Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to help students enjoy writing as they discover how to improve their written work.  The special agent assigned to help you with this task is author and teacher, Shannon Anderson, of Rensselaer, Indiana.

I’ve really enjoyed the last few weeks of episodes that were looking at some useful resources and grappling with some big philosophical questions about teaching: what is my teacher identity? How can I infuse meaning into my curriculum? Is there a way to prevent teacher burnout? However, today’s episode has us focusing again on something very concrete, but incredibly important: how can I teach writing?  As I, and you, my wonderful listeners, will soon discover, it’s easily done at any grade, if you have the right mindset and strategies.  Fortunately Shannon Anderson was willing to share some of her writing wisdom when we spoke at the end of April over zencastr.  I also want to let you know that transcripts are being included with the newer episodes, which you can find at lessonimpossible.com, and I highly encourage you to copy and pasting some of this episode’s transcript into a writing lesson plan if you want to give some of Shannon’s advice a try!

In this episode we discuss:

·      Why training students to become good writers is like training for a marathon.

·      An example lesson for introducing narrative writing

·      The biggest mistakes teachers make when teaching writing

·      Four tips she gives students to become better writers

·      Publishing student work and Budsies

Links:

·      Shannon’s Twitter

·      Shannon’s Facebook

·      Shannon’s YouTube

·      Shannon’s LinkedIn

·      Shannon’s Pintrest

·      Shannon’s Instagram

·      Shannon’s Website