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• My Teach Indy Talk 2026 (3/7/2026)

• HST: Student Optimistic Five-Point Quiz Will Boost Grade (3/4/2026)

• HST: Local Student Claims She Will Do Work “At Home” (2/28/2026)

• 10 Fantastic Books for Teaching Writing (2/14/2026)

• How to Write Useful Sub Notes (2/1/2026)

• Teaching Writing through Transformation (James Moffett on Invention) (1/17/2026)

• Why Traditional Prewriting Fails (1/11/2026)

• English Has No Super-Structure (James Moffett on English Curriculum) (12/31/2025)

• Where AI Fails Analogy Questions (12/28/2025)

• Getting Difficult Students to Write (and Other Topics) (12/13/2025)

• Where Traditional Writing Instruction Fails (11/28/2025)

• My AMLE25 Talk (“Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!”) (11/15/2025)

• How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0) (11/3/2025)

• 10 Myths about Teaching Writing (10/19/2025)

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

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• Teach Computer Literacy Before AI (9/13/2025)

• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

• Templates for Teaching Quotations (8/30/2025)

• The Joy of Teaching Siblings (8/24/2025)

• How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (8/10/2025)

• Back to School Night (8/3/2025)

• 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year (7/23/2025)

• Teach Computers Before AI: A Sketch (7/21/2025)

• Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist (7/17/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

• Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

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I. Celebrating Small Successes

In the weeks before Spring Break, I try never taking myself or my frustrations too seriously. And that’s easier said than done. Christmas Break to Spring Break marks the longest unbroken stretch of school. As the seasons change, winter fades, and the grass greens, emotions hit fever pitches. Most people would rather do anything than stay indoors.

Recently, one of my groups was working through an essay test over the Greek tragedy, Antigone. As usual, I gave feedback during work time. This particular class started the year rough, rowdy, and rude, but has grown academically into one of my favorite classes.

When I met with one student, my jaw dropped: He wrote five coherent paragraphs over five coherent ideas, nearly hitting the quota. I was ecstatic!

“Woah!” I began. “This essay is way better than anything you’ve typed this year! What changed this time around?”

He paused and thought, mulling responses. “Well, Mr. C., I realized writing isn’t so bad.”

“Can you tell me more?”

“I realized I had to do the work and the work wasn’t so bad.”

“Does writing feel easier?” I asked.

“It does,” he nodded. “It does.”

For context, this particular student resisted daily writing in August. Oh, he was never once malicious or disrespectful: Just a squirrel. Writing requires focus and focus requires sitting still. Your ability to just sit down, undistracted, and write requires a cosmic leap for many. And if’n you’re not used to focusing, then it’s just plain hard.

Aside: Discipline matters when teaching writing. Timers and clear expectations work wonders. For individuals, this means cultivating the self-control and the self-awareness to turn inwards and think. For groups, this means mitigating constant sparks which threaten to set the classroom ablaze with needless chatter. But for the iPad kids (who crave distraction), this becomes a challenge.

(You know, now that I think about it, I might have stumbled onto another post entirely…)

Despite blogging and speaking about writing, I never take student success for granted. Ideals prove easy to write, but experience means testing your convictions against reality day to day, class to class, bell to bell. If this student had a breakthrough, count me ecstatic!

Whenever this happens, though, I pause and listen. What helped?

In short, his mindset shifted. Attitudes become actions, but actions likewise shape attitudes. And what actions help? It’s no secret: Writing every day. Daily writing makes the formal familiar. When students begin capturing and redirecting inner dialogue to paper, growth becomes more likely.

II. Textbook Rants

Teaching writing requires meaning before mechanics, the why before the how. Psychology matters. Comma advice only goes so far when students fear picking up the pen in the first place. For many, the mind, the mouth, and the pen may as well be separated by light years! Many can think and write, but separately. Blending the two requires coaching, not worksheets.

What clicked with this student? I know but I don’t. Classes are never classes, but collections of individuals. I desperately want to write a book about the conditions for building student writers, so until I can manage blogging, speaking, and juggling two babies, I’ll say this: If someone preaches method above mindset with absolute confidence, they don’t understand writing whatsoever.

There’s nothing complex about my classroom. Growth requires several things. One, growth means battling implicit myths created from well-meaning but poor teaching. Actions change before attitudes, and all soft skills become hard data. Two, growth requires work. Laziness, nihilism, and on-demand entertainment becomes impenetrable walls. As the negatives grow these days, the battle becomes fostering any action at all, whatsoever.

Aside: This is why I love teaching middle school far more than high school. In middle school, mindsets act like wet concrete. But by high school, mindsets further harden and resist change. If you empower early, then important battles become more manageable.

At teaching conferences, I sometimes wander by product booths and listen to former teachers sell programs they never used. And nearly every time, I want to flip the tables. Taken at face value, teaching writing is too complex for you. (But not corporations!) Taken at face value, writing programs differ more in looks than substance. Taken at face value, it’s easier to license expensive software, remain ignorant, and defer the liability of knowing anything.

Some writing programs inevitably work because you move from nothing to something. Some movement beats being sedentary. Just consider chair exercises for the morbidly obese: Accessibility works relative to general fitness. But this isn’t necessarily good: Any coach can make their athletes run until puking, but not all effort means improvement. For writing, moving from a kind to a wicked environment means certain failure outside of five-paragraph thinking.

So where do writing programs fail? Five quick reasons come to mind:

• they lack daily writing components

• they force form over fluency

• they never connect writing to reading

• they limit writing to tested essays (rather than other mediums)

• they place rigid steps over discovery

And the list goes on. Did I mention utter lack of imagination? If the written word exists for the standardized testing only, then maybe the kids are right: School is pointless.

Our students need principles, not programs. And therein lies the problem: first principles are free.

You can do more with a timer, a notebook, and a good question than a complicated curriculum. You can do more by writing in community than licensing AI. You can improve essays—ironically enough—by writing more than essays, since conventions are best learned through contrast.

I’ll be candid: Entire multi-billion dollar textbook companies exist through illusions. Easy things must not only seem difficult, but require subscriptions that cost more than entire teaching positions. Teacher knowledge and expertise exist as liabilities because it would undermine textbook addition. Anyone who questions books might question power structures. We want pedagogues, not teachers. History proves we’d rather force our master teachers to drink hemlock than actually learn from them. And so it goes.

For more, read my essay “Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist.”

III. If’n You Can’t Say Something Nice

Last summer I was presenting at a conference which featured a ready room for presenters. (Amazing!) So I followed the signs down a winding hallway and eventually arrived at a beige classroom with a sink, a coffee pot, and a snack table. As I sat down my bag, retrieved my speaking notes, and filled a white Styrofoam cup with black coffee, I overheard two textbook saleswomen talking about Math curriculum.

“Did you hear about such-and-such school?” the first began. “They won’t use our Math program.”

“They won’t?” the second asked in disbelief.

“No. They think they can create their own stuff,” she scoffed.

As I sat down to review my talk they looked over, realized I was there (and not wearing any textbook gear), and abruptly stopped their conversation. Behind closed doors, do more sales folks have nothing but contempt for teachers?

Later that day I wandered along a crowded hallway with textbook booths.

“What writing program does your school use?” one asked.

“We don’t use a writing curriculum,” I said.

“You don’t? You know, we have AI elements that grade responses. That gives you more time with your students.”

I didn’t hold back. “Look, our corporation just eliminated like twenty positions. We can’t afford last year’s staffing or full versions of programs as is. Besides, if you went to one of my talks, I explain why teachers don’t need programs like yours.”

Talk about a conversation stopper!

Growing up I’d inevitably complain about random things at the dinner table. My parents response? One, if don’t like something, then roll up your sleeves and do something. Two, if you’re going to criticize, then offer something productive. So I guess I took up blogging and speaking, right? At least the two allow ideas to be tested.

My talk “Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!” (published as 10 Myths about Teaching Writing) reveals audiences hungry for first steps and next steps. Given the interest afterwards, this talk could serve as a Chapter One in a slim 30,000 word volume—easy enough for a weekend read. But I’m not quite in book writing mode. At least not yet.

But I have made notes on what topics work well both online and in person.

Last November I published “How to Teach Writing without Curriculum (1.0).” In it, I offer five first principles for teaching writing followed by a commentary. I’ve had Part Two outlined since October and I’ve even published sections (see here and here), but haven’t been satisfied with the core message. At least not yet.

And that’s where things stand. I’m not complaining though.

I tell my students that becoming a parent all but means re-learning how to breathe. In early 2024 my son was born and I had to build new writing habits. In late 2025 my daughter was born and I’ve spent this semester building even newer writing habits. Truth be told, I’ve been so sleep deprived that my writing has slowed to a drip. That and for every post I publish, I’ve got at least three or four 70-90% complete. It drives me crazy, but I’d rather be present as a parent than publishing tired slop.

Since I’m rambling, I may as well bring things full circle: One, I celebrate little victories with my student writing. Two, I believe teaching writing is easier and cheaper than folks think. Three, in my sleep deprived but happy state, publishing anything these days feels like a victory. And Four, I’ve got book ideas in mind, but would anyone read it?

Post Script

What would a hypothetical book look like? I studied Plato before Piaget and would love to write in Socratic form.

Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

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• How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0) (11/3/2025)

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When I sat down to write this post, I glanced at my teaching bookshelves and asked which books proved the most influential and inspirational. As such, beyond the first title, this list isn’t ordered but every title matters.

The List

⭐️ 1. Teaching the Universe of Discourse (James Moffett)

What is English? Where should you begin teaching it? How does abstraction apply to writing and thinking? What elements connect writing across mediums? Why should you abandon textbooks and teach with student writing itself?

This will be the most important book you ever read about teaching English. The end. Full stop. Through a series of essays, Moffett codifies his theoretical views towards teaching English. His Discourse was published alongside his hands-on volume, A Student-Centered Language Arts. Whoever I read a book about English, I always check the bibliography first for this title.

But caution! You might spend the entire rest of your career swimming through this classic. Despite being published in 1968, Moffett is still decades ahead of the career.

And if you haven’t read my blog before, I love writing about James Moffett:

• TWT: Let Speaking Teach Writing (James Moffett on Discourse) (2/2025)

• TWT: Five Ways to Let Speaking Teach Writing (3/2025)

• TWT: Teach Writing Reactively (James Moffett’s Action Response Model) (5/25/2025)

• TWT: How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

Note: To my knowledge, James Moffett has been out of print for decades. Thanks to recent efforts by Jonathan M. Marine and Paul Rogers, many of Moffett’s works have generously been made available online through the WAC Clearinghouse.

📚 2. The Writer’s Practice (John Warner)

If John Warner doesn’t sit on your bookshelf, then your bookshelf might be empty. His book Why They Can’t Write rocked my world early in teaching. But why this title? As I narrowed my list, I realized a theme: While some books like Moffett’s Discourse shaped my teaching worldview, many others offered practical suggestions and inspiration. And practical is good.

Truth be told, I can’t spend more than five minutes in this volume without paper nearby. The ideas practically spill off the page! Warner offers a playful and refreshing take on writing I’ve never encountered elsewhere. You can’t help but read and be inspired. The most frustrating part might be realizing you’ll need a few years to really attempt the ideas in his book. (Then again, that’s a good problem.)

I always find myself returning to one chapter for inspiration. In “Hey, Whaddya Know?” (146-151), he suggests annotated bibliographies as trivia. This playful suggestion teaches a deep lesson: Citations should be followed. Without application, research itself remains locked in definition, forever inaccessible for our students.

Truth be told, as I write, I’m likely overdue to revisit this book for ideas.

📚 3. Leveled Text-Dependent Question Stems (Debra J. Housel)

All writing reduces to dialogue, and all dialogue reduces to questioning. When planning to teach novels, I start by researching overarching essay questions. When planning everyday logistics, I write introductory questions for journals and discussion questions for reading guides. Basically, questions are to English what problems are to Math.

Within my first five years, this book modeled question asking for setting, character, theme, and more. When I wanted to analyze something, I’d reference this book to see how questions could be asked. And I’d add extra emphasis to the “could be” part. Once you understand question types and difficulties, any text becomes teach-able.

There’s no vice to writing your own questions. Each text has non-negotiable, obvious questions. If you don’t ask them, you’re negligent. If you read “Flowers for Algernon” you should expect to ask certain things: What was Charlie’s IQ before the surgery? Why did Charlie want the surgery? Who are Charlie’s friends? What does it mean to pull a Charlie Gordon?

But other questions aren’t so straightforward. Just understanding possible interpretations becomes half the battle. Was Charlie a lab rat? Could he truly consent to the surgery? Did the doctors take advantage of him? You decide. Both sides depend on non-negotiable facts to make decisions. Small questions become larger questions.

Just remember the writing your own questions keeps you fresh mentally and wards off apathy. Two teachers approach the same text two different ways and that’s perfectly okay.

If I ever taught an English methods course, I’d use this book to model question writing. Future English teachers would read a text and then draft 30-50 questions on the spot. They might then narrow the obvious questions down to the most essential, mimicking the creation of most English materials. But I’ll get off my soapbox.

📚 4. Writing Workshop in Middle School: What You Need to Really Make It Work in the Time You’ve Got (Marilyn Pryle)

I owe a lot to this book. A lot! As I thumbed through the pages for this post, I see sticky note after sticky note. Most pages show annotation. The scope of this simple book is breathtaking. Truly, it’s your all-in-one guide to building a writing classroom. And don’t let the “middle school” part fool you: This applies to high school as well. Pryle’s book moves through mini-lessons, multiple mediums, and task progressions to build a course. That last part deserves a special mention.

Many teaching books offer tomorrow-ready activities. Which is fine. But content without context proves useless. How do some activities connect to others? Pryle’s book answers many questions before you can ask. How do you program writing activities across the year? What are different configurations? Pryle not only gives the what (activities) but the how (logistics) and when (calendars). I’m positive that despite curriculum mapping, many teachers float through their careers without ever seeing the big picture.

Regarding variety, I started my teaching career thinking you should teach essays only. But her hands-on suggestions coaxed me to expand outwards. These days I preach that if you want to improve essays, you need to write more than essays. Variety helps teach conventions better than the mono-medium approach. I’m not a gambling man, but I’d wager most classrooms write for standardized tests only.

Fun Fact: Early on I drew inspiration for formatting writing assignments from this book!

📚 5. Purposeful Conferences--Powerful Writing!: Strategies, Tips, And Teacher-Student Dialogues That Really Help Kids Improve Their Writing (Marilyn Pryle)

If her Writing Workshop provides the focused, bigger picture, then Purposeful Conferences fills the gaps. These chapters introduce writing conferences themselves and then blaze through relevant topics: generating topics, details, organization, theme, introductions, and so on. This title shines through her extensive dialogue, modeling her strategies in action. As a companion to Writing Workshop, just buy this book. If you don’t, you may as well reject decades of useful advice.

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📚 6. They Say, I Say (Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst)

They Say, I Say provides an incredibly simple model for academic writing. Published years before The Writing Revolution, Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst begin with a simple framework: move from quotations to summaries to analyses using sentence stems. Sentence stems not only provide starting points, but the words themselves to give ideas structure.

And let me tell you, they provide an entire appendix with sentence stems as specific writing strategies. This makes because, but, so look… terrible.

Applied elsewhere, this logic transforms any question or inquiry into hands-on, digestible steps that scale across topics, grades, and difficulty levels. For nearly ten years I’ve mixed sentence stems with blank lines as a universal support. While my students read sample essays and annotate questions, I still provide sentence stems to help them quickly try out ideas. This not only bridges the brain to the pen, but helps increase fluency in general.

Disclosure: I haven’t read any edition newer than the 2013-2014 school year, so I’m hoping subsequent revisions did not kill the main ideas.

📚 7. The Writing Template Book (Kevin B. King and Ann Johns)

This slim book provides the right thinking for the wrong reasons. While I despise any standardized testing, it’s stated purpose, The Writing Template Book nonetheless provides an entire book of sentence stems. Truth be told, I’m not sure if I’ve ever used any suggestions directly. This book takes the informal and self-reflective to absurd degrees. (”In this paper I’m going to...”) That said, simply showing where sentence stems can go proved inspiration enough early in teaching.

📚 8. Advanced Academic Writing (Michael Clay Thompson)

Michael Clay Thompson might be the most brilliant English teacher you’ve never heard of. Early on, Advanced Academic Writing offered some invaluable insights into teaching writing. I’ll rattle off a short list:

• Academic writing is serious, but doable. Some things like formatting are non-negotiable.

• Frequency matters. Students should write more than one big essay per year.

• Grading should be clear, not opaque. Train students on your rubrics.

• Writing mistakes are predictable if you pay attention.

Thanks to Thompson, my students write frequent, bigger tasks across the year. As per his grading, I will not accept essays that are not MLA formatted. And thanks to rubrics and student writing samples, I train my students in detecting bad writing as much as writing well.

By the way, Thompson boasts the simplest method of grading I’ve ever experienced. Check out an explanation in a prior post:

📚 9. Opus 40 (Michael Clay Thompson)

When speaking about teaching writing, I have a go-to anecdote: My second year of teaching, I stayed after school one afternoon and wrote comments on student essays. Now, these were one pagers, but with 100+ students it took hours. I tried being as thoughtful as possible, hoping it would help my students. Were they grateful that next day? Nahhhhh. One student glanced at his paper, shrugged his shoulders, balled it up and then tossed it.

For most teachers, that moment would break them. Why would you ever give feedback again? Instead, I looked for a better route and found Thompson.

Thompson took a different approach in the 1980’s: He bought a Mac and began archiving his comments. The result? He never had to rewrite the same comment by hand ever ever ever again. (Can I repeat “ever” at least fifty times?) Thompson will read an essay and custom print comments that match.

As I’ve applied his method, I will approach new tasks with a blank page and simply draft comments. Then, once I’ve typed them, I’ve been known to embed feedback into assignment sheets the next time around. Thus, when students ask for help, I’ll just point to their sheet, circle a comment, and move on. Why this method isn’t shouted from the rooftops, I’m not sure.

📚 10. Using Benchmark Papers to Teach Writing with the Traits, Grades 6 to 8 (Ruth Culham)

Until I learned how to collect, compile, and curate student writing, this book served as inspiration. Culham’s slim volume showcases student writing across topics and skill levels. This sounds unremarkable, but until you’re grounded in student writing, everything remains theoretical. Simply studying these samples provides a window into where teaching could go.

Aside: Future teachers must be grounded in student work. Without it, you succumb to the overly idealistic, utterly impractical, “When I have my own classroom” rants. (Umm, no, kid, you teach actual people.) The classroom, like a river, is a highly dynamic system. You won’t know what your students need until you meet them. Real people bust perfect plans. If more college students encountered more realistic writing, even if fictional, that would at give more realistic expectations.

That said, this book fails for one glaring reason: These writing samples aren’t from your classroom. As James Moffett observed, the most relevant writing instruction addresses your students right now. Teaching in response to actual issues proves far more relevant than teaching to theoretical issues from state standards.

This book became my catalyst to teaching from student writing. For more, check out relevant posts:

Post Script

Let me know if you have any questions about these titles. I’d love to explore my bookshelf and provide more suggestions, but some focused questions might help. (”How do you teach such and such?”) Until then, as I continue struggling through other posts, I might continue addressing some easier topics.

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Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• How to Write Useful Sub Notes (2/1/2026)

• Teaching Writing through Transformation (James Moffett on Invention) (1/17/2026)

• Why Traditional Prewriting Fails (1/11/2026)

• English Has No Super-Structure (James Moffett on English Curriculum) (12/31/2025)

• Where AI Fails Analogy Questions (12/28/2025)

• Getting Difficult Students to Write (and Other Topics) (12/13/2025)

• Where Traditional Writing Instruction Fails (11/28/2025)

• My AMLE25 Talk (“Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!”) (11/15/2025)

• How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0) (11/3/2025)

• 10 Myths about Teaching Writing (10/19/2025)

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

• The Art of the Reading Guide (9/27/2025)

• Teach Computer Literacy Before AI (9/13/2025)

• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

• Templates for Teaching Quotations (8/30/2025)

• The Joy of Teaching Siblings (8/24/2025)

• How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (8/10/2025)

• Back to School Night (8/3/2025)

• 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year (7/23/2025)

• Teach Computers Before AI: A Sketch (7/21/2025)

• Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist (7/17/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

• Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

As I start my third calendar year blogging, January always seems like a slow month. Earlier this week I posted a Note about “ideas marinating in happy things”:

As for my classes, I’ve been moving slowly this balmy January. Before Christmas Break, many students indicated they struggle with vocabulary quizzes because they don’t know how to study. I mean, schools have been force-fed SEL, so go figure, right? So we’ve been learning about study skills and study strategies. (They’ve been rather shocked to learn that multi-tasking doesn’t exist and not all music helps studying!)

We’ve also talked some fundamentals of research. Check out my Note below regarding teaching citations:

So this week I’m serializing another section of “How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum, Part 2.” This week dives into James Moffett and explores his perspective on invention. Eventually I’ll publish the final product, but until then, I wanted to post something.

If you missed last week’s post, here it is:

Teaching Writing through Transformation (James Moffett and Invention)

A composing task that may seem less demanding to an inexperienced writer... is to change a text from one mode of communication or type of discourse to another... (190)

To transform a text is to take the essence of what it expresses and transfer it to another form of writing or to another medium altogether. Dramatizing and performing are transformations of text, discussed in their respective chapters... (165-166)

For students who find so-called creative writing a difficult process, who assert they “have no ideas” or “can’t write,” one process that seems simple enough is to transpose mode, to rewrite into another genre something they have read and liked. For example, a prose fable can be rewritten as a poem, an anecdote as a script, a story as a series of letters, a biography as an autobiography, a diary as a memoir, or a mystery story as a film script. This is a more challenging writing activity than it might first appear. For in changing a selection to another genre you are confronted with the limitations and possibilities of a different point of view, an altered scope, and a new ratio of scene to summary. The students who transpose mode in this way need not be told this; they will discover it as they work. What they learn in changing genre can be transferred to other writing tasks in which they face such decisions as point of view, scope, and the relation of scene to summary... (166)

Of course, rewriting prose or poetry as a script automatically shifts the medium from book to stage, radio, film, or television... (166)

Disclaimer: To my knowledge, James Moffett has been out of print for decades. Thanks to recent efforts by Jonathan M. Marine and Paul Rogers, many of Moffett’s works have generously been made available online through the WAC Clearinghouse. That said, since his physical works are collectors items, I will quote extensively, liberally, and with disregard to scholarly conventions. (This week’s passages remain unavailable without extensive quotations.)

