“Jim Burke is among the finest writing educators we have today. He keeps up with research, instruction, students and society and mines them for ideas to try out, refine and formulate as instructional principles and activities that support students' writing, thinking and learning. The Six Academic Writing Assignments is a ground-breaking amalgam of his work with his own students and the efforts of so many teachers with whom he has worked. It is phenomenal. Read it!”—Judith A. Langer, Vincent O’Leary Distinguished Research Professor, University at Albany
“A new generation of high school teachers now write books as once only college professors did, and they write better ones--and with greater relevance to teaching--than most of those professors. To me Jim Burke is the leading figure in this emerging trend, and in this valuable new book he applies "the principles of design thinking" to writing assignments, "the secret operating systems of our classes," as he calls them, that, for better or worse, affect whether students ‘learn to write well for academic purposes.’”—Gerald Graff, Professor of English and Education, University of Illinois at Chicago, former President of the Modern Language Association, and author of They Say, I Say
“In this impressive book, Jim Burke offers a deep and thoughtful look at why we do what we do in designing academic writing assignments, inspiring us to be mindful of the mental moves we want our students to engage in and intentional in creating intellectual experiences to teach and transform them. At once theoretical and practical, this book is filled with a rich array of user-friendly classroom-tested practices teachers can use to map out a year-long writing journey for their students.”—Carol Booth Olson, Professor of Education, University of California, Irvine, and author of The Reading/Writing Connection
"This book demystifies the complexities of what we ask students to write. Creating assignments for our students is one of the most important moves in our teaching repertoires, and Jim Burke shines a light on what to consider, more than most students would probably ever imagine. Leave it to Burke to help us all improve our teaching craft, sharing concrete ways to gauge abstract processes." —Gretchen Bernabei, author of The Story of My Thinking
