Join Carl Anderson and Matt Glover for a two-day virtual institute!
Overview
During this two-day virtual institute, we’ll help you develop your writing curriculum so that it meets the needs of your students in your school.
Research has consistently demonstrated the important link between student engagement in writing and achievement in any subject. This institute is designed to give you the support you need to enhance and revise your instructional approach to teaching writing to maximize the conditions for student engagement – and increase achievement.
During the institute, we’ll help you take these actions:
- We’ll show you how to enhance your current instructional approach by prioritizing methods that are directly linked to student engagement, such as giving students choice of topic and genre, teaching craft and conventions with high-engagement mentor texts, and developing mentor-mentee relationships with students in 1:1 writing conferences.
- We’ll show you how you can modify your existing instructional approach to increase engagement by swapping out low-engagement stand-alone or integrated writing units for high-engagement ones. As part of this conversation, we’ll show you how to assess the “engagement potential” of your current writing curriculum. And we’ll project several high-engagement writing units that you can implement when you return to your classroom.
Our goal is that you’ll leave this institute with a repertoire of strategies and writing units you can use to strengthen your approach to teaching writing – and that you’ll be ready to initiate school-wide discussions about student engagement and your writing curriculum when you return home.
Who is it for?
We hope that K-8 teachers who want to strengthen their writing curriculums will attend, as well as the literacy coaches, administrators, and curriculum specialists who support their school’s writing curriculum across the grades. We encourage you to come with colleagues from your school to that the institute gives you a shared framework as you think about your instructional approach to teaching writing.
Learning Objectives
- Understand what engagement is (versus compliance and motivation), and the link between engagement and student achievement
- Learn about the Pillars of Engagement
- Discover how to enhance your existing writing curriculum by taking “light touch” actions to align your curriculum to the Pillars of Engagement, such as: develop mentor-mentee relationships with students in writing conferences; teach with high-engagement mentor texts that reflect students identities and interests; offer choice of topic and genre; and more.
- Learn about three types of writing studies: genre, craft and process
- Learn how to assess the “engagement potential” of the units in a writing curriculum and how to swap high-engagement units for low-engagement ones.
- Learn how to project a high-engagement genre study
- Get tips on how to give students choice of genre in craft and process studies
- Learn how to project a craft and process study
- Discover how to evaluate students’ curricular experience with writing across the grades in your school and identify areas to improve
Sample daily schedule (subject to change):
10:00 am-10:45am: Keynote by Carl and Matt
10:45am-11:00am: Break
11:00am-12:30pm: Workshop co-led by Carl and Matt
12:30pm-1:00pm: Lunch
1:00pm-2:00pm: Breakout session with Carl or Matt*
2:00pm-2:30pm: Q & A time with Carl and Matt
*Since the institute will be recorded, you can view breakout sessions you weren’t able to attend in person after the institute
Related Reading
by Stacy Simonyi and Tania Campanelli