How do you help students who can’t start their writing? What if the best prewriting were actual writing? And what if you improved one medium by practicing another?

In his book Student-Centered Language Arts and Reading, K-13, third edition, James Moffett presents a fundamentally different approach to invention. Moffett doesn’t just anticipate student difficulties, but he plans for them. His approach offers a subtle yet cosmic difference: moving and transforming one medium to many. In short, he moves from a mono-media approach to a multi-media approach.

Note: For mono-media, I’m operating under the assumption of an essay-only bias. Whether this exists for testing or the guise of academic writing as the only serious writing, the results act the same: A narrow view of the written word.

By moving from one medium to many, Moffett alters both the departure and destination of writing.

Regarding departure, Moffett suggests writing early and starting with familiar mediums. Rather than outline and write about writing (the future tense) Moffett begins with writing (the present tense). Starting with familiar mediums has many implications: One, students write across a variety of mediums. Two, students practice this variety such that they form preferences. Three, students are given choice—at least initially.

Where should students begin? If the destination proves troublesome, then start elsewhere. His suggestions include fables, poems, scripts, stories, letters, biographies, autographies, diaries, memoirs, mysteries, film scripts, and so on. Dramatization adds an additional layer as students embody texts. (This means comprehension through movement.)

Regarding destination, Moffett’s writings provide suggestions for improving essays, but never limit writing to essays only. His initial transformations emphasize differences, not fixed paths. While some mediums flow naturally (diary to memoir), others have starker differences (prose fable to poem). Regardless, nothing prevents writing into essay form.

Transformation drives the process. Shifting mediums isn’t trivial. Every medium has limitations, and shifting across mediums highlights the limitations of both. (How do informal letters differ from formal essays?) Moffett explains how students “need not be told this” (166). While he suggests learning through discovery, I’d caution for discussion instead: My richest classroom conversations have centered around how letters differ from essays.

As he writes, he prefers the verbiage transformation, transposition, and rewriting. Noticeably absent, at least here, includes the word “revision.” Is Moffett against revision? Not at all. He never hesitates to say it elsewhere, but he says it with a key difference: Revision always flows outwards from discussion. Writing isn’t a solitary act. What you change flows from what you discussion. Thus, revision becomes inseparable from community.

Previous Posts about James Moffett

• TWT: Let Speaking Teach Writing (James Moffett on Discourse) (2/2025)

• TWT: Five Ways to Let Speaking Teach Writing (3/2025)

• TWT: Teach Writing Reactively (James Moffett’s Action Response Model) (5/25/2025)

• TWT: How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

Transformation always implies transfer. Contrast deepens distinctions. Shifting rule sets requires decisions unseen by the mono-media approach. And unseen does not mean unimportant. These decisions operate above media itself, creating a decision-making meta-layer. (Good luck finding that in state standards!) Whereas mono-media approaches address how and what only, multi-media approaches address why and who.

In practice, asking what an essay is does not answer why you’d write it. Let alone who it’s for. These distinctions matter. Without choice, Moffett might argue, writing reduces to direction following. (By any measure, his “student-centered” classroom borders on anarchy, but I’ll sidestep the issue.) These meta decisions on medium frame conventions themselves. Just reverse the polarity between what and why.

Mediums act like tools, and we should beware Maslow’s Hammers. As writers, we welcome self-imposed limitations as creative freedoms. Self-selection allows you to say, I’m writing this-instead-of-that because. The “because” is crucial. Without building this decision-making meta layer, everything collapses to mono-media. (Or fragmented knowledge at best.) Why write in this media? My teacher told me to, I guess. Why write in that media? Because it fits the situation.

Caution: Be careful with audience, here. Current-Traditional Rhetoric hinges on rhetorical mode. (In The Methodical Memory, Sharon Crowley calls it “EDNA”: exposition, description, narration, and argument.) You can’t directly measure, let alone understand, impact without interviews. Your average standardized test may ask whether an author achieves their purpose, but unless you’re a psychic or fantasy writer, the answer remains unknowable.

What does this look like in action? Don’t let Moffett’s sheer range mystify you. If he started with sixty-four crayons, let’s start with eight, so to speak. Simplify the categories. Picture an everyday problem: How do students write claims with counterclaims? Now picture two unrelated mediums for transformation: from plays to essays. How can drama help essays? Consider how the conventions impact the content.

Writing essays demands fully-formed, interlocking paragraphs. Presenting any view means presenting a claim. This seems not just unconscious, but unidirectional. Students love airing their own opinions. But other views? Counterclaims and rebuttals need conscious effort to move against the current. To mix metaphors, adding other opinions may as well be adding another wing to a house!

Writing scripts demands conversational coherence. While characters literally embody views, talking ebbs and flows through questions and answer. If statements assert, then questions challenge. Without questions, conversations dry up. In everyday speech, focus rarely exists. We clarify points, add evidence retroactively, and venture into tangents. Since people embody views, counterclaims mean good questions.

Drama embodies viewpoints. You either read ‘em like Plato or watch ‘em like Sophocles. Either way, as people act viewpoints, well-placed questions reduce one-sided exposition to leaner exchanges. You say more with less because questions integrate critics. Asking why forces brevity. Besides: Imagining conversations proves less abstract that imagining essays. So start with dramas, explain simply, then upscale to essays.

Mono-media approaches induce blindness and terrible metonymy. Without other mediums, essays lack both the context and contrast to interpret themselves. You can’t understand one medium until you transform it into another. If we write for essays only, essays become the written word. And once you hate essays, you hate writing itself. Sadly, for many students that’s the ever-present reality. The short-term tests matter more than life-long literacy. So pedagogy ages like spoiled milk.

Ultimately, Moffett’s multi-media writing goes far beyond writers block and invention. By operating above medium itself, by moving through transformation, he overcomes the problems of traditional prewriting. In application, the limits exist only with your creativity. Moving from familiar medium to unfamiliar medium and scaling ideas across conventions achieves more than brainstorm, outline, write, revise.

But this almost begs a question: How do we apply this systematically?

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Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• Why Traditional Prewriting Fails (1/11/2026)

• English Has No Super-Structure (James Moffett on English Curriculum) (12/31/2025)

• Where AI Fails Analogy Questions (12/28/2025)

• Getting Difficult Students to Write (and Other Topics) (12/13/2025)

• Where Traditional Writing Instruction Fails (11/28/2025)

• My AMLE25 Talk (“Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!”) (11/15/2025)

• How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0) (11/3/2025)

• 10 Myths about Teaching Writing (10/19/2025)

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

• The Art of the Reading Guide (9/27/2025)

• Teach Computer Literacy Before AI (9/13/2025)

• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

• Templates for Teaching Quotations (8/30/2025)

• The Joy of Teaching Siblings (8/24/2025)

• How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (8/10/2025)

• Back to School Night (8/3/2025)

• 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year (7/23/2025)

• Teach Computers Before AI: A Sketch (7/21/2025)

• Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist (7/17/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

• Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

Blogging has been interesting lately. Outside the page, I’ve been adjusting to life with two under two. My son turns two in a few weeks and recently said his first sentence. My daughter has started cooing and loves to watch her older brother make messes around the house.

As always, I have scores of posts started, nearly completed, and finished but aging. At the moment, three posts sit nearly finished: two James Moffett commentaries and the continuation for “How to Teach Writing without Curriculum (1.0).”

Also, it’s teaching conference proposal season, so I’m debating whether to draft new teaching workshops or re-frame others for conference themes. I’ve been sitting on an unpublished post about writing dialogues rather than essays, and that might make a good writing workshop.

That said, I wanted to publish something this week, so I decided to publish this working introduction to my continuation of “How to Teach Writing without Curriculum (1.0).” I’ve been working on this general theme since the fall, and I’d eventually like to expand it to a long-form post. The message?

If The Purpose of a System is What It Does, then prewriting works to prevent writing.

Until I manage to finish these upcoming, longer posts, check out some others:

Why Traditional Prewriting Fails

In “Where Traditional Writing Instruction Fails,” I explore the limitations of traditional prewriting. Traditional prewriting includes a fixed, four-step process: brainstorm, outline, write, and revise (“BOWR”). BOWR fails for many reasons: merging exploration and explanation, delaying writing until last, forcing detailed outlines before discovery, writing in convention heavy mediums only (essays only), and so on.

Consider BOWR in action: How many student spend days writing, only to discover their topic is bad? (“Sorry, you’re too late to change!”) How many students spin their wheels with outlines and move even slower with their essay? How many students can recite their ideas but write or express them poorly? What if the problem isn’t the student, but the process?

Even in practice BOWR proves counterproductive. By forcing detail outlines before discovery, we slow the process. By forcing the final product first, we merge explanation and exploration. By writing without community—writing once and for the teacher only—we create a disposable view of writing. And let’s not forget writing in essays only.

Compare learning to write like learning to dance. Some dances prove harder than others. This includes the moves themselves, the sequence, and the duration. The Carlton is not the Charleston, and neither are the Thriller. Unless and until moves become automatic, performance requires far more working memory. The same works for writing.

Every medium has conventions (rules) and some mediums have more than others. This isn’t inherently bad. In poetry, sonnets are not evil for demanding more than haikus. But until rules become internalized, rule-heavy mediums offer slow process. Conventions always precede content.

Compare the informal letter and formal essay. Beyond the body, letters have one-line conventions: the date, the greeting, the closing, and the signature. Writing “Dear” or the date requires little thought. With this short learning curve, attention shifts to the body. But formal essays have many moving parts: the formatting, the header, the basic essay structure, thesis statements, in-text citations, works cited pages, and so on. For inexperienced writers, the conventions require as much thought as the content.

Conventions therefore precede content.

Aside: Take outlines. For many classrooms, they work as crystal balls rather than mirrors. Rather than write and reflect, discover then add details, we expect them to predict their essay in stunning clarity. Formal outlines themselves look neat, but the form betrays what we’re actually asking them to do. For most, demanding formal outlines early forces students to start with finished products. That’s simply unreasonable!

The irony lies in the essay-only approach: When students only write essays, they struggle to master the form. When students only write essays, negative associations towards essays mean similar associations with the written word itself! As for the teachers, you write essays-only just because. Oh, and the test demands it.

Ultimately, if the purpose of a system is what it does, then BOWR works to prevent writing (rather than pre-writing). These fixed, inflexible steps demand product with poor process. They offer poor opportunities for discovery and bog down novice writers with rule-heavy writing. As a teacher, I’ve long given up on BOWR.

So what should teachers and students try instead? Here’s a crazy idea: What if students began with actual writing?

Share

Subscribe now

Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• English Has No Super-Structure (James Moffett on English Curriculum) (12/31/2025)

• Where AI Fails Analogy Questions (12/28/2025)

• Getting Difficult Students to Write (and Other Topics) (12/13/2025)

• Where Traditional Writing Instruction Fails (11/28/2025)

• My AMLE25 Talk (“Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!”) (11/15/2025)

• How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0) (11/3/2025)

• 10 Myths about Teaching Writing (10/19/2025)

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

• The Art of the Reading Guide (9/27/2025)

• Teach Computer Literacy Before AI (9/13/2025)

• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

• Templates for Teaching Quotations (8/30/2025)

• The Joy of Teaching Siblings (8/24/2025)

• How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (8/10/2025)

• Back to School Night (8/3/2025)

• 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year (7/23/2025)

• Teach Computers Before AI: A Sketch (7/21/2025)

• Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist (7/17/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

• Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

The form of one man’s short story is the content of another man’s critical essay. (2)

Once we acknowledge that “English” is not properly about itself, then a lot of phoney assignments and much of the teacher’s confusion can go out the window. (7-8)

All knowledge is some codification by man of his phenomenal world. (8)

Introduction

As 2025 winds down, I’ve been working through writing some James Moffett commentaries. At the moment I’ve got two interlocking posts mapped out. Tentative titles include “English is a Broken Subject” and “A Super-Structure for Composition.”

Looking to 2026, these posts will serve as background reading for a dialogue about designing writing assignments. (I’ve had that mapped out for a month or so, but hit a dead end when final exams arrived.) As for blogging topics, I’m still working through an outline from this summer, and as always, feel frustrated that I can’t type fast enough.

Since I don’t have official paid subscriber benefits, I wanted to post a mostly done version of this article. (This has three of four planned sections. Hopefully I proofed it well enough?) I’m still working on paid benefits, but maybe this is a start?

Previous Posts about James Moffett

• Let Speaking Teach Writing (James Moffett on Discourse) (2/2025)

• Five Ways to Let Speaking Teach Writing (3/2025)

• Teach Writing Reactively (James Moffett’s Action Response Model) (5/25/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

I. The Missing Super-Structure

Now, it is not hard to find a structure in English. All the particles - word, sentence, paragraph, compositional whole, literary “form” - offer us structures, a regress of increasingly larger contexts. But what are they sub-structures of? For the regress is only theoretically infinite; our conception is always finite. Some ultimate context or super-structure is exactly what English as a school subject has always lacked. (3)

James Moffett begins Teaching the Universe of Discourse musing about an “ultimate context or super-structure” in English (3). As a subject, we forget how new English is. In the history of composition and rhetoric, scholars like James A. Berlin and Sharon Crowley have chronicled the evolution of writing in the classroom. Both have written about Current Traditional Rhetoric (CTR), which forms the unquestioned, unnamed, and underlying theory to teaching writing.

If you teach English and aren’t familiar with CTR, you should be. I’ll offer a based paraphrase: “English” exists because we stopped teaching Latin. We traded education for training. The subject coevolved with textbooks and the five paragraph essay (or “theme”). Our approaches have changed little since key eighteenth and nineteenth century thinkers co-opted Rhetoric. And the destruction of Rhetoric should be a cause for lament! CTR exists because our materials exist as unquestioned echoes across the centuries. Something like that.

While Moffett never mentions the history of composition, this explains what he writes against. (To be fair, his Discourse likely predates the coining of CTR. I’m sure that’s just a Google search.) If Berlin and Crowley explain how English-as-subject evolved, Moffett exposes the missing philosophical and spiritual foundation.

For more, check out Berlin’s “Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice” (1980) and Crowley’s “The Current-Traditional Theory of Style: An Informal History” (1986). Berlin also provides an extensive bibliography with primary sources. As someone who collects old school books, this effort is jaw dropping!

“Anything,” Moffett begins, “is a structure” (2). Look around you. Find an object in your environment: Everything both exists around something else yet has its own structure. My beloved blue Bic Cristal pens sit on my desk next to sticky notes, correction tape, and scattered papers. Yet the pen itself splits into parts: the transparent, plastic body, the ink, the tip, and so on.

“By calling something a structure,” he explains, “we mean that we are preferring to strip it of context, in fact to make it itself the context for some smaller structures” (2). In the physical world, molecules become atoms. In language, compositions break down into paragraphs, sentences, and words (2). This is no truism. Moffett begins with both microscope and telescope, searching for “ultimate context.”

Teaching the Universe of Discourse was first published in 1968 with a 1983 reissue. I say that because the following question could have been written today. (And perhaps so long as English lacks “ultimate context” or “super-structure.”)

“How much is teaching English a matter of covering content, and how much a matter of developing skills, which are independent of any particular matter?” he asks (3). While form is content, he muses, learning about is not practicing. “Learning and learning how to result in very different kinds of knowledge,” he explains (3). This will form a key theme in reading Moffett. Our textbook-driven approach confuses learning about with practice.

Moffett wastes no time explaining how “we have misconstrued… and mistaught” English by treating it like “history and science” (3). English teachers can know information from other subjects, but should they integrate knowledge from history and science, they have to “justify” it as skills rather than content (4). This distresses Moffett. He wonders why we prefer some topics to others.

How do these wrong principles work in application? Moffett sets his sights towards textbooks.

II. The Textbook-Particle Approach

Today the approach is far too substantive. Take up practically any textbook on language or composition and you will find it organized in this way: categories, and therefore units of study, are derived by analytically decomposing language into the “elements.” This is what I call the particle approach - sound, perhaps, for research, but not for teaching. Although this approach pays lip service to the interrelations of elements, it cannot escape its own format. To cash in on current slogans like “sequential development,” publishers often arrange these particles in an order of smaller to larger - from the word to the sentence to the paragraph to the whole composition. I do not know what development this corresponds to - certainly not to the functioning of either the language or the student. (4-5)

Moffett’s point still stands more than a half century later. Choose any language textbook and you’ll find explicit units and chapters and lessons on language. This works as “research,” he says, but he may as well say “reference.” His chapter “Learn to Write by Writing” argues that textbooks exist to correct ineffective teaching programs as “inservice training” (209).

Structure comes from “analytically decomposing language into “elements”” and sequence comes from “arrang[ing] these particles” from “smaller to larger” (5). Notice that sequence does not “correspond” with “either the language or the student” (5). This has always troubled me. We teach ideas not because they explain how language works or how students develop language, but because some ideas reduce like fractions.

This is terrifying, infuriating, and frankly baffling.

The “particle approach” translates from products to policies. Academic standards ignore both how language works and how students develop language. Their existence codifies Current Traditional Rhetoric and confuses it with child development itself. They function as a legalized theory of mind, complete with (to borrow a more liberal expression ) systems of punishment. Or at least in theory. In practice, academic standards promote illiteracy at a societal level.

Moffett later addresses primeval academic standards in his chapter “Misbehavioral Subjectives” from Coming on Center. The entire ordeal deserves dramatization. In bitter irony, he wrote this chapter from Speedway in my own Hoosier State, where I received an award for writing an essay in the sixth grade.

The “particle approach” has two problems—interpretation and complexity.

First, wholes help interpret parts. He explains, “only in the largest context - the whole composition -can meaning, style, logic, or rhetoric be usefully contemplated” (5). Consider units specific to literacy devices or genre. While literary devices exist, they exist as parts of works. Style itself or rhetoric itself never exists apart from whole things. Wholes reduce to parts, but wholes likewise interpret parts. You can move from wholes to parts but not necessarily parts to wholes.

Second, scaling proves deceptive since complexity exists at all levels. He explains, “little particle to big particle is not even an order of simple to complex, since each sub-structure is as complex as the next largest” (5). Picture the frazzled English teacher who says they won’t work on writing until students understand grammar. (This view is relatively common.) Moffett would call this a fool’s errand considering grammar has more than enough complexity on its own.

This logic likewise extends to subject division by genre.

Genre divisions satisfy a passion for taxonomy. Though perhaps the best classification of literature so far, genres are too cavalierly equated with form and structure. Actually, the structure of a novel or play is at least as much unique to itself as it is shared by other novels and plays. And some stories are poems, some poems stories, some plays essays, and some essays are stories or poems. Perhaps more than anything else, genres are marketing directives. As such, they provide convenient rhetorical bins. Pedagogically, they constitute a hazard by making both teachers and students feel that they have to “define” what a short story or a poem is, i.e., find something similar in all the examples. Even if this were not futile, one would be left with only a definition, another substantive reduction that does not help one to read or write, or even appreciate. Since a definition would have to be of the form, not content, the very difficulty of definition suggests that we exaggerate greatly the formal similarities among members of the same genre. (5-6)

Moffett finds labels dangerous. And not because defining poetry or sonnets proves morally wrong, but because labels skew to definitions more than content. As a profession we devote more effort to taxonomy than action. Students may read poetry analytically without ever writing poetry. (But as someone who has devoted his career to middle and high school, I’m okay not reading poetry about high school breakups.)

His comment on self-unique structure always gives me pause. The fourth sentence bears retelling: Some stories work like poetry while other poems and essays tell stories. Some plays dramatize to polemicize. While genres have “form and structure,” this isn’t a given. Even haikus and sonnets as forms talk about other things. (Note: He uses the words “form” and “genre” loosely, and beyond this sentence I’m fighting the temptation to write another half page.)

If you take his comment about “convenient rhetorical bins” seriously, you will become a cynic among cynics. How many times does English focus around genre first? How many times do English teachers focus on short stories or poems? Moffett would remark this places taxonomy over meaning. In that sense, form matters more than content. This places unnecessary restrictions on the content itself.

Moffett would argue teaching topics before labels. This not only lowers the resistance to other mediums—like following fiction to poetry—but to other subjects entirely. If you like an aspect of fiction, why not study the history behind it? Why not follow knowledge where it leads? As we will discuss soon, Moffett disregards subject bounds themselves, but not necessarily for taxonomy’s sake.

So what would Moffett teach? Since he rejects the analytic view, he instead adopts a more symbolic view. But this might take some explanation.

Read more

If you missed my talk, check out my matching post:

In the meantime, I’ve been adjusting to life with two under two. Parental leave came and went, and I landed back at school as the semester crescendos to a climax with final exams. Since then I’ve never forgotten the audience questions, but have spent time mulling them over. This post (and others) will answer those questions with more thought, although I suspect I’ll likely rewrite them further down the line.

What did audience members want to know? I’ll post the questions below and mark which ones I’m addressing today:

✅ 1. What strategies would you suggest for students who run out the clock and refuse to produce unless you spoon feed them?

2. How do you model making mistakes in writing?

3. How do you practically teach reading and writing together in your classroom?

✅ 4. What is the best way to motivate students to write?

5. What type of writing do students like or connect with the most?

6. How would you integrate writing in other disciplines?

✅ 7. What were those books you mentioned?

8. How do you integrate vocabulary into writing?

✅ 9. How do you help students who do the bare minimum?

10. How do you make writing social rather than solitary?

✅ 11. How do you preview and review topics in daily journals?

12. How do you handle students with significant learning challenges?

13. How do you handle everyone reading everyone?

14. I know teaching is a continuous process. How long did it take you to develop classroom staples and routines? Did you have any big fails you remember consistently?

This post will address a swath of questions by grouping some together and addressing underlying themes.

1. My Favorite Books for Teaching Writing

#7: What books did you mention [about teaching writing]?

The following list includes my favorite books for teaching writing. Aside from Teaching the Universe of Discourse, the rest are listed in no particular order. At some point I’ll expand this list into a full-blown post.

