To celebrate the Simon & Schuster re-release of Adequate Yearly Progress, I pulled together some themes I’ve been thinking & speaking about for years as a 5-part series for the Washington Post. Each of these, in its own way, relates to the stories we tell about teaching. (more…)

Luckily, it’s also not that true. A truer (and more useful) statement is this: Almost all new teachers have days when they think they are being broken.
(more…)

One piece of common writing advice is to read your writing out loud to see how it sounds. For me, a more helpful way to get a sense of the “sound” of a piece of writing is to spend a few minutes listening to an audiobook that’s both well written AND has an amazing narrator. If you listen long enough, the narrator’s voice becomes the voice in your head when you sit down to reread your own writing. Suddenly, unnecessary words or unclear phrasing become obvious, and you hear the poetic potential in lines that felt straightforward when you wrote them. Plus, the well-honed style of a professional voice-actor offers a less jarring version of your work than your own voice in an empty room. While writing and revising Adequate Yearly Progress, this habit became so invaluable that I repeatedly listened to specific sections of certain books depending on which part of my own book I was working on – kind of an audio-chapter playlist.

(more…)

It’s a well-known, well-worn word of writing-world advice – almost a cliche at this point: The best writers are readers. This is true, of course. Without more context, though, it’s not specific enough to be useful. A decade of teaching high school English taught me a more workable version of this. The best writers don’t just read. They read like writers. And the best writers know that if you pay close attention, you can reverse-engineer much of what you love about other authors’ writing.

(more…)

You don’t always know when you’re reading a list. Sometimes, you just notice you’re reading something wonderful, which means – if you’re me – you highlight the passage, not quite sure what you’re going to do with it, just sure you want to be able to find it again. Then one day, while planning a writing workshop, you sort through these favorite passages and realize that many of them are really just lists. Short lists that barely seem like lists. Long lists that seem almost too long until they end with a bang. Lists that wander in and out of the list format. Lists of questions. Lists that pause the action and force the reader to pay attention to every tiny detail of a moment. Lists that feel like poetry. You get the idea. Here are 5 of my favorite examples of literary lists, plus a prompt to help you write your own. (more…)