American author Kurt Vonnegut has famously declared that writing is unteachable, yet formal education persists in that task. Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination is the culmination of P.L. Thomas’s experiences as both a writer and a teacher of writing reaching into the fourth decade of struggling with both. This volume collects essays that examine the enduring and contemporary questions facing writing teachers, including grammar instruction, authentic practices in high-stakes environments, student choice, citation and plagiarism, the five-paragraph essay, grading, and the intersections of being a writer and teaching writing. Thomas offers concrete classroom experiences drawn from teaching high school ELA, first-year composition, and a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses. Ultimately, however, the essays are a reflection of Thomas’s journey and a concession to both writing and teaching writing as journeys without ultimate destinations.

“Unique and thorough, Warner’s handbook could turn any determined reader into a regular Malcolm Gladwell.” —Booklist For anyone aiming to improve their skill as a writer, a revolutionary new approach to establishing robust writing practices inside and outside the classroom, from the author of Why They Can’t Write After a decade of teaching writing using the same methods he’d experienced as a student many years before, writer, editor, and educator John Warner realized he could do better. Drawing on his classroom experience and the most persuasive research in contemporary composition studies, he devised an innovative new framework: a step-by-step method that moves the student through a series of writing problems, an organic, bottom-up writing process that exposes and acculturates them to the ways writers work in the world. The time is right for this new and groundbreaking approach. The most popular books on composition take a formalistic view, utilizing “templates” in order to mimic the sorts of rhetorical moves academics make. While this is a valuable element of a writing education, there is room for something that speaks more broadly. The Writer’s Practice invites students and novice writers into an intellectually engaging, active learning process that prepares them for a wider range of academic and real-world writing and allows them to become invested and engaged in their own work.

An international outlook on the different aspects of critical pedagogy. Authors from around the global discuss the both philosophical and social common themes on the subject.

Millions of people experience stress in their lives, and this is even more prevalent in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether this stress stems from a job loss or a fear of sickness from working with the public, stress has reigned throughout the pandemic. However, stress is more complicated than being simply a “bad feeling.” Stress can impact both mental and physical wellbeing. Using Narrative Writing to Enhance Healing During and After Global Health Crises is a critical reference that discusses therapeutic writing and offers it as a simple solution for those who are at the highest risk of poor health. This book covers multiple writing narratives on diverse topics and how they aid with stress after the COVID-19 pandemic. Including topics such as anxiety, health coaching, and leadership, this book is essential for teachers, community leadership, physical and emotional therapists, healthcare workers, teachers, faculty of both K-12 and higher education, members of church communities, students, academicians, and any researchers interested in using writing as a healing process.

The past two decades have seen an increased interest in education, especially in core areas such as mathematics, language and science. This is in part a consequence of the increase in the number of international comparisons of educational outcomes, such as PISA and TIMSS. Much research has focused on the contributions that curricula, financial resources, parental support, and so on, might have on educational outcomes. A factor that seems likely to have a very significant effect on student achievement, teachers’ practices and beliefs, has received little attention. This book reports results from a research program that sought to develop and employ research methods to compare teachers’ practices and beliefs across Canada. It provides insight into the challenge of such research, and describes teachers’ contexts, beliefs and practices, and how they differ, in four regions and across two languages. Using a multivocal ethnography approach (Tobin, 1999) teachers were involved in the preparation and discussion of videos of their own teaching and that of others. This approach resulted in not only insights into the teachers’ pedagogies and practices, but also opportunities for the teachers to reflect on their own teaching in new ways, and for researchers to reflect on research practices and orientations. The work is innovative in several ways. In a field crowded with research on teachers’ practices, beliefs and knowledge this research helps to unearth the implicit values that underlie the way teachers see teaching itself. Through the process of observation of each other’s practice, the teachers became aware of their own pedagogies, giving them new insights into their values and practices. Researchers also engaged in a parallel process of reflection on their own practices as observers of teachers, with similar insights into the values guiding their work. This book will be of interest to government policy makers, teachers and teacher educators, as well as researchers in Mathematics Education. Members of the AERA SIG in Research in Mathematics Education, the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group, the NCTM, and provincial Mathematics teacher associations are potential readers. Praise for Researching Pedagogy and Practice with Canadian Mathematics Teachers: What a treasure! This book is an important resource for anyone interested in high quality mathematics teaching. It fills a gap in our understanding of how mathematics is taught across Canada, where students are among the highest performing on international mathematics assessments. The studies reported are conceptually grounded, methodologically rigorous, and filled with nuanced observations of the similarity and variation in classroom teaching across many of the Canadian provinces. Edward A. Silver Senior Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies William A. Brownell Collegiate Professor of Education & Professor of Mathematics University of Michigan