1. ⭐️ Teaching the Universe of Discourse (James Moffett)

2. Leveled Text-Dependent Question Stems (Debra J. Housel)

3. They Say, I Say (Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein)

4. The Writing Template Book (Kevin B. King and Ann Johns)

5. Advanced Academic Writing / Opus 40 (Michael Clay Thompson)

6. Purposeful Conferences--Powerful Writing!: Strategies, Tips, And Teacher-Student Dialogues That Really Help Kids Improve Their Writing (Marilyn Pryle)

7. Writing Workshop in Middle School: What You Need to Really Make It Work in the Time You’ve Got (Marilyn Pryle)

8. Using Benchmark Papers to Teach Writing with the Traits, Grades 6 to 8 (Ruth Culham)

9. The Writer’s Practice (John Warner)

10. Roots in the Sawdust: Writing to Learn Across the Disciplines (Anne Ruggles Gere)

2. Daily Journals: Getting Started

#11. How do you preview and review topics in daily journals?

If you’re curious about daily writing, check out my early 2025 series which includes a general description, example policies, example scripts, and 50+ journal starters. While the next section points back here, I wanted to group my resources together first.

3. Writing with Difficult Students (Write Every Day)

#1. What strategies would you suggest for students who run out the clock and refuse to produce unless you spoon feed them? #4. What is the best way to motivate students to write? #9. How do you help students who do the bare minimum?

I often joke: If I could answer some questions, I could retire tomorrow. And writing with difficult students fits the bill. So how do you deal with difficult students? Each student has their reasons. I grouped these questions together for ease, but suspect the underlying nuances might require several solid attempts to answer.

To start, I want to meander around the topics before musing about potential answers.

Why do some student refuse to write? Why do some require hand holding? Why do some students prefer the bare minimum?

Consider character: Some students will always refuse. No matter what. Human nature says they didn’t opt-in to schooling, so opting out feels like their only real choice. And no matter how much we beg and barter, coax and cajole, no hippie-hippie PBIS nonsense will address this fundamental friction with human nature.

Some students require hand holding because their dispositions demand it. But this skews both directions. When students who struggle demand 1:1 attention, teachers complain. Yet when students who excel demand 1:1 attention, we write them off as needy. So we excuse one but not the other.

Some students refuse help while others jump through the cracks. They don’t want help. Again, disposition matters. Some students—despite grades as feedback—genuinely don’t think they need it. Then again, maybe others complete the bare minimum because they’re too afraid or proud to ask for help. It’s not always malicious.

Consider reading: Scarborough’s Rope suggests reading isn’t one thing. Singular reading “numbers” betray basic complexity. Some struggle with decoding while others struggle with comprehension. Some have lower vocabularies while others have poor working memories. Some read and move on without enough self-awareness to stop and reread.

Let’s look elsewhere for inspiration, thinking to mechanics and exercise science.

What if the problem isn’t the problem? My dad has been a mechanic and repairman for decades. Despite not inheriting his skills, he still impressed key troubleshooting advice: Sometimes what we see and hear isn’t the problem. Sometimes we see effects, not causes. Sometimes problems lie deeper and require disassembly. Assumptions need checked.

What if the main lift isn’t the issue? Squat University, one of my favorite YouTube channels, explains how certain weaknesses create imbalances and cause problems. Many lifting problems isolate muscles (like academic standards) yet ignore the body-as-system. You cannot address complex systems on a purely part-by-part basis.

As I’ve written elsewhere, writing instruction begins with category errors. Academic standards distort part-whole relationships and fundamentally overcomplicate the act of writing. Between terrible standards and terrible textbooks, if The Purpose of the System is What It Does, then academic standards exist to prevent language development.

So how do you help difficult students? I’ll start sketching an answer. But let’s talk running first.

Many students refuse to write because writing isn’t routine. And where there isn’t routine, resistance fills the vacuum. I liken most approaches to forcing 5K’s while neglecting the running. Rather than build endurance first, we force the action and then wonder why teachers and students alike hate it.

I hated running growing up. Despite being an All-American in Swimming, despite my above average athletic ability, I was slow. In gym I’d often be picked last because apparently the bigger kids were faster. And so it went. I didn’t run because I was bad at running. But little did I realize I was bad at running precisely because I didn’t run.

After getting married, my wife and I went on several runs. Since I flew past her, she encouraged me to start running on my own. I protested. Why would I? I was terrible at it. She then gave me the look and said being terrible never stopped her. And so I tried.

Those initial runs were painful, terrible events. I’d start and I’d stop and I’d walk. Then I’d try again. People flew past on the trails. Yet I kept persisting. Eventually I ran a mile for the first time ever without stopping. Then one mile became two and two became three and so on. Over two years, I eventually hit six nearly continuous miles. (Pesky stoplights!)

The lesson? I was bad at running because I did not run. Was I slow? Of course! But avoiding running never helped build running endurance. Truthfully, if not for plantar fasciitis and having children, I’d still be out there running four or five miles most days after school. (I haven’t quite replaced running as my daily routine.)

Let’s translate this to writing: Teachers and students alike struggle to write precisely because they do not write. The end. You may as well never exercise because you’re out of shape. And while that sounds terrible, it’s the default. I’ve rarely met teachers who outright say their students write little, but the results are obvious.

How do you write more? It’s simple: Start with the first five minutes.

Trade resistance for routine. Improving writing doesn’t require fancy programs, charts, or jargon. It likewise doesn’t require expensive consultants, thick books, or computer programs. You’d be shocked how far five minutes, a notebook, and a great question go. Start every class by writing. Make writing as common as desks and breathing.

The basic procedure requires a shift in mindsets and routine. Students write for the first five or so minutes each class. And avoid the no good, terrible writing acronyms. Drop ‘em! Instead, write about literature and life. Students should preview future topics, review past topics, and write about current or calendar-driven topics.

Along the way give routine open-ended topics. Let them write about things that matter to them, including trucks, farming, the NFL, band competitions, anime, make up, and so on. It doesn’t matter if we find their self-chosen topics stupid. Writing about what matters builds meaning. If we don’t welcome writing for meaning, we close it instead.

Our so-called difficult students struggle for the same reason everyone else does: Atrophy. Because many students only ever write with acronyms and five paragraph structures, they’ve never learned to write in the first place. Oh, they follow the motions alright, but it’s like painting-by-the-colors rather than beginning from the blank canvas.

I normally dismiss many student concerns because of laziness, but with writing mnemonics I get it: Kids resist them because they are genuinely terrible.

Many teachers justify acronyms because the structure encourages writing more. Yet in conversations, acronyms encourage writing less. For many, the acronyms become destination. Teachers force form before fluency. They actively prevent learning through feedback in authentic tasks.

As I’ve written elsewhere, if you want students to write more then simply write more.

Why does writing every day work? It’s all about form and fluency.

Form refers to structure. Text structure helps both composition and comprehension. Most questions imply arrangement: topical, chronological, compare and contrast, cause and effect, and so on. Once students learn these underlying structures, writing becomes jazz-like. So what about fluency?

For just a moment, imagine an artist carefully and lovingly sculpting stone. We never question the form or sculpting part: The block is just there. But fluency builds the stone, so to speak. You cannot sculpt what isn’t there. And yet how often do teachers demand proficiency where nothing exists?

As I’ve written elsewhere, our absurd devotion to academic standards is like practicing heel striking without running.

Fluency refers to your ability to just write. You cannot teach any writing without it. Fluency allows form to stick. You know, like having a block to sculpt from.

In a perfect world, I’ve love to travel to other schools and help earnest teachers with writing. But even if I did, my advice would remain consistent: Write every day.

Do I have students resist writing? Sometimes, but resistance isn’t always boisterous. Oftentimes, it’s quiet. Truth be told, routine writing shines a spotlight on some students. Consistency provides more opportunities for help. Daily writing addresses the problem at its source.

What about behavior problems? They still happen. But in nearly ten years of daily writing, they’re the exception. August means creating routine. To some extent, what we don’t punish we permit. So I narrate and remind my expectations daily. In nearly ten years, spanning hundreds and hundreds of students, I’ve had only a handful of journal-related write ups. What do I say? Check out a sample script:

“Once I start the timer, your goal will be writing four to five sentences during that time. If you finish early, wait quietly for others to finish. Even if your neighbor finishes, you should not be turned and talking.

For more, check out my daily writing notebooks starter:

In general, difficult students either bend to social pressure or quietly refuse. But if you give them the space to create meaning, writing keeps them engaged. And yes, I encourage students to write about how much they hate writing. I just tell them to use details and provide specific examples. As Palpatine would say, Ironic.

This approach works, by the way, for the same reason as the Couch to 5K approach: Increasing, regular exposure. When I teach middle school, I start at three minutes. Then four, then five, then six. When I teach high school, I throw them into seven minute, gigantic paragraph territory. Adjust duration to fit—then eventually expand—your audience.

Beyond daily writing, I have many other strategies. Some students respond to sentence stems, others respond to whole-class writing, and so on. But more often than not, so many problems stem from atrophy rather than excess.

Towards a Summary: Writing every day is not magic. Behavior problems will still exist, but building fluency across the board helps everyone. It creates the foundation for every other skill and does not require fancy programs, graphics, or charts.

Anyways, that answer went far longer than I anticipated, so I will have to split my other answers into a future post.

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🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• Where Traditional Writing Instruction Fails (11/28/2025)

• My AMLE25 Talk (“Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!”) (11/15/2025)

• How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0) (11/3/2025)

• 10 Myths about Teaching Writing (10/19/2025)

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

• The Art of the Reading Guide (9/27/2025)

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• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

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• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

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“But there is a difference between an essay with five paragraphs and the “five paragraph essay”“ (28).

John Warner, Why They Can’t Write

Preview

What if standards-based teaching ignores fundamental aspects of writing? How are media, conventions (rules), and fluency related? What if our all-essay approach discourages writing? What if speech-oriented mediums encourage more writing? What if students improved their essays by writing other things first?

This dialogue explores fundamentally ignored aspects of teaching writing. As I work towards more systematic posts, I wanted to follow my own advice and explore other media. This dialogue furthers several posts such as “Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist“ and “How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0).”

When my students write dialogues, I have a simple goal: To explore ideas as deep as possible with as few words as possible. I’m talkin’ earthy, organic, and umami. This means casting off constraints entirely: introductions, thesis statements, topic sentences, paragraphing. Instead, the question becomes currency.

In practice, I encourage my students to begin in media res and immediately explore big questions. We may start either with a kernel conversation or brainstorm twenty questions and reduce to ten. Once students hit the line quota, they can stop abruptly without corny, feel-good platitudes. Not all conversations change minds.

For ease, unlike reading Plato, this conversation will be divided into sections with easy line numbers as reference. For instance, “In II.24, CHARACTER said...”

Characters

• Everett: A thirty-something teacher.

• Avery: An earnest twenty-something teacher.

I. “Many Have Written Little”

1. Everett: Hey, Avery! Didn’t expect to see you in the teacher’s lounge during prep. Your students are writing essays this week? How’s that gone so far?

2. Avery: Not well.

3. Everett: Oh. What’s been happening?

4. Avery: We’re several days in and many have written little.

5. Everett: What are your expectations?

6. Avery: After three days they should be nearly finished, but many have only written three paragraphs.

7. Everett: Three paragraphs in three days. That sounds harsh! Have they been misbehaving?

8. Avery: They talk, but they also work.

9. Everett: What prewriting did you do?

10. Avery: Nothing unusual. They brainstormed and outlined first.

11. Everett: Do you want another perspective? I might ask a lot of questions.

12. Avery: That would be great. Ask away.

13. Everett: Do your students write every day?

14. Avery: Not every day.

15. Everett: What writing do students do outside of essays?

16. Avery: We spend a lot of time with paragraph acronyms or writing mnemonics.

17. Everett: Tell me about what acronym you use the most.

18. Avery: They use “RACE,” which means Restate, Answer, Cite, Explain. I like it because it lists the steps to writing with evidence.

19. Everett: Does it work time?

20. Avery: They need constant reminders.

21. Everett: What other things do you write? Do students write outside of simple essays and writing mnemonics?

22. Avery: Not really.

23. Everett: Do your students write letters or anything job related?

24. Avery: Maybe once or twice, but not often.

25. Everett: So where do you start your writing instruction?

26. Avery: It’s academic writing. We write academically with academic things.

27. Everett: I see.

28. Avery: How about you? Where do you start? Also, do you have any ideas?

29. Everett: I do. But we might start with a detour.

II. Conventions Before Content

1. Everett: My writing begins with several maxims: We write every day, discussing writing about literature, and read other students. And so on. But an important step includes transforming writing across text structures and mediums. I want to focus on that last part.

2. Avery: Do you mean mediums like media literacy?

3. Everett: Yes and no. For many, media literacy refers to comprehension rather than composition. For comprehension, many focus on credibility. But media for composition means expanding beyond the essay.

4. Avery: How would you define mediums in writing?

5. Everett: In communication, this refers to the classic sender, message, and receiver triangle. In Art think painting, sculpture, photography, and so on.

6. Avery: How does medium impact writing and teaching writing?

7. Everett: We’ve forgotten writing itself as medium. We’ve forgotten the blank page as the blank canvas. English is an Art like painting, yet we’re forced to teach it like Math. This tragedy goes well beyond punctuation.

8. Avery: Why do you say that?

9. Everett: Walk into any classroom and ask why they write. The answer? Testing. For many students, they only ever write for testing—never for communication. After a while, students assume all writing carries tested conventions.

10. Avery: What do you mean?

11. Everett: All writing follows conventions or rules, and some mediums have more rules than others. Rules aren’t bad—they form boundaries. Letters are not essays and essays are not scripts. Conventions always precede content.

12. Avery: Can you give an example?

13. Everett: Let’s say you want to write a letter to a friend. What do you include?

14. Avery: You’d write the date, greeting, and body, then the closing and the signature.

15. Everett: Would the body follow a strict organization?

16. Avery: Not to a friend. You just say what you need to.

17. Everett: Let’s say you want to write a formal, MLA essay. Where do you begin?

18. Avery: You’d format the text as Times New Roman, size 12, and double spaced.

19. Everett: What about the first six lines?

20. Avery: You’d write your name, the teacher’s name, the class, and the due date. Then you’d add the center aligned title and tabbed first sentence.

21. Everett: What about the essay itself?

22. Avery: From there you’d include an introduction with a thesis statement, body with topic sentences, and conclusion.

23. Everett: What about a formal tone and citations?

24. Avery: Formal tone includes omitting personal pronouns, contractions, and slang words. Citations include in-text citations and works cited pages.

25. Everett: Do citations include formulas and rules?

26. Avery: They do.

27. Everett: That’s a lot of rules to remember, isn’t it?

28. Avery: It is.

29. Everett: Let’s say you’re worried about every rule before writing that first word. That might impact your ability to just write, wouldn’t it?

30. Avery: It might.

31. Everett: Now let’s compare letters and essays. Which has more rules?

32. Avery: Essays. Nobody debates that.

33. Everett: But if you only teach tested writing, mediums vanish. All writing becomes rule-heavy, tested writing. Paired with irregular writing, could students form negative associations?

34. Avery: They might.

35. Everett: What if students write slow because tested forms encourage students to hate writing?

36. Avery: Huh.

37. Everett: Never underestimate variety in writing. Ignoring media or preferring one media may encourage students to form negative associations that impact performance in ways we can’t quite quantify. Why do students write little? What if our policies encourage them to hate it?

III. When Conventions Constrain

1. Avery: I’m still not sure why medium matters in writing. Starting with the task means starting with the rules. And rules aren’t bad.

2. Everett: What if the rules, at least initially, hold students back? What if the all-essays approach artificially limits student writing abilities? What if starting with something else encourages writing more?

3. Avery: What do you mean?

4. Everett: Let’s think poetry: Compare writing a haiku and a sonnet. Which has more rules?

5. Avery: The sonnet.

6. Everett: Pretend I’ve never heard of sonnets. What rules do they follow?

7. Avery: Sonnets have fourteen lines with set syllable and rhyme structures.

8. Everett: And haikus?

9. Avery: Oh, haikus are simple: Three lines with five, seven, and five syllables.

10. Everett: Which takes longer to write?

11. Avery: That’s not a serious question. Sonnets take longer. They’re more demanding.

12. Everett: Do you worry about conventions before content?

13. Avery: You would.

14. Everett: Would conventions impact working memory?

15. Avery: I don’t see why not.

16. Everett: What if you learned to write just to write sonnets?

17. Avery: That would be terrible!

18. Everett: Now let’s step back: What if writing essays only were like writing sonnets only? Wouldn’t conventions constrain content?

19. Avery: I don’t buy that. You can’t avoid essays because they aren’t easy. If anything, that’s why you write. To practice. Why not provide supports instead?

20. Everett: Be careful: I never said to avoid writing essays. Just to write more than essays. As for supports, I include many.

21. Avery: Like what?

22. Everett: I include checklists, examples, and templates, both physical and digital.

23. Avery: Does that help?

24. Everett: For some. Remember we’re talkin’ teenagers here. They’d complain because a million dollar check requires cashing it first.

25. Avery: Good point. What do you do instead?

26. Everett: If the essay-only approach slows students, then start with something else. Expand beyond the essay. Include speech-friendly mediums like interviews, scripts, and letters. Start with less rule-intensive mediums and then move to more rule-intensive mediums. As counterintuitive as it sounds, writing beyond essays may help essays.

27. Avery: Why is that?

28. Everett: Compare starting with a letter. With fewer rules to obey, the same effort would produce more words. Your working memory can focus on content, not conventions.

29. Avery: How would that work for something argumentative?

30. Everett: Start in conversation. Maybe students begin by interviewing someone who disagrees. Then they draft a quick letter addressing disagreements point-by-point. Now the prewriting becomes actual writing.

31. Avery: So talking helps writing?

32. Everett: It does. Our poorest writers aren’t poor talkers. (Many talk instead of write.) Sadly, our standards-first approach divorces the written and spoken word. If you want to unleash student potential, bridge the mind, the mouth, and the page.

33. Avery: How do you handle teaching multiple mediums? That sounds like a lot.

34. Everett: Introducing other media requires mini-lessons for sure, but remember how writing points towards something. Different media suit different tasks. For instance, journals help predict and react. Letters help introduce and reflect. Scripts explore ideas without worrying about paragraphing and other formalities.

35. Avery: So you move straight from introduction to application?

36. Everett: I do.

37. Avery: Does the order of media matter?

38. Everett: There’s the beauty: Multiple entrance points exist. Different does not mean complicated. When moving from one media to another, simple conversations about contrasting media help.

39. Avery: So you teach by comparing media?

40. Everett: You’d be shocked how far comparing letters to essays goes.

41. Avery: Do you have any other issues with prewriting?

IV. Where Prewriting Fails

1. Everett: Let’s loop back: What is happening with your students right now?

2. Avery: Days into writing, many have written little.

3. Everett: Trace the causes. What was your prewriting?

4. Avery: We brainstormed and outlined before writing.

5. Everett: That’s a fairly normal thing, right?

6. Avery: It is.

7. Everett: Did your students write half their essays and change their minds?

8. Avery: They did.

9. Everett: Why is that? Did they have bad topics?

10. Avery: I’m not sure. Maybe they thought they could write more.

11. Everett: How did they learn that?

12. Avery: Through writing.

13. Everett: So writing helps writing. Maybe you don’t know what you can write until after you write it?

14. Avery: I think so.

15. Everett: Would you say that writing helps explore?

16. Avery: It does.

17. Everett: Take the traditional brainstorm, outline, write, and revise (BOWR). When do students actually write?

18. Avery: The third step.

19. Everett: Which step is the final product?

20. Avery: The fourth.

21. Everett: Do final drafts often stray far from first drafts?

22. Avery: Not always.

23. Everett: Here’s my problem: Traditional prewriting forces explanations without exploration. It merges the first and final product. By placing writing last, you begin with conclusions. Brainstorming and outlining become formalities for pre-digested opinions. Is it any wonder that students change their minds? We don’t give them the space to form opinions!

24. Avery: Are you against outlining?

25. Everett: I’m not against outlining—just traditional uses. Leading with detailed outlines implies fully formed ideas before starting. I’m not convinced that’s realistic whatsoever.

26. Avery: What would you suggest instead?

27. Everett: Outlines reflect tense. When we outline matters. How often does writing reveal new directions? What we think we will say is not always what we say. Outlines organize, but more reflection than prediction. The process is recursive.

28. Avery: Would you ideally have students outline at all stages?

29. Everett: Something like that. Five minutes to jot and reflect could work wonders. But what proves realistic individually often proves unmanageable for a class.

30. Avery: In a perfect world, would all outlines be detailed?

31. Everett: In Dual Coding for Teachers, Oliver Caviglioli explained how ideas move between images and words. If ideas imply text structures, drawing orders like outlining. They might even function like two sides of the same coin. (See diagram.)

32. Avery: So how would you answer prewriting, then? Wait! We already talked about that. Through transforming other media. What do you think about revision?

33. Everett: When we merge the first and final products, we treat process as disposable. For many students, “revision” is an alien word. Many students name rather than explain. A sentence stands as self-evident. Why explain? Readers are mind readers. I’m sure you’ve experienced this.

34. Avery: I have.

35. Everett: And yet some students act as perfectionists. They plead for edits after submitting anything.

36. Avery: They do.

37. Everett: In an ideal world, all students could revise all writing. But this complexity defies managing. At least for grading. Some students would take a week to write a sentence if you let them. Help those who want help, and others dive between the cracks.

38. Avery: So what do you do?

39. Everett: Oftentimes I try to read as many drafts as possible during class, but then I force mid-draft submissions. Then I’ll take notes, present whole group feedback the next day, then enlist fast and focused peer reviews.

40. Avery: So do your revisions happen more conversationally?

41. Everett: They do. I use comment sheets when possible, but that’s another topic.

42. Avery: If students write in other mediums, how do you know which one works best?

43. Everett: Ah! You can’t use every medium for every task, so its more art than science.

44. Avery: Does writing with different media work every time? Do students say more?

45. Everett: This would become a fascinating research study. Like skills in video games, not all statistics are evenly spread. Regardless, expanding beyond the essay means many students do write more. But different students will prefer different mediums.

46. Avery: What would you do ideally?

47. Everett: I guess I’d force some media sometimes and allow choice other times.

V. Where Paragraph Acronyms Fail

1. Avery: Earlier you asked about paragraph acronyms and writing mnemonics. Would you mind talking about those?

2. Everett: As a preface, most paragraph acronyms plagiarize each other. I find no malice in adding evidence. Yet acronyms treat writing like Math. Predictable answers means predictable questions. I’m not always convinced that’s a good thing.

3. Avery: What does that mean?

4. Everett: To be blunt, shallow answers mean shallow thinking and terrible writing. They discourage individuality by design.

5. Avery: What are your main concerns?

6. Everett: Paragraph acronyms and writing mnemonics sound authoritative, but mask the skills they claim to teach. They value form over fluency, divert time from other tasks, and delay invaluable feedback. They also never scale beyond a paragraph.

7. Avery: What do you mean by scaling?

8. Everett: Complete the following: first, second…

9. Avery: Third.

10. Everett: What order is that?

11. Avery: Chronological.

12. Everett: How do you know that?

13. Avery: It’s implied.

14. Everett: So Restate, Answer, Cite, and Explain. What comes next?

15. Avery: Your next point.

16. Everett: Your next point in what? How do you know that from the acronym?

17. Avery: You don’t.

18. Everett: Therein lies my point: Acronyms do not replicate or scale beyond themselves.

19. Avery: I’m still not getting it.

20. Everett: In writing, ideas scale from words to sentences to paragraphs to pages. Consider how transition words like first, second, third apply to word lists as well as starting sentences or paragraphs. Each word implies the next. So here’s a question: Does Restate, Answer, Cite, Explain do that?

21. Avery: It doesn’t.

22. Everett: And you can list first, second, and third to start entire paragraphs?

23. Avery: You can.

24. Everett: Paragraph acronyms work at the sentence level. Writing one paragraph is writing one paragraph. If you want to improve paragraph-ing, then improving multiple paragraphs means writing multiple paragraphs. The acronyms fail at face value.

25. Avery: Would this apply to anything at the sentence level?

26. Everett: Any writing strategy with overly prescriptive, sentence-by-sentence commands will fail. The results seem concrete but rings hollow. It’s parroting, not thinking.

27. Avery: What do you mean about diverting time and delaying feedback?

28. Everett: Many teachers use acronyms as their sole writing strategy. Yet the mnemonics forget application. Writing acronyms is not writing other things.

29. Avery: What about the text evidence focus? That’s good at least.

30. Everett: Many students struggle using quotations without the mnemonics. Consider all the little steps: selecting, editing, integrating, and explaining. Punctuation mechanics alone cause problems. Acronyms address these things only superficially. Remove them and students make predictable mistakes.

31. Avery: Like what?

32. Everett: Without paragraph acronyms, students may use quotations as topic sentences. The feedback is straightforward: Move the quote. Does this imply other structures? Maybe. But they’re learning from experience and feedback rather than prescriptive acronyms.

33. Avery: Can you give another example?

34. Everett: If one quote per paragraph is good, students may use five. The feedback is easy: Just use one. But if they only write with acronyms or mnemonics, they’re denied ever learning from experience. Imagine practicing foot-strikes without ever running!

35. Avery: So acronyms and mnemonics delay feedback?

36. Everett: They do.

37. Avery: How would you teach quotations?

38. Everett: As an active reading skill, simply discussing annotations (important quotations) helps. In writing, embedding checklists directs attention towards quotations without the mnemonics. Paired with sentence stems, and these steps work as means, not ends.

39. Avery: So jump straight to application? Is that what you mean by diverting time?

40. Everett: Yes.

VI. In Summary (Conclusion)

1. Avery: I think the bell will ring soon. Do you mind summarizing your points?

2. Everett: Not at all.

3. Avery: What about conventions?

4. Everett: Conventions come before content. Different mediums have different conventions, and some mediums have more conventions than others. Writing in purely rule-heavy mediums like essays may constrain some students. Allowing students to write in speech-oriented or less rule-heavy mediums may encourage them to write more.

5. Avery: What about prewriting?

6. Everett: In traditional prewriting—brainstorm, outline, write, revise—writing comes last. We expect students to explain before allowing them to explore. When students do write, rule-heavy mediums may discourage writing. By merging first and final drafts, discovery harms rather than helps. Outlines predict but never reflect. I can’t imagine better ways to write less.

7. Avery: What about paragraph acronyms and writing mnemonics?

8. Everett: Paragraph acronyms and writing mnemonics encourage terrible writing. They divert time from other tasks where students learn naturally through feedback. Unlike text structures, they neither scale nor replicate. Students would learn faster in application without them.

9. Avery: And there’s the bell. Time to get back to class.

Share

Subscribe now

Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• My AMLE25 Talk (“Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!”) (11/15/2025)

• How to Teach Writing Without Curriculum (1.0) (11/3/2025)

• 10 Myths about Teaching Writing (10/19/2025)

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

• The Art of the Reading Guide (9/27/2025)

• Teach Computer Literacy Before AI (9/13/2025)

• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

• Templates for Teaching Quotations (8/30/2025)

• The Joy of Teaching Siblings (8/24/2025)

• How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (8/10/2025)

• Back to School Night (8/3/2025)

• 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year (7/23/2025)

• Teach Computers Before AI: A Sketch (7/21/2025)

• Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist (7/17/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

• Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

Preface

In November I’ll present my talk “Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!” at the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) national conference in Indianapolis. While last year I stood in awe of the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, this year I’m thankful to present in my own backyard. Without paying for a hotel.

Since my talk has an hour time slot this year, I’m rewriting it from the ground up, integrating posts such as “20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow“ and “Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist.” I will leave links to the other parts below.

This post covers the back half of my talk. How do you teach writing, I ask? What if you needed principles, not programs? After introducing five basic principles, I’ll discuss implications in a conversational format. I added “1.0” to the title since these thoughts already demand revision. Future posts will explain this thinking in more concrete detail.

Also, I recently posted a survey with a simple question: How do you format your writing assignments? I’d love to trade papers, make notes, and work towards better templates for newer teachers. Feel free to share your favorite writing assignments!

Update: Before I could hit Publish, The Paste Eaters Blog had some wonderful updates behind the scenes!

Programs Over Principles

How do you teach writing? Many wrong ways exist—just see the ten myths. But many correct ways exist as well. The longer I teach, the more I’m convinced that you don’t need expensive curriculum. Or perhaps any curriculum at all. Instead, you need solid first principles. I’ll start with five.

Why these five? Long story short: Every so many years I analyze my teaching by filling pages with statements on the whats, hows, and whys. So I filled pages with statements and reduced to five. These five balance the need for fluency, form, and feedback. Together they form a solid foundation and flexible framework for teaching writing. And did I mention they’re free?

Overview: The Five Principles

• 1. Write every day. Write relentlessly. But start small. Daily writing builds fluency. Students begin each class by previewing or reviewing topics. Weekly conferences create regular, individual feedback loops.

• 2. Teach writing as an extension of speaking. Bridging the written and spoken word creates endless (and free) sources.

• 3. Students will discuss what they write about literature. Integrate rather than isolate. Simplify your teaching by writing about literature. Allow some things to teach other things.

• 4. Everyone writes for everyone. Everyone reads everyone. Writing is social, not solitary. Conversation creates feedback loops. Write collaboratively with students and use workshops (or public audiences) for feedback.

• 5. Students will write and transform ideas across text structure and medium. Teach form with text structure and instill flexibility by moving across media.

Introduction: The Five Principles

1. Write every day. Write relentlessly. But start small.

Fluency means your ability to just write. Occasional writing brings occasional results. But regular writing creates regular results. Growth doesn’t require pricey programs, complicated charts, or fancy jargon. It just needs five minutes every class with a pencil, paper, timer, and a good questions.

My students begin each class by writing, either previewing or reviewing a topic. No acronyms needed—just raw, unpolished thinking. We grade them side-by-side in weekly conferences. If they stay on topic and hit the quota, they receive full credit. Mistakes are circled, discussed, and not punished. Why does this work?

Writing is psychology as much as mechanics. Barriers form when students write infrequently and fear mistakes. Barriers fall when student write routinely with feedback. Once writing moves into familiarity and easy feedback, growth happens. So reject expensive programs and embrace the freedom of routine instead. Write every day.

For more, check out my series on daily writing:

2. Teach writing as an extension of speaking.

Writing always encodes speech into something. Yet many classrooms divorce the written and spoken word. Isolation distorts and parts never add up to wholes. Separate topics demand separate lesson plans, and calendars crowd with disjointed topics. Ideas exist as definitions without application.

In practice, the standards-based approach divorces writing from speaking. Writing exists as neither means nor ends. It neither connects nor creates, explores nor explains. Grammar and vocabulary express themselves in the written word, but for many, writing stands as the extra rather than the starting point.

Instead, ground writing in speaking. Integrate speech-oriented mediums like letters, interviews, and scripts. Transcribe speech then change mediums. Allow the spoken word to fill the page. Allow writing to be social, not solitary. Connect the mind, the mouth, and the page. Once the spoken word becomes source, endless opportunities await!

For more, check out my posts on teaching writing as an extension of speaking:

3. Students will discuss what they write about literature.

This view unifies and simplifies. Blend reading, writing, and discussion. Let writing address both content and expression. Rather than plan separate units on writing or grammar, application addresses problems in real time. Revision differentiates at the individual level.

Reading without writing is like inhaling without exhaling. Reading and writing exist like sides of a coin without separation. While talk is cheap, writing is slow. Pencils force contemplation. Writing about reading forces deeper thinking. Discussion further explores those ideas. So discuss what you write about literature.

4. Everyone writes for everyone. Everyone reads everyone.

Many classrooms see students write once and for teachers only. Without dialogue, writing becomes solitary. Without revision, writing becomes disposable. Without feedback, writing becomes stagnant. Without a real audience, writing exists as graphite scratches on paper, lacking the social elements needed for growth.

As teachers, we should write both for and with our students. Modeling, sharing, and collaborating reveal our thinking in real time. Finished products betray process. And goodness, writing is all process! Talking about writing is not the same as writing. Never doubt the power of students watching their teachers stumble and stutter through finding words. Some lessons cannot be scripted.

So write and trade papers. Write in community. When everyone writes for everyone, everyone reads everyone. Dialogue forces feedback as students ask peers to clarify. This simple act drives improvement as audiences expand far beyond the teacher. Social pressures move faster and farther than grades alone.

For more, check out my post on teaching with student writing:

5. Students will write and transform ideas across text structure and medium.

Writing means encoding ideas into mediums. Mediums (as containers) have conventions, but conventions become barriers. Definitions constrain. If the written word exists for five-paragraph thinking only, the written word gains arbitrary barriers.

Transforming ideas across mediums opens breathing room. Skip traditional prewriting entirely. Begin writing with real audiences. So start something persuasive with a letter to a friend who disagrees. Start ideas with interviews where one student talks and another student scribes. Use outlines retroactively (”What did you write?”) rather than starting points (“What could you write?”). From there, move from emails to essays or interviews to letters. Shifting ideas opens many creative possibilities.

Transforming text structures forces other vantage points. Most works contain at least one predominant structure. Exploring other structures enriches thinking. While many arguments begin with lists for and against, why not explore cause and effect as well? Why not begin with a story or chronological account as background? Why not compare related problems and contrasting solutions?

Just remember: Organization is a skill; intention is not. Organization refers to black and white logical sequence. Sequence either matches or not. Details are either chronological or not, comparison or not, sequential or not, and so on. However, intention is not a skill. Despite our best efforts, rhetorical mode (exposition, description, narration, argument) is entirely subjective. We can control sequence but never how our audience will respond.

Together, transforming ideas across mediums and text structure invites a flexible and adaptable approach. This creates not one starting point, but many. Ideally, once students agin experience across media and organization, this creates new outlets to explore ideas. So why not write a summary as a script? Why not begin arguments as interviews (for the other side)? Why not write short monologues that become essays? What do you have to lose?

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Principles in Practice (Commentary)

In action, these five principles invite multiple starting points and interpretations. Think webs, not lines. Tested writing only moves one way. By considering dimensions like media and structure, movement opens across all directions. Whereas testing-focused writing ends in five paragraphs, these principles end only by imagination.

That said, if the possibilities ripple outwards, mapping them in depth requires several posts. The questions themselves spill outwards:

• How do they work in application? What do frameworks look like?

• What do you write about? How do you write every day?

• How does teaching across text structure and media work?

Until then, I wanted to conclude by writing conversationally about these topics.

How do these ideas work as a framework? The options themselves sound like many elements to introduce. But think integration, not isolation. Allow some things to teach other things. Movement isn’t always linear. When we write, we encode into something (media). When we write, we favor major sequences over others (organization). Lastly, when we write, we write about something (content).

Thus, all writing has all elements. Mini-lessons help introduce elements, but integration allows reading and writing to work together. Writing across media helps diversify and expand available writing types. Remember: Time not spent writing is time not spent writing. Changing your focus from an essay-first and essay-only mindset broadens and strengthens existing lessons.

What do you write about? Try an easier question: What do you read about? By teaching writing as an extension of speaking, by discussing what you write about literature, everything becomes connected. Integration allows simplicity. Let student mistakes reveal trouble spots, and teach as response.

Together, I suggest writing about books and calendars. Write about school, teenage life, holidays, and changing seasons. Tap into student discussions and occasionally allow student interests to guide. (Well, sometimes at least.) The most important part: Move discussions from the spoken word to the written word and back.

Why focus on writing across media? Few question the test-only mindset. Five-paragraph thinking ignores fundamental aspects of writing. For many, merely questioning this thinking screams insanity. Just like your plates should include more than one food, writing across media provides a healthy academic diet.

⭐️ How do you teach different media? In a perfect year, my classes move from introduction letters to formal emails to transcribing conversations. Each medium includes a mini-lesson, but the discussions compare and contrast the rules across media. And maybe that’s the whole trick: Contrasting forms deepens knowledge each time.

Note: Introducing media requires sequence, but this sequence is flexible rather than fixed. Beyond that, moving between media requires a playfulness forgotten in most classrooms.

Every media has conventions or rules. Conventions define and distinguish. Letters are not essays and essays are not screenplays. This is not bad. Like comparing basketball to baseball or football to track, different games have different rules. Like learning a new sport, until rules become second nature, they remain the first thought. Rules impact working memory, and too many risk cognitive overload.

Some media require more rules than others. The medium may be the message, but the rules of media precede any message. And for many students, a single-media approach requires mastering numerous rules before they’re able to speak. What if a single-media approach forms an insurmountable barrier to entry?

Are you against essays? I’m not against essays: Just essays only. The essay-only mindset creates blindness across other media, as if the written word itself exists for tested writing only. Besides, the essay-only approach (including paragraph acronyms) actively discourages growth. I will die on this hill. Let me explain.

Just compare letters to essays. Letters have few structural parts. They include the date, greeting, body, closing, and signature. The length and formality depend on the audience and purpose. Letters can be intimate or public. In short, letters-as-containers offer nearly unlimited flexibility.

However, even simple MLA essays include multiple layers of fixed rules. The page includes fixed rules on font, size, and spacing along with headers. The structure includes the basic introduction, body, and conclusion with a thesis statement. Formal tone includes lists of formal and non-formal words. Attribution requires in-text citations and works cited pages, sources themselves diverging in formulas. Essays-as-containers offer flexibility in topic, but not form.

Writing a letter requires fewer rules than writing an essay. When we stress essay-first and essay-only, many students worry more about the medium than the message. They begin with cognitive overload and short circuit before their first word. Besides, the essay-only approach discourages exploration. Whereas most know what they’re writing about afterwards, placing medium before message denies exploration to some.

(If students struggle from media, why not intervene? Despite layers of safeguards—MLA templates, checklists, teacher workshops—students still struggle. At this point, assuming students are able, I wonder if the problem requires explicitly creating mental models of the medium. I’ve got ideas and wild eyed intervention ideas, but this might take a chapter to unpack!)

Aside: The invention stage provides no help either. The traditional brainstorm, outline, write, and revise (BOWR) not only places writing last, but provides little space to explore ideas. Thus, some students begin writing as if scaling a vertical wall.

Instead, consider starting with a less rule-heavy medium first. Integrate speaking-centered writing early, such as interviews, letters, and scripts. Allow ideas to form before constraining their form. Allow students the freedom to worry about exploration before worrying about rules. Once ideas have been explored, then upscale ideas to more formal media.

For the college bound, academic writing becomes an art form. But when we worry about academic writing only, we artificially blind their thinking. If creativity requires questioning boundaries, then students begin in straitjackets. Five-paragraph thinking becomes Maslow’s Hammer where everything else becomes a nail.

So do your students only write in letters, scripts, and essays? Not always. Before longer writings my students write daily journals, answer reading guides, write questions about reading, and complete graphic organizers. Writing no doubt helps process information, but unless students have a basic understanding of basic facts, then factually incorrect writing helps nobody.

From a practical standpoint, writing varies with regularity. Students have daily writing (journals), mid-length writing (quizzes and other media), and periodic longer writing (end of novel essays). Sometimes journals chunk topics across days, and oftentimes journals and quizzes connect towards longer essays. Time allows depth across repetitions.

Ultimately, students write in progressions, moving from one activity to another.

Until Next Time / Writing Progressions

Can you give ideas for moving between media? You know, I thought you’d never ask! But as I type, my word count has exploded far beyond my first intentions. In allowing this second half to grow like vines, I recognize it will eventually need revised. So until then, I want to save some progressions and transformations for their own follow up post.

💬 In the meantime, feel free to drop questions below. I’m sure I missed some obvious things.

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Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

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My teaching career began with all ideas and little practical knowledge. Oh, I could rattle platitudes about being a “guide on the side” rather than a “sage on the stage,” but when it came to specifics, I know little about either. As I’ve written elsewhere, my teaching program lacked both mental models and hands-on examples.

In hindsight, I began teaching like fresh meat thrown to starved Piranhas.

My first writing assignments were terrible! They lacked both substance and style. Even if I had a decent question, my presentation was so terrible that my questions had little readability. As my first year blended into my second, I realized I was locked in a cycle of habitual re-creation. And so I started managing templates instead.

Eventually, names like Michael Clay Thompson and Marilyn Pryle provided both the substance and style I needed. My assignments gained rigor. My presentation gained legibility. Grading with a notebook helped create feedback loops as one assignment provided reflections for the next. And after ten years I started blogging and presenting about it.

➡️ Which brings me to a question: How do you design writing assignments?

Lofty Goals and a Survey Button

This post links to a short survey about creating writing assignees. According to Substack, this blog is read in 37 states and 30 countries these days. Given the widespread geography and teaching levels, I would love to improve together.

Let me narrate my thinking through some questioning:

• In substance, how do you approach designing a writing task?

• In style, what do your assignments themselves look like? What are the major sections and headings? What do your rubrics look like?

• What themes emerge across subjects, grades, and geography? What can we learn from each other when designing writing tasks?

• What if we could assemble a range of templates for newer teachers? What if we save newer teachers time in first steps?

• What if these templates could breathe fresh life for older teachers?

Since a short survey is a good survey, I’m keeping it bare bones. Nothing worth a dissertation. But when surveying, I want to give credit where credit is due. Here are the areas:

• 🌎 About you: Where do you teach? What is your school? Your subject? Your grades and/or age levels?

• ✏️ Substance: What do you consider when designing a writing task?

• 💾 Style: What do your assignments look like? Please, please, upload examples!

• 🌟 Wish: What do you wish you could do better in an average writing assignment? What would you like to learn from others?

• 🤔 Other: What other comments or feedback do you have?

The Survey

Anyways, those are my big lofty thoughts. Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

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Subscribe now

Resources (Links)

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• 10 Myths about Teaching Writing (10/19/2025)

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

• The Art of the Reading Guide (9/27/2025)

• Teach Computer Literacy Before AI (9/13/2025)

• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

• Templates for Teaching Quotations (8/30/2025)

• The Joy of Teaching Siblings (8/24/2025)

• How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (8/10/2025)

• Back to School Night (8/3/2025)

• 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year (7/23/2025)

• Teach Computers Before AI: A Sketch (7/21/2025)

• Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist (7/17/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

• Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

In November I’ll present my talk “Help! I don’t know how to teach writing!” at the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) national conference in Indianapolis. While last year I stood in awe of the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, this year I’m thankful to present in my own backyard. Without paying for a hotel.

Since my talk has an hour time slot this year, I’m rewriting it from the ground up, integrating posts such as “20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow“ and “Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist.” I will leave links to the other parts below.

As I write, many areas demand their own posts. (As you read, please comment where you’d like to hear more!) I suppose these other posts will come in due time. And speaking of due time, with a newborn due any day now, my posts might become sporadic for a while.

These ten myths cover three major areas: myths about myself, writing, and my students. Each explanation follows a similar pattern: agreeing with concerns, questioning the concerns, and suggesting action steps. This should provide some predictability to reading.

Also, this talk focuses on the why’s before the how’s. Attitudes become actions just as methods become mindsets and expectations become experiences. Any framework requires first principles. And while we can follow actions back to attitudes, addressing these myths help clear the way for a stronger teaching foundation.

The Ten Myths

• 1. I’m not good at writing myself.

• 2. I don’t know enough to teach writing. I’m not trained.

• 3. I can’t teach writing, I have to teach other things.

• 4. Writing has too many parts.

• 5. I have to grade every mistake.

• 6. Grading and feedback take too much time.

• 7. My students have too many skill levels.

• 8. My students can’t write a complete sentence.

• 9. My students have low stamina, bad attitudes, and so on.

• 10. My students do not see their own mistakes.

Myths 1-3. About Myself

Let’s address these myths head on: It’s hard to teach something you’re not good at. Whether you’re not good at writing, you’re not trained to write, or you feel overwhelmed, the results end the same. If Math operates in black and white, how do you navigate writing, which acts in shades of grey? (Or perhaps worlds of color?)

1. I’m not good at writing myself

Agree: For many, teaching writing is like coaching a sport you’ve never played. Without personal experience, even following steps feels hollow. Without personal experience, teachers need textbooks more than their students. Answer keys help with two-step equations, but not thirty sentence essays.

Questions: When will you be good enough (to teach writing)? What does that look like? And good compared to what—a best-selling author? A fifth grader? Let’s try this: When was the last time you sat down to write?