This collection of reflective essays is a treasure trove of advice, reflection and hard-won experience from experts in the field of open and distance education. Each chapter offers tried-and-tested advice for nascent academic writers, delivered with personal, rich, and wonderful stories of the authors’ careers, their process, their research and their writing, and the struggles and triumphs they have encountered in the course of their careers. The contributors explore the philosophies that guide their work, the conflicts and barriers they have overcome and the mentors and opportunities that sustain and stimulate them, always focused on making their experiences relevant and useful for scholars who are in the early stages of their writing lives. These rich and informative essays will appeal to anyone who wants to learn more about the crafts of research and writing, and the unseen struggles involved in publishing and “being heard.”

This book provides ways of thinking about the teaching of writing in secondary schools (with applications to college writing) and shares research-based strategies for immediate use in the classroom. The strengths-based, classroom-tested, student-centered writing hope strategies shared within the Writing Hope Framework (WHF) are designed to allow students to work within their own unique writing processes and insert their individual writers’ voices and styles authentically. The Writing Hope Framework allows students to choose which strategies and stages of the writing process they wish to engage in for purposeful writing goal attainment; it recognizes unique writing approaches and accounts for these differences in curricular design and implementation. Teachers can assess the writing abilities and self-beliefs of the students in their classes using a variety of strategies provided and then guide students in their pathways selection processes for writing. Given the nature of this research and its application, it is the intention of this book to bring readers through a process of hope that can facilitate life hope and writing hope in the classroom for and with students. Hope is not exclusively for the already hopeful students; it is also, and perhaps more critically, for those students who do not presently see hope in their lives but who can. Every student is capable of hope if it is facilitated effectively and purposefully.

What goes on in a classroom? can mean "Are teachers imparting knowledge that will raise test scores?" or it can mean much more. In this series of essays, Block addresses the nature of the classroom as a place for encounter and engagements: with curriculum materials and books, between teachers and students, and with the self.

Teaching for Mastery in Writing provides a practical approach to developing mastery in writing which helps all primary children to develop their skills and inspires a love of writing. This innovative book follows an approach that integrates mastery into existing teaching sequences – an approach which aims to improve the writing ability of all children, not just the more able. Writing is a tough discipline for children in today's primary schools. The number of skills they are expected to learn is a source of amazement to many adults outside education. It is no easier to teach, not least because of the many and varied demands on schools, including the National Curriculum, SPaG tests, assessment frameworks and inspections. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that teachers focus on helping children become the most effective communicators they can be through the medium of writing. Throughout the book, Mike Cain promotes the importance of a classroom culture characterised by focused talk and reasoning, and provides lots of ideas for challenging children in their writing through the development of key learning dispositions and critical thinking skills.

Written by an experienced teacher and literacy consultant, Planning to Teach Writing offers an easy-to-use, tried-and-tested framework that will reduce teachers’ planning time while raising standards in writing. Using the circles planning approach, it provides fresh inspiration for teachers who want to engage and enthuse their pupils, with exciting and varied hooks into writing, including picture books, short stories, novels and films. Exploring effective assessment practice, each chapter puts the needs and interests of pupils at the forefront of planning, and models how to design units of work that will lead to high-quality writing outcomes in any primary school classroom. The book uses a simple formula for success: 1 Find the gaps in learning for your students. 2 Choose a hook that you know will engage your students. 3 Select a unit plan that you know will support you to get the best writing out of your students. 4 Tailor it. 5 Teach it! With a fantastic range of hooks to inspire teaching and learning, Planning to Teach Writing ensures successful planning that will maximise engagement, enjoyment and achievement. This book is an accessible and necessary resource for any teacher planning to teach writing in their classroom.