Action Steps: Apply this thinking elsewhere: Avoid exercise because you’re out of shape. Avoid learning things you don’t know. And so on. This myth has a simple solution: Inertia. Start somewhere. Gain experience. Writing isn’t this formal, unreachable thing. Just put your pen to paper and go. So where do you start?

First, find a blank notebook and fill it. Write before, alongside, and with your students. Build experience with your own tasks. How often do our explanations fail because we won’t attempt our own work? As you grade, grade with notebook in hand. Simply observe. Narrate student mistakes. Aim for twenty statements and twenty questions. Then reflect. You will learn more from your notebooks (at first) than dry, academic texts.

Second, read poetry. When my own creativity wavers, I find inspiration from beauty. I return to the Psalms, Whitman, Dickinson, and lately, James Whitcomb Riley. Poetry does for the ears what art does for the eyes. Lose yourself in something beautiful. Then things happen.

💬 What do you write about? If you need better starters, comment below and I’d love to provide first steps.

2. I don’t know enough. I’m not trained.

Agree: Despite coming from a program that emphasized writing, I had ideals without first steps. This meant years of needless trial and error and failure and frustration. Knowing about isn’t knowing from experience, just as memorizing sports statistics won’t give you a six pack. So what do you do when you start with less than that?

Questions: When will you know enough to teach writing? When does action require perfect knowledge? What if the problem stemmed from lack of experience rather than knowledge alone? What if this could be gained?

Action Steps: Until you manage to memorize an encyclopedia, learn through doing. Allow actions to build the right attitudes inductively. Allow trial and error to teach through experience. Just as there are no perfect people, there’s no perfect way to learn writing or teaching writing. If writing requires revision, the act itself requires constant reflection.

What do those first steps look like? I have so many books to suggest! Writing needn’t be complex or overly formal. What if students wrote an introduction letter that first week? What if they reflected in a paragraph before class discussions? What if they watched a movie clip and transcribed speech?

💬 Would anyone be interested in a writing reading list with helpful books?

3. I can’t teach writing, I have to teach…

I hear this one often: “I can’t teach writing because I have to teach spelling. I can’t teach writing because I have to teach grammar. I can’t teach writing because I have to teach vocabulary.” And so on. Before long, all checkboxes have checks except for writing. However, let me ask:

Questions: When do you use proper spelling? When writing. When do you use proper grammar? When writing. When do you use proper vocabulary? When writing.

Action Steps: Let’s say you have thirty minutes to teach. What if you spent ten for spelling, ten for grammar, and ten for vocabulary? Whoops! No time to write. But what if you spent ten writing, ten discussing, and ten revising? What if your time addressed actual errors instead of hypothetical errors? As the Seven Habits say, start with the big rocks.

If writing feels like one more thing, your philosophy isolates rather than integrates. Covering parts without wholes always adds to zero. Spelling, grammar, and vocabulary only exist with writing. So write first. Start in application and move to revision. Move from wholes to parts. Did I also add it’s less stressful? Check out my posts on teaching with student writing:

Note: While I teach some elements separately, I spend more time in application. Students should read and respond to student writing on a weekly basis.

Myths 4-6. About Writing

So let’s say you’re comfortable writing yourself. Many can write, but not explain. Acting isn’t the problem: Narration is. These next three myths deal in the complexity of writing and the muted silence follows the curse of knowledge.

4. Writing has too many moving parts. (Writing is too complex.)

Agree: I agree here. Writing does have too many parts. Just consider the vocabulary for grammar: There are eight parts of speech, eight kinds of pronouns, and eight examples for intensive and reflexive pronouns. The taxonomy alone fills pages!

Questions: Why does complexity scare us? Does action require naming? Can we work every skill every time? What’s the reasonable limit? Why do student mistakes scare us?

Action Steps: Writing does have too many parts—if we focus on every part at once. Start with wholes before parts. Never place taxonomy before action. You can write a sentence without labeling nouns, fragments, and declarative sentences. Learning taxonomy requires reflection, which means action first.

As with Myth #1, grade with a notebook in hand. On the positive, complexity represents the prescriptive or correct way of writing. On the negative, complexity represents the descriptive or “wrong” ways of writing. So write about mistakes. Immerse yourself in the complexity. Script feedback (whole class explanations). Teach in conversations using student work as the centerpiece.

Once you no longer fear student mistakes as enemies, you can teach them as friends.

5. I have to mark every mistake.

Agree: Stop. Do not attempt this. You cannot sustainably mark every mistake for every student and every paper. You will burn out. You will become a hollow, cynical husk of a human being. This assumption is well-intentioned but destructive. To all.

Question: Has every red mark improved every mistake? Was there a 1:1 relationship? Yes, poor writing deserves poor grades, but what if feedback weren’t time consuming? What if you became more selective with your feedback? What if you only had to draft it once?

Action Steps: You cannot fix every mistake at once. Pick and choose your battles. Make your focus known. Once there, talk more than mark. Red marks may direct the eyes, but without spoken feedback, you’re just coloring. Sadistically. Imagine acting when every step is wrong. You’d give up too, right?

In general, if you write it more than once, write templates instead. Use the 80-20 Rule. For new tasks I grade with notebook in hand and write feedback for the most common mistakes. Later I’ll integrate feedback into assignment sheets and have comments waiting. Every English teacher should know Michael Clay Thompson’s Opus 40 framework for feedback.

6. Grading and feedback take too much time.

Agree: Grading does take time. Consider grading sixty essays at two minutes each: That’s two hours. Since most teachers have more than two classes or sixty students, grading any writing requires weeks of afternoon time. What then?

Questions: How do you grade? What rubrics and mental models? Does the same rubric count for every task? Do you grade the same way every time? What if the rubrics themselves slow you down?

Action Steps: Rubrics act like filters and lenses. Select the right rubric for the occasion. Grid-like rubrics focus on parts only. Grading with microscopes takes forever! But other rubrics consider wholes and allow faster action. You can’t grade every variable, but starting with the big picture and zooming in considers mistakes in context. Check out my comments on grading from AMLE 2024:

Myths 7-10. About My Students

These last myths deal with our students. Because when we’re expected to teach grade level instruction and students arrive two, three, or four years behind, we could spend months off roading just to catch up. How do you start with thirty starting points?

7. My students have too many skill levels.

Agree: Mixed ability classrooms are normal, but large skill gaps mean whiplash. In many cases, gaps matter less than learned helplessness. Some students demand hand holding for every step while others jump through the cracks. Regardless, many teachers struggle here.

Questions: When do we ever get uniform skill classrooms? What if this framing were backwards? What if we always taught individuals, not classes? What frameworks work best?

Action Steps: James Moffett’s action-response model begins in application, teaching descriptively than prescriptively. Rather than pre-teach hypothetical mistakes, he advocates letting student mistakes drive instruction. Begin in reality.

Starting with student mistakes means starting with relevance. Students never have to ask why. As he describes in Teaching the Universe of Discourse, such feedback is “accurate, specific, individual, and timely” (200). Check out my posts on Moffett’s action-response model:

8. My students can’t write a complete sentence.

Agree: Sentence fragments drive everyone crazy. Many English teachers begin with fragments, and despite the worksheets, students still write with them. I’ve heard it many times: “We won’t write a paragraph until they master the sentence.”

Questions: What if fragments represent atrophy? What if students write too little because they write too little? What if quantity leads to quality? What if you integrated writing to explore ideas?

Action Steps: Fix fragments by writing more. Allow writing to explore ideas, serving as more means than ends. So ditch the silly acronyms. Give students the space to breathe and think. Ditch the worksheets, discuss relevant mistakes, and move on. When students write more, they write fewer fragments.

9. My students have low stamina, bad attitudes, and so on.

Action Steps: This myth extends the last. If writing isn’t routine, it’s resisted. So write every day. If they have low stamina, write more. If they have bad attitudes, write more. Since many teachers default to tested writing only—from paragraph acronyms to five-paragraph essays—breaking free solves many problems at once.

Check out my series on daily writing:

10. My students do not see their own mistakes.

Agree: It never fails: The worst writers are the harshest critics. Show them something terrible, and they critique without mercy. Show them their own writing (which is worse) and they just stare and blink. They see everything except for the mirror.

Questions: What if teaching from mistakes and about mistakes were separate things? How do we train students to see their own mistakes?

Action Steps: Here’s a riddle: A room with twenty students has how many graders? If you said one, you’re off by twenty. Feedback isn’t exclusive to teachers. While my students can’t give formal grades, they give feedback. In many respects, I spend more time teaching about incorrect writing than correct writing.

Peer review needn’t be complex. For shorter tasks, fast and focused helps. Partners trade papers for simple point-to mistakes. Simple editing checklists go far. For longer tasks, partners trade and read papers back to their owners. Simply hearing your words in another voice and another cadence reveals mistakes like a flashlight.

Looking Ahead / Further Reading

So where do we go from here? If some attitudes harm teaching writing, what attitudes help teaching writing? Looking to my notes, as I continue to rework my “20 Tips for Teaching Writing” in lieu of other posts, my talk will segue to helpful attitudes.

The back half of my talk will present a working idea: “How to Teach Writing without Curriculum.” I’m really really really jazzed out this one! (I’ve been drafting it since July.) This reworks ideas from my “20 Tips” into an interlocking framework. I’m thinking I could spend the rest of the school year exploring these ideas—drafting the ideals and writing checklist-ready first steps and next steps.

After “How to Teach Writing without Curriculum,” combining posts from the past year might finally start to from the foundation for a novella-sized book about teaching writing. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. My house is expecting a newborn any day. 👶

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Resources

🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

⏰ Recent Posts

• 50 MORE Metaphorical Writing Prompts (10/5/2025)

• The Art of the Reading Guide (9/27/2025)

• Teach Computer Literacy Before AI (9/13/2025)

• The Mysterious Disappearing Analogy Book (9/7/2025)

• Templates for Teaching Quotations (8/30/2025)

• The Joy of Teaching Siblings (8/24/2025)

• How Google Forms Simplifies Data Collection (8/10/2025)

• Back to School Night (8/3/2025)

• 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year (7/23/2025)

• Teach Computers Before AI: A Sketch (7/21/2025)

• Creative Writing Doesn’t Exist (7/17/2025)

• How to Teach with Student Writing (6/25/2025)

• Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (6/21/2025)

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

Humans tell stories. Grouped with other truisms, we might say birds sing and cats mew. As time-bound creatures, we speak chronologically. From fables to fairy tales, myths to legends, diaries to histories, or parables to allegories—we tell stories. No, really: How was your day?

Consider this: Nobody lectures toddlers about plot. As I write, my toddler smacks his feet across the hardwood floor, book in hand, begging me to read Dr. Seuss. He may babble, but he sits dutifully and solemnly to hear stories three, four, or five times in a row. Hand the book to him and he hands it back.

We never outgrow stories. They impart, educate, and entertain. They form our pasts, prove our points, and project our futures. We message friends, read the news, watch movies, play video games, and more. Even sports reporting has evolved into documentary: perfect seasons, legendary games, inspiring backstories.

If schooling anchored the written word in the spoken word, writing would include some storytelling and communication. However, reality says we fill blank pages with something else, something far less natural.

Where do students spend their time writing at school, you ask? If not storytelling or messaging, what forms the default writing? The essay.

The Page as Worldview

In practice, students write exclusively for standardized tests—if they even write at all. The action exists for measurement. The implicit lesson teaches writing-as-punishment, the sentence as sentence. The written word itself mutates into punishment as students sit confined for hours on end, writing essays-on-demand during testing season.

Writing becomes Math-like. Thinking follows formulas, imposing universal mental models and conformity over curiosity. For paragraphs: restate, answer, cite, and explain. For essays: a thesis with three main points. Everything has an introduction, body, and conclusion. Since students never experience other mediums—no letters, no drama, no memoirs—all written expression means the essay.

Tested writing limits thinking rather than extending it. Five-paragraph thinking leads with the conclusion, forbidding invention or discovery. Our prewriting, a product of Current Traditional Rhetoric, stresses "BOWR": brainstorm, outline, write, and revise. We force these steps like orders of operation. We prefer mechanics over meaning. If writing is thinking, the page becomes worldview.

Tested writing suffocates. Their claustrophobic forms harm, not teach. They rob time without offering meaning. They hold no value beyond themselves or arbitrary scores. Teaching them teaches nothing. As hallways they lead to dead ends, fit for dancing cave shadows, nothing more. Go ahead, try explaining other mediums exist. Light blinds.

I'm not blaming my fellow teachers: We have our mandates. Policy becomes pedagogy. When teachers enter college, programs skip teaching writing entirely. (Along with phonics and basic classroom management.) When teachers enter classrooms, buildings enforce products rather than principles. When teachers enter administration, they spearhead consumption. It's a vicious cycle. Nobody truly learns.

Scripted teaching implies unknowable material. Teachers can't know their subjects, but they can read scripts. Corporations know all. So grab your sunglasses: All authority rests on corporate materials. Purchase and obey. Following with "fidelity" implies marriage, vows, and adultery for thinking otherwise.

Tested writing acts like a monoculture. Nothing else exists. In nature, industrial agriculture degrades soil and destroys biodiversity. Ecosystems crumble. In education, industrial farming of the mind degrades human potential. Society crumbles. In both, short-lived booms summon drought and dust.

Aside: Tested writing isn't exactly academic either. In academia, every convention from quotations to citations to style extends thinking across time like a conversation. In essentials, academic writing uses essays-as-letters, moving from inquiry to investigations to insight, authors responding to authors. Humanity needs academic writing! But five-paragraph thinking resembles neither letters nor research articles. Try a five-paragraph dissertation!

So if the default is "tested" writing, what do we call stories? Why, "creative" writing, of course!

Creative Music and Boring Writing

This “creative” writing distinction carries so many connotations: additional, extra, superfluous, nonessential. Useless. “Creative” justifies a taxonomy of exclusion. To true believers, only testing grants validity. It’s irrelevant whether communication itself is “creative.” It’s irrelevant whether tested writing applies elsewhere.

Notice we never call songs "creative music" or artwork "creative painting." Creativity is implied. We message into mediums, but the artistic mediums enrich our lives. They train the senses and pursue beauty. Emotions spill into song and dance while events memorialize as images.

Notice we also never praise tested writing as "boring writing." Being colorless, uninteresting, and droll is likewise implied. It's just "writing." The only writing. For many, just seeing limitations screams deviance and heresy. Tested writing acts liturgically with other religious notions like academic standards. So follow your standards with horse-blinders, practice dead-level abstracting, and never question.

Besides: Questioning isn't a standard.

And so the blank page never becomes the blank canvas. Schools teach disconnection: Speech never becomes text. Only one medium exists. Expression means song, dance, and drawing, but never writing. Novels move history like earthquakes, yet we disregard storytelling like finger painting. Take "creative" writing if your schedule allows.

Instead, every literate act exists within the grid of standards—political, prescriptive, and punishable. All learning must be measured like GDP. Nothing exists for its own sake. We banish the beauty from literature with Lexile levels and reading guides. Melville wrote Moby Dick for eleventh grade English, you guys. See the stamp?

Music or Just Notes?

Simply adding more stories misses the point. The error rests much deeper philosophically, I'm afraid. Fresh paint can't fix broken foundations. We need shovels and mirrors, excavation and reflection. Our policies create problems so simple, they're nearly invisible. Our premises lead to inescapable conclusions, yet we can't question cause and effect.

Wherein lies the issue? In short: Policy forces pedagogy to distort whole-part relationships.

Imagine teaching other things like we teach writing: History would feature people without events. Band would play notes and dynamics without playing music. Art would form lines without drawing pictures. Track would move arms and legs independently without running. And perhaps construction would start with roofs.

Sound absurd? Maybe so. Isolation always distorts complexity. Parts need wholes and context provides perspective. Most times, one plus one equals two, but other times, synergy rules. One plus one equals three. Isolation teaches at a loss. Grab a Linguistics book: Language is complex. Now grab a poetry book: Language is beautiful. Reconstructing complexity without context fails every time.

Let's focus on music: Music reduces to notes, yet musicians never play just notes. They play notes together. Playing just notes means never playing music. If you play just notes long enough, psychology takes over and music becomes unreachable. Ready for a crazy thought? Improving music means playing music.

Now translate this idea to writing.

Many English teachers claim the following: "I can't teach writing, I have to teach spelling. I can't teach writing, I have to teach grammar. I can't teach writing, I have to teach vocabulary." And so on. This sounds reasonable. By all means, teach spelling and grammar and vocabulary. (I do!) But divorced from writing, they're just notes. If improving music means playing music, then improving writing means actually writing.

As a shortcut, if isolation means distortion, tested-writing exists isolated from all other writing.

Consider the average rehearsal: Band directors don't need formal lesson plans or objectives to improve groups. Certainly no "I can" nonsense. Instead, musicians play through music and stop when they have trouble. They move from wholes to parts. The focus is descriptive, not prescriptive. Playing notes without music accomplishes nothing.

Now translate this idea to writing.

What if you only had thirty minutes to teach language? Prevailing wisdom says devote ten minutes each to spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. Maybe this might address student gaps? Then oops! No time for application. So why not start in application, write for ten minutes, then spend twenty in discussion and revision? Rather than pre-teach problems students may not face, addressing individual problems yields far greater return without the paperwork.

If teaching to actual problems seems controversial, we need to admit our directives are fundamentally flawed.

Principles over Programs

Philosophy determines marketing slogan. Follow tested-writing upstream and you'll find academic standards. The headwaters rise from the assumption we can legislate intelligence as numerical output. Once we decree every student the same, one-size-fits-all policy translates to product and pedagogy. Entire multi-billion dollar industries profit from this core assumption.

And just as Big Pharma prefers pills to nutrition, Big Textbooks and Big Testing prefer programs to principles. Subscribe forever. Independent, knowledgeable teachers help these companies no more than the healthy help the pill pushers.

Creative writing doesn't exist because educational policies imprison the written word. Tested writing smells like stagnant pond water. Until writing flows from speaking and spills into other mediums, reality demands aeration. We need a more simple design philosophy. We need integration, not isolation. We need principles, not products. We need permaculture of the mind.

Humans speak in stories—in creative writing. So what if we sourced writing from and around speech? What if we dropped the "pre" in pre-writing and students just wrote? What if we transformed ideas across mediums? What if writing-as-speech removed barriers? What if we began with interviews, letters, or drama and then moved to the essay?

What if we open-sourced language teaching?

Blank pages and ink will always cost money. Beyond that, however, improvement doesn't require fancy steps or software. It's far less linear or formal than people think. If we move beyond tested writing, if we ground writing in speech, the blank page as blank canvas opens new worlds for all. And for pennies compared to textbooks!

Again, I'm not advocating a stories-only approach. Just not a test-only approach. That’s it. Integrate other mediums. Begin writing in discussion then move to speech-oriented mediums before essays. Students act far less constrained thinking aloud to friends than beginning with convention-heavy essays.

English isn't like Math, but Music. As medium, the blank page exists like sheet music and marble. Only Art balances the simplicity and complexity of language. Only Art balances mechanics and meaning. Only Art balances parts and wholes, syntax and structure. And only Art invites writing as a lifetime pursuit, far beyond test scores and bells.

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🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

What if students improved rapidly by writing for other students? While I’ve explored this question across many posts, this spring I rewrote the gist as a conference proposal. And apparently it’s done well.

This talk has been accepted by the Keep Indiana Learning Convention, Lafayette Ignite, and the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention in Denver. (I'm really jazzed about the NCTE!)

This talk has three parts: 1. Action-Response > 2. Collect, Compile, Create > 3. Ten Workflows.

This post will summarize key points from Parts 1 and 2, while a future post will go in-depth for Part 3 along with checklists. Since my talk will mention resources, this post will insert them along the way. And when I consider spin-off topics, I might explore this theme for a while.

PowerPoint (PDF)

Infographic (PDF)

Part I: James Moffett's Action-Response

In Teaching the Universe of Discourse, James Moffett contrasts two models of writing: error avoidance and action-response. Error avoidance is traditional: Teachers front-load instruction, pre-teach mistakes, and treat errors as enemies. Students write for teachers. Writing is solitary, not social.

Moffett finds this backwards: Why teach solutions to problems students haven't faced? What if these mistakes don't apply? This all but forces students to ask why. What would he suggest? I'll quote Moffett in full:

The learner simply plunges into the assignment, uses all his resources, makes errors where he must, and heeds the feedback. In this action-response learning, errors are valuable; they are the essential learning instrument. They are not despised or penalized. (199)

If he learns everything the hard way, doesn't he get discouraged by his mistakes? For one thing, trial-and-error makes for more success in the long run because it is accurate, specific, individual, and timely. For another, if the teacher in some way sequences the trials so that learning is transferred from one to the next, the student writer accumulates a more effective guiding experience than if one tried to guide him by preteaching. (200)

Moffett places action before explanation, problem before solution. Teaching therefore happens in response through feedback. But feedback isn't limited to teachers: Here students write for students. This embraces writing as a social rather than solitary act. Teachers give directions, but student mistakes give details.

Note: Many writing mistakes prove predictable like an obstacle course. As such, if we structure tasks correctly, feedback repurposes itself from otherwise planned teaching. This isn't discovery learning in disguise, but explicit instruction waiting as solutions to student-generated problems.

Moffett suggests three applications: projecting papers for whole-class discussions (196-197), small group responses to papers (197), and chaining tasks together (200).

Chaining deserves special attention. He suggests "meaningful trials... in a meaningful order... to arrange for a feedback that insures the maximum exploitation of error" (199). Chaining also means "one paper is adapted into another" (200). So start with journals and move to scripts and end with plays.

⭐️ So lead with action, teach to actual problems, and connect tasks across time. Some mistakes prove task-dependent, but let tasks reveal them. Let creation build context. One-off projects accumulate nothing. So abandon linear mapping and build webs across works instead.

How does this work in action? I'll give two examples from my classroom, the second being unexpected but welcome.

One, in August we practice dialogue through transformation. We watch video clips, transcribe them into script form, then rewrite them in prose with quotation marks. This previews introducing quotations and later speech-as-evidence. Each step in transformation teaches conventions through contrast, using conversions to explicitly discuss rules. The steps go as follows:

Speech Progression

1. encoding (as a script) > 2. rewrite in prose > 3. introducing quotes > 4. quotes-as-evidence

Two, action-response produces gains in spelling through daily writing and regular discussions. Here's how. First, my students begin each class with journals, previewing or reviewing topics. We grade them together in weekly conferences for length and being on-task. Each week I circle and discuss mistakes, but otherwise forgive them. This includes spelling. Second, I collect and project spelling mistakes from other assignments. Each discussion feeds the next.

Together, transformation and discussion allow feedback to accumulate across tasks. Each year students self-report massive gains, and I'm always inclined to agree. Beyond outlining tasks, explicit instruction occurs as explicit feedback.

For more, see my post, "Teach Writing Reactively (James Moffett’s Action-Response Model)"

Part II: Collect > Compile > Curate

Overview: Teaching with Student Writing

How do you teach with student writing? James Moffett's action-response provides solid principles, yet skips concrete particulars. (His writing does this.)

Instead, let's rephrase it: What steps help teach with student writing? Moving from attitudes to actions, I'll give an early answer: By immersion. We must become students of student writing. Nothing must surprise us. We should recite mistakes for tasks like others recite sports scores. Once we become the leading authorities, we can curate examples with confidence.

Teaching with student writing has three main steps: collect, compile, and curate. I won't mince words: The first two steps take time to implement. I'd say a year. Initially collecting writing feels like thinking about breathing or blinking. Awareness paralyzes. But habits become automatic. Once collecting and compiling feel natural, curation feels like a joy.

What does this look like?

• Collecting means crowdsourcing and organizing. Imagine packing for a trip. (Or making papers face the same way?) As a goal this means preparing raw files, aligning file types, and imposing naming schemes. As a maxim this means getting to copy-paste as fast as possible.

• Compiling aims for easily searchable archives. In practice, I manage three distinct mega folders: raw documents (sorted by class, by year, and by assignment), combined documents, and scanned writing. Microsoft Word simplifies this through "Insert text from file."

• Curating aims to embed writing throughout the process. Since action-response rejects pre-teaching errors, writing samples instead provide material to critique in later repetitions. Curation creates focused discussions, released responses, and printable workshops.

Aside: If you’re not familiar with my Google Forms Discussions, students respond using Google Forms and teachers project the results anonymously on the board. Teachers give feedback in real time and archive the responses for later. Check out “Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing.”

Step 1: Collecting

Collecting work often feels like packing. Initially you select and arrange, but arranging isn’t itself packing. Sometimes more thought goes into selecting than stuffing. If you’re packing clothes, arranging shirts neatly and uniformly beats being wadded up. Yet this somehow needs stated for our digital lives.

Let's start with how NOT to collect writing: Saving everything without organization. For physical tasks this means passing nothing back, creating clutter piles, and closing feedback loops. For digital tasks this means collecting to chaos.

Consider the math: Let's say 100 students just hit "Share." Just 10 things mean 1000 unique shares. One thousand shares! Folks, that destroys your Shared drive! That's 5000 files over five yers! And without naming schemes, creating folders becomes questionable.

⭐️ How does collecting work? Be more specific: What do we save and how do we save it? In short: Save the big and small, but not all. Save selectively and save for the future. Save anything typed but some things hand written. This means saving everything from Google Forms or Google Docs, but saving selectively from mid-sized, handwritten tasks.

As a goal this means preparing raw files, aligning file types, and imposing naming schemes. As a maxim this means getting to copy-paste as fast as possible.

For me, I save anything typed like Google Forms, essays, letters, and dialogues. I scan some handwritten tasks like introduction exercises or literature quizzes. I read and ruminate, study and scribble, learning from their writing just like they’re learning to write. Learning moves in endless feedback loops, students to teachers, teachers to students, task to task.

Aside: And sometimes, when students struggle and examples seem sparse, I purposely crowdsource bad examples. Check out my recent post on rule breaking discussions:

Let's talk logistics.

How do you make digital archives possible? Make files match! The first weeks of school mean tutorials for file management, word processing, MLA formatting, creating templates, and submitting work. All digital tasks share similar naming schemes, and all tasks export as Word files. Since we revisit tasks, file names count as points. (I’m cold and merciless in grading file names, but it helps find files in a pinch.)

💾 Aside: How do you teach Google Docs? Check out my workshop!

How do you handle physical tasks? I scan paper quizzes and some introductory tasks, always at the highest quality. The key lies in scanning selectively and avoiding busy times at the copier. While scanning only takes five minutes, five minutes work better immediately after school rather than during prep.

Note: I never mix downloaded and scanned files since the file sizes vary so widely.

Remember: Archives, like houses, aren’t built at once. Instead, they’re built brick by brick, task by task, file by file. While you won’t start Year One with released responses, discussing ongoing samples has similar effects. In the meantime, imposing predictable naming schemes and submission procedures (file types) helps organize your digital lives.

Step 2: Compiling

Let's revisit those absurd Shares: If 100 students only shared 10 things, that's 1000 shares. Rereading any task means double clicking each individual file. Over time, numbers create complexity. How do we manage? Make them useful.

I maintain three mega folders for student work: raw files, compiled files, and scanned work. This means downloading local copies from Canvas and sorting into folders by class, by year, and by assignment. While student naming schemes sort alphabetically, class naming schemes sort by time.

Note: Once I download raw files from Canvas, I leave them alone.

Spoken, student naming schemes as "Last First dash Title" without spaces. So "Kent Clark dash Final." When compiled into folders and consolidated using Microsoft Word, my naming schemes go "YEAR space MONTH dash DAY space title." (Which sounds intimidating!) So "2025 space FIVE dash TWENTY-FIVE space FINAL."

Main Folders

• 1. Raw Downloaded Work (by class, by year, by assignment)

• 2. Compiled Work (assignment folders collapse dozens of files to one)

• 3. Scanned Work

Naming Schemes

• For Students: LastFirst-Title (KentClark-Final)

• For Teachers: Year Month-Day Title (2025 5-25 Final)

But this invites complexity: If assignment folders hold one hundred files each, reading them becomes cumbersome. Imagine double clicking and closing each file to read them! Too bad you can't just merge one hundred files to one. Or can you?

How does Microsoft Word merge files in seconds? Just open a new document and hit Insert > Object > Text from file and select the range (from the folder). While Word can theoretically handle 100 files at once, I go A to M and N to Z. Sadly, this only works with PCs.

However, basic MLA formatting creates a problem: Spacing. Imagine the size twelve, double spacing as the air in a bag of potato chips! So instead I change to size elven, single spaced, and begin each response on a new page. This means moving the cursor to the start and hitting Insert New Page with Control + Enter.

Where do merged files go? To a compilation folder, effectively creating a single timeline for classes across years and tasks. Each file represents one assignment with many responses. This second folder reduces and renders thousands of files to easy accessibility.

Where do scanned files go? To a third folder which functions like the second. Since file titles should mirror downloaded work, navigation proves easy.

Note: Since Google Forms Discussions begin online, I merge them into a yearly spreadsheet and leave them. This saves time creating files online.

⭐️ Together, collecting leads to compiling and organization accounts for complexity over time. Tweak the process where you need it, but consolidating files into a timeline should create a rich database of student writing. However, creating a database does nothing without action. It’s how you curate the samples that ultimately matters.

Step 3: Curate

Curation implies art. The verb means “to select the best or most appropriate.” We curate into publications or galleries. While the reality means the former (publications), I prefer the latter (galleries). Art often forces conversations. And here, conversations matter.

Let’s start with some application. The following thesis statements were inspired by an essay test over “Flowers for Algernon,” asking which character was the most dynamic. What do you notice about them? (Note: I begin with thesis statements a what because of a why.)

• 1. Charlie was.

• 2. Charlie was the most dynamic character.

• 3. Charlie was because his intelligence went up and down.

• 4. Joe and Frank were the most dynamic characters because they go from bullies to friends.

• 5. Charlie goes from mentally disable to a genius.

Curation requires a careful eye. You can always display old Google Forms Discussions, but sifting through filler or distracting responses takes time. Since action-response discourages pre-teaching mistakes, examples help train. Applied literally, curation recycles past writing for discussion and response.

⭐️ What do you curate? Mix the good and the bad, the long and the short, the focused and the off-topic. Interleave responses for student critique, using them for trail and error. These ranges—good and bad, long and short, focused and not—themselves mix. So include ideal responses along with long and bad, short and good, in between and unfocused, and so on.

Now for several asides:

• Never show student names on responses. Never. And be wary of siblings year to year.

• If anyone wants a checklist for curating writing, I have one sketched on the back of an envelope. Maybe for a follow up post? Curation bingo?

Where do you curate? Moffett suggested (a) displaying responses for whole-class discussion and (b) responding to papers in small groups. From here, I favor several places:

• 1. Curated Discussions. Use varied responses as review.

• 2. Printable Workshops. Short workshops include responding to specific skills like thesis statements while longer workshops include writing letters as feedback to a single essay.

• 3. Released Responses. Students read released items before essay tests or longer writings. This builds context and fills gaps left by teacher talk.

• 4. Peer Review. Students read responses to each other and progress through checklists of common mistakes.

In addition, I require mid-draft submissions to capture raw mistakes before I've had a chance for in-depth feedback. Compiling responses in media res allows for more accurate whole-class feedback mid-task.

Together, this three step process of collect, compile, and curate helps translate Moffett’s action-response from principles to practice. As students write for other students, real audiences with real feedback force them to evolve in real time. Meanwhile, starting from student examples leads to richer, more enjoyable teaching. The work upfront always pays off handsomely.

Part III: Ten Workflows (Preview)

So let’s pretend you’ve spent a year collecting, compiling, and curating. It’s Year Two. How does student writing translate as lesson plans? This final part will suggest ten applications for tomorrow’s class. But first, we will need to define a few terms…

Glossary

• Google Forms Discussion: students submit responses on Google Forms while the teacher displays the results (anonymously) in real time for feedback

• writing workshop: students reading and responding to student writing; sources come from past responses as well as working responses

• peer review: in pairs, students read writing back to the owner and progress through short checklists with common errors

• responding: writing about writing, sometimes with strict

• timed writes: any silent, time-constrained, focused writing time

• annotate: when students proof and mark up other writing

Ten Example Workflows

These workflows were designed to form the backbone to lesson plans. As such, feel free to bend them, break them, or balance them with other topics.

• 1. write > lesson > GFD

• 2. review (GFD) > work

• 3. read > respond > discuss

• 4. peer review > discuss > work

• 5. timed write > peer review > discuss

• 6. time write > read-reread-respond > discuss

• 7. workshop (ongoing) > annotate > discuss

• 8. work > GFD > discuss

• 9. workshop > GFD > discuss > work

• 10. peer review > GFD > discuss > work

To be continued...

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🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

In my post “How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again),” I described a thought experiment which applied metacognition to lesson planning. The result? Most planning reduces to predictable mental steps. Once we know the topic (direction), we remember relevant activities and sequence them accordingly. But planning comes with pitfalls: predictability.

Some associations always naturally follow. We habitually re-create as conventions constrain. And while predictable means stable, too much predictable means boring. Creativity sparks when blurring the line between signal and noise. The absurd widens our horizons. Forging new connections requires conscious effort—it requires escape velocity.

Why would anyone want random lesson plans? Because they might just reveal novel combinations when your creativity seems lacking. Besides, this shifts the effort from remembering and sequencing to evaluating.

I generated the following with Excel. Not AI. Rather than waste effort recalling and sequencing, this sheet combined with reckless abandon. Effort shifts from creation to evaluation, recognizing novel combinations, sifting the signal from the noise. Just ignore the duplicates and try the following:

• 1. Read up and down, left and right, and diagonally, looking for unlikely options.

• 2. Read activities categorically, replacing them with more specific activities.

• 3. Eliminate options, making them fit your allotted class time.

Each set contains thirty examples each:

• Set 1. Reading, Writing, and Discussion. This set begins with basic, categorical activities.

• Set 2. Reading, Writing, Discussion, and Work Time. This set adds Work Time.

• Set 3. Discussion Focused. This set adds Partner Talk, Think-Pair-Share, and Socratic Discussions.

• Set 4. Drama Focused. This set condenses reading to Reading as Scripts and adds staging scenes to Whole-Class Discussions.

Eventually I’ll work towards a purposeful lesson plan starter pack that includes 100+ purposeful plans with a workflow similar to this post.

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Set 1: Reading, Writing, and Discussion

1. Reflection, Reflection, Partner Writing, Class Writing, Writing Alone, Partner Writing, Reflection

2. Class Writing, Class Writing, Silent Reading , Writing Alone, Class Writing, Partner Writing, Class Discussion

3. Silent Reading , Group Writing, Group Reading, Silent Reading , Class Writing, Partner Discussion, Group Writing

4. Class Discussion, Partner Reading, Class Writing, Partner Reading, Group Discussion, Reflection, Group Writing

5. Partner Writing, Group Reading, Group Writing, Class Writing, Group Reading, Writing Alone, Class Writing

6. Group Reading, Partner Discussion, Writing Alone, Class Reading, Writing Alone, Reflection, Partner Reading

7. Group Discussion, Class Writing, Group Reading, Class Discussion, Group Writing, Writing Alone, Writing Alone

8. Partner Writing, Writing Alone, Group Writing, Partner Writing, Partner Reading, Partner Discussion, Class Writing

9. Silent Reading , Class Discussion, Writing Alone, Group Reading, Class Reading, Class Discussion, Silent Reading

10. Group Writing, Reflection, Class Reading, Partner Reading, Class Writing, Silent Reading , Silent Reading

11. Class Reading, Reflection, Partner Reading, Group Writing, Reflection, Class Reading, Class Discussion

12. Class Discussion, Reflection, Group Reading, Partner Reading, Group Discussion, Group Writing, Silent Reading

13. Group Reading, Partner Discussion, Silent Reading , Group Writing, Partner Reading, Class Writing, Reflection

14. Class Reading, Silent Reading , Partner Discussion, Reflection, Partner Reading, Class Discussion, Partner Reading

15. Partner Writing, Class Reading, Partner Reading, Group Discussion, Class Writing, Partner Discussion, Partner Discussion

16. Partner Writing, Group Discussion, Class Reading, Class Reading, Class Writing, Class Reading, Writing Alone

17. Silent Reading , Group Writing, Class Discussion, Writing Alone, Class Reading, Group Reading, Group Discussion

18. Group Discussion, Class Writing, Class Writing, Partner Discussion, Partner Writing, Writing Alone, Partner Writing

19. Silent Reading , Class Discussion, Partner Discussion, Group Discussion, Class Reading, Partner Writing, Partner Writing

20. Class Writing, Class Writing, Partner Reading, Class Reading, Partner Discussion, Class Reading, Class Discussion

21. Group Writing, Partner Discussion, Reflection, Partner Discussion, Class Reading, Class Discussion, Class Writing

22. Partner Writing, Class Writing, Group Writing, Class Writing, Reflection, Class Reading, Class Writing

23. Partner Reading, Silent Reading , Class Writing, Reflection, Reflection, Partner Discussion, Class Reading

24. Partner Writing, Group Writing, Group Writing, Class Discussion, Partner Writing, Group Discussion, Class Discussion

25. Partner Discussion, Silent Reading , Class Writing, Partner Writing, Class Discussion, Partner Reading, Class Discussion

26. Class Reading, Silent Reading , Group Writing, Group Reading, Partner Discussion, Silent Reading , Partner Discussion

27. Group Discussion, Class Writing, Partner Discussion, Group Writing, Partner Writing, Reflection, Group Writing

28. Silent Reading , Class Reading, Partner Reading, Reflection, Group Writing, Partner Discussion, Group Writing

29. Class Reading, Silent Reading , Partner Reading, Reflection, Reflection, Silent Reading , Class Reading

30. Partner Discussion, Writing Alone, Class Writing, Silent Reading , Partner Discussion, Partner Discussion, Group Writing

Set 2: Reading, Writing, Discussion, and Work Time

1. Partner Discussion, Group Reading, Partner Reading, Partner Discussion, Work Time, Partner Reading, Class Reading

2. Group Writing, Reflection, Class Writing, Partner Reading, Work Time, Partner Reading, Group Reading

3. Partner Discussion, Silent Reading , Partner Reading, Work Time, Partner Discussion, Group Discussion, Silent Reading

4. Writing Alone, Group Discussion, Work Time, Reflection, Partner Writing, Class Discussion, Class Reading

5. Partner Reading, Class Writing, Group Discussion, Silent Reading , Partner Reading, Work Time, Writing Alone

6. Group Reading, Class Discussion, Group Writing, Work Time, Class Discussion, Reflection, Class Discussion

7. Group Reading, Group Writing, Group Discussion, Work Time, Group Discussion, Partner Discussion, Partner Discussion

8. Silent Reading , Class Discussion, Work Time, Work Time, Class Reading, Partner Discussion, Reflection

9. Class Reading, Partner Discussion, Work Time, Class Writing, Class Writing, Group Writing, Partner Writing

10. Partner Discussion, Class Writing, Partner Writing, Group Discussion, Class Writing, Partner Writing, Work Time

11. Class Writing, Class Reading, Class Writing, Writing Alone, Work Time, Writing Alone, Writing Alone

12. Class Discussion, Partner Writing, Work Time, Group Reading, Group Discussion, Writing Alone, Work Time

13. Group Reading, Work Time, Group Writing, Silent Reading , Class Reading, Partner Reading, Partner Discussion

14. Group Reading, Partner Writing, Reflection, Writing Alone, Group Discussion, Work Time, Class Discussion

15. Partner Reading, Group Reading, Class Reading, Reflection, Group Writing, Work Time, Group Reading

16. Group Writing, Partner Reading, Partner Discussion, Reflection, Writing Alone, Work Time, Class Reading

17. Partner Discussion, Group Discussion, Writing Alone, Class Reading, Group Writing, Partner Discussion, Reflection

18. Group Discussion, Class Discussion, Work Time, Writing Alone, Writing Alone, Partner Discussion, Silent Reading

19. Group Writing, Group Discussion, Silent Reading , Partner Writing, Work Time, Group Discussion, Class Reading

20. Class Writing, Group Writing, Partner Writing, Group Writing, Class Discussion, Group Writing, Work Time

21. Partner Writing, Work Time, Partner Discussion, Partner Writing, Group Reading, Group Writing, Partner Discussion

22. Group Discussion, Silent Reading , Writing Alone, Work Time, Group Reading, Group Reading, Group Discussion

23. Class Writing, Writing Alone, Group Reading, Class Reading, Work Time, Class Writing, Reflection

24. Partner Reading, Class Discussion, Silent Reading , Group Reading, Writing Alone, Work Time, Partner Reading

25. Work Time, Partner Reading, Group Discussion, Reflection, Partner Discussion, Class Reading, Reflection

26. Partner Reading, Class Discussion, Work Time, Silent Reading , Class Discussion, Partner Discussion, Partner Reading

27. Writing Alone, Reflection, Class Discussion, Work Time, Group Writing, Class Reading, Class Writing

28. Partner Discussion, Class Writing, Partner Reading, Class Discussion, Work Time, Silent Reading , Reflection

29. Partner Writing, Group Writing, Work Time, Class Reading, Group Reading, Partner Writing, Reflection

30. Group Writing, Partner Discussion, Work Time, Partner Writing, Group Reading, Partner Discussion, Group Discussion

Set 3: Discussion Focused

1. Partner Writing, Writing Alone, Silent Reading , Think-Pair-Share, Partner Talk, Socratic Discussion, Reflection

2. Class Reading, Socratic Discussion, Socratic Discussion, Class Reading, Group Writing, Group Reading, Class Writing

3. Socratic Discussion, Silent Reading , Class Writing, Silent Reading , Group Discussion, Group Writing, Think-Pair-Share

4. Group Discussion, Writing Alone, Partner Writing, Reflection, Partner Writing, Partner Writing, Think-Pair-Share

5. Silent Reading , Group Reading, Think-Pair-Share, Socratic Discussion, Class Writing, Socratic Discussion, Silent Reading

6. Group Writing, Socratic Discussion, Socratic Discussion, Partner Talk, Group Discussion, Class Writing, Group Writing

7. Think-Pair-Share, Writing Alone, Socratic Discussion, Partner Writing, Class Writing, Reflection, Socratic Discussion

8. Writing Alone, Silent Reading , Partner Writing, Class Writing, Partner Talk, Socratic Discussion, Think-Pair-Share

9. Class Writing, Class Discussion, Group Discussion, Socratic Discussion, Group Discussion, Partner Writing, Writing Alone

10. Group Discussion, Class Writing, Partner Talk, Group Discussion, Group Discussion, Partner Writing, Partner Discussion

11. Group Discussion, Think-Pair-Share, Socratic Discussion, Writing Alone, Think-Pair-Share, Class Reading, Group Writing

12. Reflection, Reflection, Socratic Discussion, Partner Writing, Silent Reading , Think-Pair-Share, Partner Writing

13. Reflection, Partner Writing, Class Discussion, Think-Pair-Share, Class Writing, Silent Reading , Group Discussion

14. Think-Pair-Share, Partner Writing, Reflection, Think-Pair-Share, Writing Alone, Partner Writing, Class Discussion

15. Group Reading, Group Writing, Writing Alone, Writing Alone, Class Writing, Think-Pair-Share, Think-Pair-Share

16. Group Writing, Group Writing, Group Discussion, Think-Pair-Share, Socratic Discussion, Class Writing, Class Discussion

17. Socratic Discussion, Silent Reading , Socratic Discussion, Group Reading, Writing Alone, Group Discussion, Socratic Discussion

18. Partner Discussion, Writing Alone, Writing Alone, Silent Reading , Partner Writing, Reflection, Partner Talk

19. Think-Pair-Share, Group Reading, Group Writing, Think-Pair-Share, Partner Talk, Writing Alone, Partner Discussion

20. Partner Talk, Partner Writing, Writing Alone, Silent Reading , Group Reading, Writing Alone, Socratic Discussion

21. Partner Talk, Group Discussion, Group Discussion, Silent Reading , Class Writing, Writing Alone, Group Discussion

22. Class Discussion, Socratic Discussion, Silent Reading , Partner Discussion, Group Reading, Group Reading, Writing Alone

23. Think-Pair-Share, Partner Talk, Group Discussion, Partner Discussion, Group Discussion, Group Writing, Group Reading

24. Group Writing, Group Reading, Think-Pair-Share, Class Discussion, Silent Reading , Class Reading, Partner Talk

25. Class Writing, Partner Discussion, Partner Talk, Reflection, Class Writing, Socratic Discussion, Think-Pair-Share

26. Partner Discussion, Class Writing, Socratic Discussion, Class Writing, Partner Discussion, Socratic Discussion, Partner Writing

27. Class Writing, Group Reading, Think-Pair-Share, Class Discussion, Class Writing, Group Writing, Group Reading

28. Class Discussion, Reflection, Partner Discussion, Socratic Discussion, Class Writing, Group Reading, Class Reading

29. Think-Pair-Share, Class Discussion, Class Reading, Think-Pair-Share, Writing Alone, Partner Talk, Think-Pair-Share

30. Partner Discussion, Reflection, Class Reading, Reflection, Partner Writing, Socratic Discussion, Silent Reading

Set 4: Drama Focused

Disclaimer: I’m no drama kid, but acting a text does wonders with comprehension. “What does that look like? Show me.”

1. Silent Reading, Partner Discussion, Silent Reading, Group Writing, Class Discussion (Acting)

2. Silent Reading, Partner Writing, Partner Discussion, Partner Discussion, Class Reading (Script)

3. Class Reading (Script), Class Writing, Group Writing, Class Writing, Class Discussion (Acting)

4. Group Discussion, Silent Reading, Class Reading (Script), Class Writing, Writing Alone

5. Class Writing, Class Reading (Script), Partner Writing, Silent Reading, Silent Reading

6. Silent Reading, Silent Reading, Group Writing, Class Reading (Script), Group Writing

7. Class Reading (Script), Group Discussion, Reflection, Reflection, Reflection

8. Group Discussion, Class Reading (Script), Class Reading (Script), Partner Discussion, Group Writing

9. Group Writing, Reflection, Class Reading (Script), Class Reading (Script), Group Discussion

10. Reflection, Class Reading (Script), Class Reading (Script), Group Writing, Group Writing

11. Partner Discussion, Class Reading (Script), Writing Alone, Class Writing, Class Discussion (Acting)

12. Reflection, Class Reading (Script), Group Writing, Silent Reading, Class Reading (Script)

13. Group Writing, Class Reading (Script), Class Discussion (Acting), Class Discussion (Acting), Partner Writing

14. Class Reading (Script), Writing Alone, Class Reading (Script), Class Reading (Script), Silent Reading

15. Group Writing, Class Writing, Class Writing, Reflection, Class Reading (Script)

16. Reflection, Group Discussion, Class Reading (Script), Group Discussion, Class Discussion (Acting)

17. Partner Writing, Reflection, Class Reading (Script), Writing Alone, Writing Alone

18. Class Reading (Script), Partner Writing, Class Discussion (Acting), Class Writing, Class Discussion (Acting)

19. Partner Writing, Writing Alone, Class Reading (Script), Reflection, Reflection

20. Silent Reading, Group Writing, Class Discussion (Acting), Partner Writing, Partner Writing

21. Class Reading (Script), Partner Writing, Silent Reading, Class Writing, Writing Alone

22. Silent Reading, Class Reading (Script), Class Reading (Script), Partner Writing, Silent Reading

23. Class Writing, Class Discussion (Acting), Class Reading (Script), Group Writing, Class Writing

24. Class Writing, Class Writing, Partner Discussion, Class Discussion (Acting), Class Reading (Script)

25. Class Reading (Script), Group Writing, Class Reading (Script), Silent Reading, Partner Discussion

26. Partner Discussion, Class Discussion (Acting), Partner Discussion, Partner Discussion, Group Writing

27. Class Reading (Script), Writing Alone, Class Reading (Script), Silent Reading, Class Reading (Script)

28. Partner Writing, Reflection, Partner Writing, Class Discussion (Acting), Partner Discussion

29. Class Discussion (Acting), Group Writing, Silent Reading, Partner Writing, Group Discussion

30. Class Reading (Script), Class Writing, Partner Writing, Group Discussion, Reflection

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The learner simply plunges into the assignment, uses all his resources, makes errors where he must, and heeds the feedback. In this action-response learning, errors are valuable; they are the essential learning instrument. They are not despised or penalized. (199)

If he learns everything the hard way, doesn't he get discouraged by his mistakes? For one thing, trial-and-error makes for more success in the long run because it is accurate, specific, individual, and timely. For another, if the teacher in some way sequences the trials so that learning is transferred from one to the next, the student writer accumulates a more effective guiding experience than if one tried to guide him by preteaching. (200)

In June I’ll present a talk called “How to Teach with Student Writing,” which blends previous posts about integrating technology. If those posts are the how, this post is the why. James Moffett’s action-response model places student action before explicit teaching. This allows students to create the context for instruction, meaning the reactionary becomes relevant.

What if we over-plan teaching writing? What if we plan for the wrong problems? What if lengthy lessons or time teaching deprives students of valuable experience? What if action should precede explanations? And what if all learning start with dialogue?

How It Works. In his chapter “Learn to Write by Writing,” James Moffett presents the action-response model of writing. Action-response flips the script for most: Students write and then teachers teach. He lists three “implications” to the model:

• 1. Begin with “trial and error” by “[p]lunging into an act” (198).

• 2. Do not “pre-teach problems and solutions” (199) to new tasks. Just act.

• 3. “[R]eject all prepared materials” (201). He then refutes writing textbooks.

The Big Picture. Action-response places actions before explanations. To Moffett, errors are "valuable" and "essential" (199). From this, experience creates context. Teaching becomes a response to demonstrated need. Students never have to ask why. Being reactionary creates relevance. Errors without reproof "define what is good" (200). “The difference,” he explains, “is between looking over your shoulder and looking where you are going” (199).

By contrast, error avoidance relies on negative motivation—of fearing mistakes. Teachers spend time pre-teaching mistakes and students begin with "good and bad ways." Even without a "system of rewards and punishments," errors become "enemies" (199). Textbooks aim the "mythical average student" rather than living, breathing students (202). Thus, reliance on prescribed materials means ignoring actual students.

Moffett presents three general applications for the model:

• 1. Whole class. Project papers on the board to discuss without judgments (196-197).

• 2. Small groups. Read and annotate papers with feedback (197).

• 3. Chain tasks together, allowing feedback to carry and build (200).

Yes, but. "Good teaching requires planning. Define your objectives. Make your directions clear. Do you seriously believe expectations are bad? Just tell the kids what you want. Besides, being reactive sounds like an excuse for being ill-prepared. Let alone being random and time-consuming. And you just don't teach without curriculum maps this century!"

💎 Instead. Moffett defends trial-and-error feedback as "accurate, specific, individual, and timely" (200). Consider which builds the most relevance: (a) Talking about writing without writing or (b) Reflecting on writing after writing. Pre-teaching solutions to problems students haven’t faced wastes time and squanders the experiences which create relevance.

Furthermore, Moffett suggests accumulating feedback through "meaningful trials... in a meaningful order... to arrange for a feedback that insures the maximum exploitation of error" (199). He suggests "chain-reaction assignments" like transforming one paper into another (200). If tasks do not connect, feedback cannot accumulate.

Aside. So does Moffett reject all explanations? Sort of. In practice I never explain where actions first generate context. But with falling literacy rates, some explanations are needed.

My Experiences. Action-response drives individual improvements in ways we can’t predict. Note this relies on feedback and chaining tasks. I’ll give two examples.

In August, a simple progression (chaining) grounds writing in speech and transforms dialogue across mediums. The experiences accumulate feedback quickly:

• Encoding. Students listen and transcribe dialogue in script form. We discuss what makes a sentence as we ground writing in speech.

• Transforming. Students rewrite the script into regular prose form. We discuss how to punctuate speech, how to integrate action, and so on.

• Quotations. Students practice locating important quotations. We discuss how to introduce, explain, and cite them. Note: Checklists work well here! (See below.)

• Summarizing. Students practice using quotations in summaries. We discuss how text structures support composition and comprehension.

Teaching Quotations with Checklists

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This example assignment, taken from the short story “The Medicine Bag,” demonstrates practicing explaining quotations with sentence stems and checklists.

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In May, I’m always shocked when student self-report improvement in spelling without formal lesson plans. How is this? Action-response explains it:

• Daily Journals. During weekly writing conferences, I annotate and discuss spelling mistakes without deducting points. This feedback accumulates.

• Group Feedback. After many assignments, I collect misspellings and project them on my board for discussion. This reenforces individual conferences.

• Periodic Reflection. While my students end each grading period with reflection letters, some journal prompts have students reread and proofread old responses.

On Feedback. “How is it possible for every member of a class of thirty to get an adequate amount of response?” he wonders. “Classmates are a natural audience” (193). As a preface, Moffett explains how writing represents a social, not solitary, activity. Live audiences provide timely, tangible benefits.

• Students write better for their peers than for teachers. Even if students lack technical explanations, discussions help “establish a consensus” (194).

• Student responses are more “candid” and in their “own terms” while teachers worry about “wound[ing]” students (194).

• Teachers help by “clarifying problems after students have encountered or raised them” (195). Without solutions, students resort to a “faultfinding sprit” (196).

• Moffett explains, “The role of the teacher, then, is to teach the students to teach each other. This also makes possible a lot more writing and a lot more response to the writing than a teacher could otherwise sponsor” (196). Thus, frequency of feedback leads to more frequent writing.

On Textbooks. Moffett's third implication rejects writing textbooks because they rely on error avoidance.

• He lists six issues: rejecting prescriptive or irrelevant advice (201), taxonomies of error (203), textbook exercises (204), professional models (207), writing stimulants (208), and the directions themselves (209).

• He observes textbooks exist for teachers, not students. They mask poor training and a general lack of knowledge.

The Bottom Line. The longer I teach, the more I connect, revisit, and revise tasks, shifting purpose and medium. This organic, student-created model rejects the overly prescribed and often irrelevant standards-driven model. Rather than plan around linear paths, we move around hub-like tasks across the year.

If I haven’t screamed it yet, academic standards undermine teaching writing. Period. They fail to account for the complexity of thinking and individuality in the writing process. As policy and pedagogy, they sit on rest on rhetorical mode—a category error. Furthermore, textbooks fail thanks to current traditional rhetoric. If we emphasized the “Art” in ELA, maintaining basic whole-part relationships, we could simplify and strengthen writing instruction.

References

Moffett, James. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. 2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982.

Further Reading. In the next month I'll hopefully blend this post with the following for my talk. If you would be interested in reading the full remarks, let me know in the comment section!

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (9/2024)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing (9/2024)

• Round Pegs, Square Holes, and Google Forms (11/2024)

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🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent starter pack as well as a Google Drive Folder with FREE classroom resources! Also, The Honest School Times has your schooling satire.

🏆 Fan Favorites

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

✏️ Teach Writing Tomorrow.

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)

• Let Speaking Teach Writing

📓 Other Writing Tricks

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

• Off topic essays? Try this easy intervention

• 50 Free Metaphorical Writing Prompts

As I ended last time, I posed several questions: What if colleges ditched the stereotypical fifteen page lesson plan? What if students began with a magazine-like book of lesson templates? What if lesson planning were like trying new recipes? What if students evaluated lesson plans like Math problems? ("Why won't this particular lesson work?")

But as I narrated my thought experiment, I mused about memory as reaching into our minds for playing cards. Then I wondered: What if teaching activities were cards? What if future teachers drew activities and arranged hands into the best lesson possible? What if they drew interruptions and adjusted in real time?

However, rather than retread the formal and systematic, imagination required something different. So read and pretend and maybe play along. Here’s a brief outline:

• Dialogue 1: Introducing Three Cards to Chaos.

• Download and Disclaimers

• Dialogue 2: A Lesson Planning Cookbook.

• Teacher’s Training as Fan Fiction

🎓 Since the intended audience includes new and future teachers, I would love to collaborate with teacher’s training programs!

Dialogue 1: Introducing Three Cards to Chaos

[Early fall. As fresh sunshine streams through the second story windows, students file through the door. A mower hums nearby, spitting emerald glass, still wet from the morning dew. Leaves sway in the breeze outside the window.]

1. Professor: Alright, class, get out your card decks. We're going to start with a few rounds of Three Cards to Chaos today.

2. Elliot: What will we be planning today?

3. Professor: English. [Clicks and a poem fills the screen.] An Emily Dickinson poem. [The class nods.] I'll give you a minute or two to read through it first.

4. Elliot: What are the rules again?

5. Professor: You will draw five cards, arrange a lesson (or hand), then discard two.

6. Elliot: Do we draw an interruption card now?

7. Professor: Not yet. So go ahead, read the poem, draw your cards, and I'll give you a five minutes before we regroup. [Five minutes pass. The students read and deal cards.] Alright, I want to hear from three volunteers. List your cards and explain the lesson.

8. Jocelyn: I drew Reading in Partners, Acting a Scene, then Writing as a Class.

9. Professor: Why would they act before the discussion?

10. Jocelyn: Acting means understanding what happened. So acting helps comprehension before writing, right?

11. Professor: Great! Next?

12. Imani: Mine wasn't as exciting. I had Silent Reading, Writing Alone, then Writing in Groups.

13. Professor: That might sound tough. What stands out?

14. Imani: Well, students would need multiple prompts, right? [The Professor nods.] So maybe they write reactions first? I'm not sure what goes after.

15. Professor: Remember, there's more to writing than reacting. Would anyone else have suggestions? What comes before analysis?

16. Elliot: What if the second prompt summarized the poem? Or maybe interpreted it?

17. Professor: Good! I need one more volunteer.

18. Otis: I got Reading as a Class, Writing Alone, and Socratic Discussion.

19. Professor: Why would that work?

20. Otis: So they start by reading together. Writing before the Socratic Discussion would help them focus ideas.

21. Professor: Let's pretend you drew two Writing Alone cards. What if we repeated it last?

22. Otis: Would students compare different opinions about the poem from the discussion?

23. Professor: Exactly! Now everyone draw an interruption card. [Some students groan while others cheer.] What do you have to deal with?

24. Otis: Oh no! I drew a Weather Delay.

25. Professor: How does that influence your lesson?

26. Otis: It says to remove one card. That might mean no Socratic discussion. Or at least a short one.

27. Professor: And what if you had to push it off to the next day?

28. Otis: That means something else gets moved.

29. Professor: And what if you planned every day solid?

30. Otis: Would that throw off the entire week?

31. Professor: It would. Anyone else?

32. Elliot: Mine said Fire Drill. Discard one card from the hand.

33. Professor: And that's the way it will go. Now that we've warmed up, get out your books...

Download and Disclaimers

This iteration aimed for the minimal viable product, creating the fewest cards for functional gameplay. This meant ignoring numerous possibilities. Please, please, please leave comments and suggestions, but read my own questions first.

• 1. Other Subjects. What's a reasonable deck size? Why not expand to other subjects? Should other subjects be expansion packs? What activities are truly subject-specific?

• 2. Generalist Potential. What if all teachers began training for all subjects? What activities apply to all subjects? What if specialization comes later (with expansions)?

• 3. Limited Activities. This deck contained the most general activity categories. Many, such as Writing Alone, represents dozens of possible activities. What categories did I miss?

• 4. Infinite Expansion (Science of...). Why not include evidence-based activities from The Sciences of Learning and Reading? (E.g., Review becomes Retrieval Practice.) Maybe generative learning frameworks?

• 5. Limited Interruptions. How many interruptions are too many? Why not include more creative or serious interruptions? Why not draw multiples?

• 6. Limited Gameplay. Why not include dice? Why not expand to roleplaying potential? Why not plan for multiple lessons?

• 7. Selecting Topics. How should lesson topics be chosen? (Dialogue 2 addresses this through proposing a general high school syllabus.)

Want to experiment with your own cards? Just halve an average notecard!

Three Cards to Chaos! (Concept)

350KB ∙ PDF file

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This game helps future teachers prepare for the classroom by drawing activity cards and creating strongest three card hand (lesson). But beware! Once players arrange their hand, they must draw interruption cards like Fire Drills or Weather Delays and adapt to the rules.

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Dialogue 2: A Lesson Planning Cookbook

If Three Cards to Chaos teaches lesson planning through play, this complementary volume explores planning through subject outlines and lesson plan templates. Think cookbook. All first year teachers would receive this book.

1. [A] Student: Professor, I don't understand this lesson planning book. Why does it start with a syllabus of high school itself? Why offer lesson plan steps without titles?

2. Professor: It's all about direction—of suggesting major topics you could teach. So what topics make Algebra or American History? Biology or British Literature? This syllabus outlines subjects like an atlas while lesson plans work as itineraries.

3. Student: Will we teach these topics verbatim someday?

4. Professor: Not exactly. This list isn't prescriptive, definitive, or canon. What will you teach someday? Nobody knows. This syllabus just paints big pictures.

5. [B] Student: What about the lesson plan section? Why explain teaching through cooking?

6. Professor: Pretend I've never seen a cookbook. What do they do?

7. Student: Cookbooks catalogue recipes and recipes list ingredients and steps. You buy cookbooks to learn how to cook.

8. Professor: Imagine starting with the blank page. Why recreate common recipes from scratch?

9. Student: I still don't understand. How does that connect to planning? I want to write my own lesson plans. Doesn't this just discourage creativity?

10. Professor: Not at all. In fact, this book should inspire creativity. Nothing limits anything here. Creativity doesn't always mean symphonies from nothing, but often altering or rearranging common conventions. Have you ever changed a recipe?

11. Student: Of course. I add and remove things all the time. Make it my own.

12. Professor: When do you stop using recipes?

13. Student: Once I know the steps.

14. Professor: So recipes begin as starting points but become guides?

15. Student: Yes.

16. Professor: Then read this teaching book like a cookbook: Find a recipe. Try it out. Then reflect. Start with the starting points until the recipes become references. Experience allows us to start from scratch.

17. Student: How could anyone write something like this?

18. Professor: This blends several thinking tools. Have you heard of brute force problem solving or the 80-20 Rule (Pareto principle)?

19. Student: I don't think so.

20. Professor: Brute force programs break computer passwords by methodically and systematically creating every possible combination—within a set range, of course. Brute forcing eats time, even for computers. As a fun case, several years ago some musician slash lawyers tried brute forcing—and copyrighting—every possible melody. It was a fun thought experiment.

21. Student: That's crazy. What about the 80-20 Rule?

22. Professor: Paraphrased, the 80-20 Rule says that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. Think Frequently Asked Questions: A majority of questions are the same questions. Addressing those 20% of things means 80% of the work.

23. Student: How does that apply for planning?

24. Professor: Each subject has subject-specific activities: Math does Math things, English does English things, Science does Science things, and so on. Lesson planning just sequences relevant activities. It's both creative and predictable. Does that make sense?

25. Student: It does.

26. Professor: This section leans into the predictable (mechanical) aspects and shifts mental effort forwards. It creates new starting points. Rather than fill the blank page, instead adapt relevant templates. Choose, not create.

27. Student: I think that makes sense.

28. Professor: So let's say these plans sequence predictable activities. Sometimes the same steps apply to many topics. You can read and discuss many stories. But variations—switching or moving activities—form different lesson plans. You can read, write, then discuss a story. So same steps, different stuff and different steps, same stuff.

29. Student: That makes sense.

30. Professor: Let’s think 80-20: Each lesson plan has many uses. So if one plan has ten uses and ten plans have one hundred uses, then several pages have thousands of uses. These pages seem abstract, but this magazine contains volumes.

31. [C] Student: Oh, then I guess I had it all backwards. [Pauses.] Why does the third section scramble the second?

32. Professor: If lesson plans contain conventional associations, this section seeks novel associations. It's a creativity booster.

33. Student: How does that work?

34. Professor: Try a word problem: What two words come after January?

35. Student: February and March. They're months.

36. Professor: Good. Some things naturally follow, like discussion after reading, but others don't.

37. Student: So instead of January to February, January to chicken?

38. Professor: [Laughs.] Not quite. But random associations bend towards novelty.

39. Student: How would you even read them?

40. Professor: Normally we'd read left to right. Here you'd read any which way: down to up, right to left, and diagonally. Look for things you'd otherwise never connect.

41. Student: That's unique…

Teacher’s Training as Fan Fiction

As a teacher, I can only speak for my own little carpet square. Voice my own experiences. This applies to my training as well. However, after so many years at the ground level, talking others pieces together a wider picture.

I get the why behind the stereotypical college lesson plan: Length accounts for missing context. Saying the invisible parts: What grade? What skill level? What activities? What standards? What will you say? What assessments? What extension activities? And so on.

But the stereotypical college lesson plan isn't quantity versus quality. It's relevance versus irrelevance. For starters, nobody writes 10+ page lessons for 180 contractual teaching days. Students study teaching without actually teaching. Many essays here function like fan fiction. Like writing travel blogs about places you've never been.

If comprehension relies on background knowledge, some living goes before learning. This explains why my training gained relevance after teaching. Not before.

So I'll say it again: Being a student of teaching isn't being a teacher of students. Teaching teaches teachers to teach. All else is studying school.

Teachers either stumble through on the job learning—or they quit. And considering many teachers teach, grade, and go home, relevant knowledge just floats on a vast ocean of folk wisdom. Lost like foamy flotsam. Unrecorded.

Yet others fake entire careers by reading scripts. You know, The Chinese Room applied to schooling. Content knowledge isn't just irrelevant, but dangerous if it means asking questions. Just follow the canned curriculum... with fidelity. Follow the pacing guide. Use the slides. Ask the prescribed questions. Use the answer key. Never question the corporate talking points.

In the meantime, relevant training isn't impossible. Or costly. What if teaching programs acted like Rosetta Stone between colleges and K12? What if professors engaged in meta-teaching and narrated logistics to a fault? What if students translated college syllabi to basic lesson plans? What if professors narrated how they created courses?

But I suppose that’s another post entirely.

💬 Until then, what do you think about this card game and cookbook? Useful? Crazy? Let me know in the comments section.

🔮 Next time I might publish 100+ MORE Random Lesson Plans. (I’ve just been sitting on them for a while.) And in the future, I'd love to publish 100 Actual Lesson Plan Templates, like my imagined book describes.

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New to the blog? Explore some other favorites!

✏️ Need a place to start? Check out my ongoing series, Teach Writing Tomorrow.

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

• 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies

📓 Want other tips for teaching writing? Check out some fan favorites.

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

🏆 And here are some other popular posts:

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

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Last Time: Teaching & Habitual Re-Creation

My first year of teaching began with a creativity crisis: I was boring. Students openly complained about doing the same activities over and over. The worst part? It wasn't for lack of effort—or materials—on my part. While many books cover content, teaching, and teaching content, few model teaching content. Few model actual lesson plans. I'd spend untold hours habitually re-creating the same activities. I needed a creative jolt, but couldn't find solutions in conventional materials.

III. The Thought Experiment (Part 1)

Months later, as December dawned, I grew more desperate. Still boring. Just months earlier, as my teaching program ended, I felt like I could do anything. Now, I could do nothing. And certainly nothing right. I just needed examples.

This time I stared at a blank notebook page, determined to solve this problem. My brain was swimming in a chaotic and combustible mix. Something was on the tip of my tongue, but I wasn't sure what. If I struggled lesson planning so much, what if I lesson planned once and never again?

What a stupid question! Then again, why not?

Exasperated, I scrawled the question across a blank page: What if I lesson planned once and never again?

Before starting in earnest, I wanted to walk around the problem.

How did I define my terms? What is a lesson plan? I began by rejecting the stereotypical fifteen page lesson plan from teaching programs. Useless. (Try that for 180 days...) Instead, zooming in and out, I framed it through travel: A syllabus acts like a calendar and lesson plans act like itineraries. Once you have general direction, lesson plans use schedules to sequence activities.

And perhaps itineraries worked like recipes—from packing lists and times to ingredients and steps.

How much do teachers plan for? Let’s approximate with some back of the envelope figures. Seven hours per day over 180 days means 1,260 hours or 52.5 days. Over thirty years, a full career, that’s 37,800 hours or 1,575 days. (Or 4.31 years.) Just three teaching activities per day for 180 days means 540 activities. Over thirty years that’s 16,200 activities.

What’s the most inefficient planning possible? If teaching is performing, then scripting every line minute by minute seems obvious. Since we take longer to write sentences than to speak them, scripting an hour of teaching would take more than an hour. So no scripting.

Note: Many years later I would begin scripting important lessons, comparing my dialogue to student results, input and output, before and after, cause and effect. But that's another story.

How does that work as information? Well, information is either new or review, presented or practiced. When I started teaching, the “flipped classroom” was all the rage. So this had me thinking: Information was experienced either in the classroom or at home. These in mind, I sketched a simple grid with PRESENT x PRACTICE and IN x OUT (of school) to get the following.

Figure 1. Activity x Location

These four categories represented the scope of planning. Present-In means covering new information in class while Practice-In means practicing old information in class. Present-Out means learning new information at home while Practice-Out means homework. Where was my focus? With some homework, balancing Present-Out and Practice-In. Maybe. This wasn’t anything earth-shattering, but I needed some sort of starting point.

Where do teaching books fail? Many function as encyclopedias rather than how to's. I could name activities, but only in disconnection. I knew whats without whens, wheres, and hows. So what did I know? Some activities worked early in teaching (entrance tickets), some worked late in teaching (exit tickets), and others fell in between. This in mind, I sketched four time blocks—before, during, after, and any. Then I started sorting.

Figure 2: Activity x Time Index (General to Specific)

The problem still remained: I lacked mental models. But a functional index helped, expanding whats to whens. I felt more confident with my materials. Sorting by time not only made my entire teaching library accessible, but I realized I could read from left to right with writing activities. Could that be useful? What if planning functioned as connecting?

How do veterans approach planning? I reflected on past conversations. Some teachers scratch the daily topic in a blank book and just teach. Others write detailed plans year after year, filling shelves with binders. Everyone else falls between extremes. Each group started from precedent, but while some relied on internal memory, others externalized it. And if the best activities moved forward year after year, precedent meant patterns.

New teachers can’t begin with experience. But what if they did? Browsing through binders would save years of creation. Instead, teachers could begin by selecting options and gaining experience from them—like following a cookbook. Starting from someone else's precedent was still precedent. Context, though, served the limiting factor. Why those lesson plans? When were they used? Who were they for? How were they received? How do teachers change?

I wondered: If we account for teaching styles and similar lessons, could these volumes simplify to pages? It’s unlikely each binder featured 180 unique lesson plans year after year. Since plans reduce to activity sequences, surely teachers favored some means of presenting and practicing information. Applying the 80-20 Rule or Pareto principle ensures that a handful of patterns repeat over time.

As I visualized sifting through binder after binder, I wondered: What if decades of plans reduced to fifteen pages? Or less than ten? Working backwards, could the right questions produce them a priori? If so, what mental steps do we follow to plan? It’s all assembling information, right?

Let's start with that ending point, I figured. How else does planning work as information?

First, English does English things, Math does Math things, Science does Science things, and so on. While some activities should be universal, not every activity is. Science performs labs and Band performs musical instruments. Yet overall, every subject contains predictable, subject-specific activities.

Second, let’s pretend we read a short story. We might read it, discuss it, and write about it. Cool. That particular order means a specific “lesson plan.” But if we mixed the steps, that variation becomes a different specific lesson plan. Cool. However, if we switch out the story and kept the same activities—or variations—those became new lesson plans.

Therefore, from an informational standpoint, I formulated the following statements:

• 1. All subjects have fairly predictable, content-specific activities.

• 2. Lesson plans sequence activities for given content. Two things follow:

• 3a. The same steps often recycle for different content. (Same steps, different stuff.)

• 3b. Different sequences become different lesson plans. (Different steps, same stuff.)

I circled back: What if I could lesson plan once and never again? Would I really need 180 unique lesson plans? Likely not. Likely far less.

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IV. The Thought Experiment (Part 2)

Now that I had a more solid foundation, I began meditating on the mental and mechanical steps of planning. The questions just spilled out: How did I plan? What steps did I follow? What steps consumed the most time? As input-output, why did I keep creating the same plans? Could charting my steps help chart new steps?

How do you lesson plan once? I let metacognition become mirror. Once I knew the daily topic, I imagined reaching into my mind and grasping for relevant activities. This meant finding one from all, one from many. Once I had that activity, I held it and repeated the process several times. Once I held around three activities, I toyed with variations and selected the best one.

Imagine planning as a card game: I'd recall the deck then retrieve relevant cards. Once I had three cards, I'd toy with variations, each sequence or hand representing a distinct "lesson plan." Yet recalling alone destroyed my mental energy. Even then, I'd forget cards and habitually re-create the same hand week after week with diminishing returns.

So which mental step took the most effort? Recall. I knew teaching activities but forgot them. My limited recall therefore had limited results. So if recall consumed the most time, I transformed the step into a writing activity: Name every teaching activity you know.

And so I scrawled, scribbled, and scratched. While the original paper has been lost to time, the activity inscribed itself to memory:

• reading as a class

• instant drafts

• reading in partners

• writing

• KWL (Know, Want to Know, Learned)

• entrance tickets

• exit tickets

• Socratic-Fishbowl Discussions

• Sustained Silent Reading

• partner writing

• brainstorming

• partner brainstorming

• group reading

And on and on and on it went. Activity followed activity as a list emerged, growing like an unwieldy vine. But unwieldy became useless. This wasn't it. It was too messy to be useful.

Studying the list, I realized each activity shared similarities (dimensions). One, most activities had James Moffett's four Language Arts—reading, writing, speaking, and listening. (I blended the last two as "discussion.") Two, each activity scaled by people: working alone, in partners or groups, whole class, and teacher-led. (I ignored the time or when with this list.)

So I drew two axes, activity and person, resulting in twelve categories. For example, students could write alone, with partners-groups, or as a class. But not every category worked. For instance how can students Discuss-Alone? Through personal reflection? Also, any Teacher-Led activity means modeling. (Or just a “Lesson”?)

Figure 3a. Activity x Person (General)

Moving from general to specific, each category represented scores of specific activities. Partner Discussions meant Turn and Talks, Think-Pair-Shares, and even Peer Review. (Peer Review combines Writing and Discussion.) Writing-Alone meant reflecting, brainstorming, instant drafts, KWL's, and so on. The possibilities were endless! So I could either translate and transfer my unwieldy list into an organized chart or stay general with the category names. (I chose somewhere between.)

Figure 3b. Activity-Person Schema (Even More Specific)

Aside: Have you considered Acting as a category? Embodied cognition represents a vast, untapped continent. This morphs my categories from twelve to sixteen. Reading getting stale? Transform novels into scripts. Try having students read as characters with a narrator. Or perhaps try students staging scenes, transforming the verbal to the visual. Embody reading comprehension. Never be afraid to use your imagination. It beats boredom!

Since this chart visualized recall without mental effort, what now?

Sequencing follows recall. Combining now served as step one—not recall. So this meant a new starting point as my mental effort shifted forward. Eliminating recall and subsequently forgetting felt revelatory! What possibilities! The blank page felt like a vast expanse. So I started combining, slowly and blindly at first, then with growing speed until I scribbled furiously across the page. The expanse shrunk.

Figure 4a. Activity Catalogue

As I combined, options begat variations. It felt like gazing into a moving kaleidoscope. Within a half hour, as combinations grew, a familiar problem emerged: organization.

My first attempts kept the general categories, but I soon began experimenting around specific teaching activities. For example, I added specific discussion-based activities like Think-Pair-Shares and Socratic (Fishbowl) discussions.

• What if students wrote first, talked to partners, and then moved to Socratic discussions?

• What if they talked to partners first, reflected next, and then moved to Socratic discussions?

• What if opinions changed? What if they reflected both before and after?

Here's an example from 2015.

Figure 4b. Discussion Themed Activities (12-2015)

If purpose represented nouns, then I had pages and pages of verbs.

I stopped again. Just hours before my starting point was recall. Then it shifted to sequencing. And now it was a catalogue. Had the thought experiment really been that easy?

Note: This wasn't as simple as "Write 100 example lesson plans." Since I couldn't describe my own steps, narrating the process would have proven difficult. But narrating the steps and moving from possibilities to catalogues simplified things.

Zooming out, since I used repeating weekly formats at the time (Tuesdays as Language Days, Wednesday Work Days), I sketched a simple calendar and toyed with weekly formats. Just seeing the templates gave newfound freedom.

Figure 5. Chart: Weekly Activities

However, I realized a limitation: Purpose constricts novel sequences. My favorite “days” featured novel activity sequences, juxtaposing unrelated activities. If scores of purposeful plans helped my creativity, then random plans provided both easy starters and creativity jolt-ers. But purposely being random proved exhausting. What if a computer program could generate random plans for sheer creativity?

Aside: This was 2013 or 2014, and it wasn’t until 2022, for something completely unrelated, that I realized Microsoft Excel could randomize information from a list. See my post “101 Random Lesson Plans” for more. These days, when problem solving, I love defining parameters and beginning with vast, randomized lists. If you’re familiar with ThinkerToys, if Brute Think forces connections, then randomized lists qualify, right?

Interlude: Starting with Endings

As my first semester of teaching finally ended, variety became a speed bump. My crisis of creativity shifted to a crisis of classroom management. Spoiler: I ignored the warning not to become friends with the students. So I crashed and burned like a dumpster fire for the next ninety days. (Dreaming of that first year qualifies as a nightmare!)

Aside: Regarding classroom management, two books became indispensable during year two: The First Days of School and Fred Jones Tools for Teaching. In short, set routines and clear expectations.

For the next four years, I planned with templates instead of blank pages. This drastically reduced my planning time but shifted my efforts elsewhere. “If you write it more than twice,” I’d catch myself saying, “make a template.” So I created templates for unit planning, adapting books, assignments, rubrics—you name it! But I’ll save the autobiography.

Do I still use these lesson planning catalogues now? Eh. My recipes became references. I moved from pattern to precedent. A decade after my thought experiment, I prefer “binders” and random patterns as starters.

All that said, two questions remain: So what? Who cares?

🔮 Next Time: As I sketch the post script, I'm musing on starting careers with catalogues. What if colleges ditched the stereotypical fifteen page lesson plan? What if students began with a magazine-like book of lesson templates? What if lesson planning were like trying new recipes? What if students evaluated lesson plans like Math problems? And what if a game could teach the same concept?

Hint: My next post will include a printable game as proof of concept. And since I'm talking books, I suppose it's either a book or a Masters Thesis proposal. Whichever.

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I. My First Semester Crisis

A late Sunday night in September 2013.

Crickets sang as a soft breeze moved through an open window, fluttering the blinds with a metallic rattle. Tall grass bent and danced. I stared at my computer, eyes straining. Soft thunder boomed in the distance like a timpani, barely audible.

The caret blinked on a white word processing screen. Blink, blink, blink, like the seconds hand of a clock. Tick, tick, tick. Time passed. The screen remained blank.

I sighed, laying my forehead on my desk in resignation. What was I teaching tomorrow? My mind flashed back to the prior week when lack of classroom management and creativity converged.

As I explained the day's objectives, a student interrupted, "Your class is so boring. We just do the same things every day."

"No, we don't," I stammered. "Today we're reading—"

She fired back. "We read different stories, but keep doing the same things. It's so boring. I know this is your first year and all, but you're a terrible teacher."

You know, I probably was.

Lightning illuminated the sky without a sound.

I understood the problem: I was boring. My teaching lacked variety. And so my teaching books spread and stacked across my desk. I was searching. I needed examples. I needed variety. Just something.

I was locked in a state of habitual re-creation, where, despite hours planning, I kept re-creating the same activities day after day, week after week. This extended past routine. She was right. I kept trying for different but kept creating the same over and over again. What a failure.

I stared at my teaching books. Despite hundreds and hundreds of pages talking about teaching, they lacked concrete examples. I had passion, but not much else.

If only I had examples. If only I had examples. If only.

II. From Recipes to References (Where Teacher’s Education Fails)

Chefs have cookbooks, builders have blueprints, musicians have sheet music, and quilters have patterns, but teachers? They start with nothing.

Consider cooking. Anyone can find cookbooks in bookstore or recipes online. While good cooks start with fresh ingredients from scratch, cooking doesn't mean inventing recipes from scratch each time.

Yet if cooking were teaching, aspiring chefs would write fifteen pages about the history of cinnamon before being allowed near a kitchen. (They may never bake, by the way!) They’d barely cook before being thrust into a hostile environment with combative customers.

Consider building. Your local home improvement store—or grocery store, even—might feature magazines with dream cabin blueprints. Without studying architecture, any stranger can browse blueprints and dream about houses they’ll never build.

Yet if building were teaching, construction workers and architects alike would write fifteen pages about the growth cycle of trees before being allowed near a hammer. They'd be certified without ever practicing designing houses, yet somehow safety would still matter.

While books on teaching, content, and teaching content exist, few model planning. Many books talk about planning without plans, remaining so general that adaptation becomes problematic. Many teachers therefore start without precedent, creating the wheel from scratch. As routine settles, they habitually re-create the same lessons day after day, week after week, and year after year.

Say you fancy some curry. You don't start by inventing a recipe. Instead you research recipes, compare them, and follow one. If it works, you try it again. If it fails, you reflect and try a new approach. Yet if this were teaching, you'd only find articles about curries. No action steps. You'd certainly never find a general cookbook with starting points.

Recipes offer more than recipes: They offer templates. Experience internalizes patterns and precedent becomes starting point. (With time, all recipes become references.) Creativity doesn't mean starting from nothing, but moving from learning conventions to breaking conventions. Without pattern recognition, individual actions require intense forethought.

Consider the athlete learning a new skill. At first, learning requires hours of concentration and repetition, moving the motion from conscious thought to unconscious action. In the same way, as new skills become routine, time and strategy shift from the short term to the long term.

Other professions require on-the-job training. Teaching follows suit, but through omission. Yes, teaching programs require observing classrooms and student teaching, but with little relevant transfer. While teachers learn through reflection, teacher’s education denies that experience. The preparation mismatches future demands, like training for cross country by playing golf.

Note: I'm critiquing institutions and processes here, not people. I love essays as both medium and art from. Yet writing an essay is not writing a parent email. As for me, having devoured many books on teaching, I suffered mental indigestion. I had whats without whys, knowing specific things without mental models to organize them.

Comparing my experiences to others, teacher's education fails by design for several reasons.

One, teacher’s education cannot predict every particular of every position. Will you teach in an urban or rural setting? Will your school have funding? Will you need a second job to make ends meet? Will you start with helpful guidance? Will you have supportive principals and parents? What fads become chains?

Since these concretes can't be predicted, training remains abstract. General. Preparing for all situations means preparing for nothing.

Two, teacher’s education cannot escape its own classroom context. Rather than prepare with teacher things, it demands student things. This forces on the job training by omission. So when you start teaching without being fully prepared, the consequences feel quick, severe, and unforgiving. You study teaching without practicing teaching.

Maybe this makes sense: Being a student of teaching isn’t being a teacher of students. Each requires a different skill set. Reworded, we might get this: Teaching teaches teachers to teach. All else is studying school.

There's an irony here: If teaching teaches teachers to teach, it's without other teachers. Schools may assign newer teachers "mentors," but unless they physically observe the classroom, new teachers learn without help. Sink or swim. Their carpet square represents unexplored territory. New schools may as well be new countries. Every "lesson" happens nested within classes, within schools, and within communities.

And let's face it: Not every teacher fits every school. That's okay.

Let's meander a little.

What do you teach? It depends on the students, frankly. Good plans fit the audience. And if the audience won't cooperate, good plans fail.

Mentor teachers may give advice on shared students, but that doesn't always translate. Not every student behaves the same in every situation. Change the context, change the outcome. Just like we behave differently in different social situations, students are no different. Thus, even advice from fellow teachers about the same students often falls flat. So plans fail for other reasons.

Of course, daily lesson plans join a constellation of paperwork. A robust checklist might include long range planning, lesson plans, speaking notes, visual aids, assignments, and so on. If you take the reflective path, you can fill notebooks with careful observations on whether something worked or not. That said, lesson plans just form one focal point.

Aside: Some districts micromanage with startling efficiency, creating the opposite problem. No planning required. Teachers function like happy little cogs as everyone reads the same sanitized scripts. Both teachers and students alike become interchangeable parts, square pegs forced through round holes. The map becomes the territory through sheer force. Apply the Chinese Room to teaching: When everything is scripted—from teaching to possible student responses—who does the thinking? Who's the robot? In this inverted scenario (with no planning), the fetish for sameness means teaching individuals through groupthink. Forced happy.

And so teachers begin their careers creating and re-creating otherwise predictable activities. Teachers start with blank pages—no recipes, no blueprints, and no entrance ramps.

And so I sat, resigned, with my forehead on my desk, wishing for better examples. Something like a recipe book. Ideals without logistics are empty.

III. The Thought Experiment (Part 1)

Months later, as December dawned, I grew more desperate. Still boring. Just months earlier, as my teaching program ended, I felt like I could do anything. Now, I could do nothing. And certainly nothing right. I just needed examples.

This time I stared at a blank notebook page, determined to solve this problem. My brain was swimming in a chaotic and combustible mix. Something was on the tip of my tongue, but I wasn't sure what. If I struggled lesson planning so much, what if I lesson planned once and never again?

What a stupid question! Then again, why not?

Exasperated, I scrawled the question across a blank page: What if I listen planned once and never again?

But before starting in earnest, I wanted to walk around the problem...

To be continued in "How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)."

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The Spreadsheet

In my post “101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI),” I talked about a thought experiment and a spreadsheet. The thought experiment went something like this: What if you could lesson plan once and never again? The result spanned several schemas and filled notebooks as I explored the mental steps to lesson planning. The mental steps, I realized, function mechanically. In coming posts, I will explore the following questions:

• What are the mental steps to lesson planning? Which takes the most effort?

• Name every teaching activity you know. How do you organize them?

• What if you could take the mental effort of planning and push it forward?

As proof of concept, I introduced a spreadsheet which could take activities and randomly sequence them into lesson plans. From an informational standpoint, the following holds true across subjects:

• 1. All subjects have fairly predictable, content-specific activities.

• 2. Lesson plans sequence activities for given content. As such, two things follow:

• 3a. The same steps often recycle for different content. (Same steps, different stuff.)

• 3b. Different sequences become different lesson plans. (Different steps, same stuff.)

So rather than recall one activity after another, using mental energy to sequence them, shift your mental energy forwards. Instead, just input up to sixteen categories and generate 100 results in seconds. This frees your mental energy to look for novel results and combinations rather than remember and sequence.

Update: What if you could lesson plan once… and then never again?

User Guide / Instructions (Beta Version)

This spreadsheet should have no learning curve. Just (1) input your categories, (2) select the outputs, and (3) copy-paste the results into another program. That’s it! However, I have three quick notes:

• This spreadsheet has volatile functions, so ANY change scrambles results.

• The spreadsheet is locked to prevent accidentally breaking it. The dropdowns, however, couldn’t be protected.

• Duplicated results will be highlighted. But the more activities per line you include, the odds of duplicates fall.

Here’s my only request…

Give feedback. That’s it. I want Beta testers. What works well? What should be added? What other ideas do you have? Just tell me something.

While you’re at it, be on the lookout for a post, “How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again).”

Note: This spreadsheet requires the most recent version of Microsoft Excel. It will not work on Google Sheets!

Lesson Plan Randomizer 3 8 2025

30.6KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

This spreadsheet will take up to sixteen categories and generate 100 lesson plans in seconds! So rather than remember and sequence every activity, free your mental energy to look for novel combinations instead.

Download

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New to the blog? Explore some other favorites!

✏️ Need a place to start? Check out my ongoing series, Teach Writing Tomorrow.

• 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow (#1-10)

• How to Write Every Day (Student Writing Notebooks) (1/3)

• 101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI)

📓 Want other tips for teaching writing? Check out some fan favorites.

• Five Ways Google Forms Help Teach Writing (+ Template)

• Three Big Benefits to Teaching with Student Writing

• Q+A: Writing Every Day, Grading, and Giving Feedback (AMLE24)

🏆 And here are some other popular posts:

• Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day

• Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

• What is Dual Coding Theory? (Hint: Not Computer Related)

🗞️ Crave honest education news? Check out same satire from The Honest School Times.