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"The one thing that generates the juice - the electricity - that brings everything in a story to life, giving it meaning, conflict and urgency, is this: a clear sense of how what's happening in the plot is affecting the protagonist internally. The story, I realized, is not about the plot. The story is about how the things that happen in the plot force the protagonist to struggle with an unavoidable problem, thus triggering - scene-by-scene - a long needed, incredibly hard internal change. What hooks and holds the reader is internal conflict, not external "drama." Recent advances in brain science and evolutionary biology have born this out. Stories are simulations - think of them as the world's first virtual reality: you are there, viscerally experiencing what the protagonist is going through, from the inside out. A story isn't about what someone does, it's about why they do it. Only by diving deep into what someone is really struggling with as they make a hard, unavoidable decision, can we reap useful intel on what it would actually be like to be in that situation ourselves. You're not reading about Jane Eyre's experiences from the outside in, you are Jane Eyre, experiencing those events yourself."

"Language merely reflects our way of trying to make sense of the world. - Frank Smith Frank Smith (1982) says 'writing touches every part of our lives'. One of the first reasons we write is because it is a tool for communication in culture. It gives us the ability the share information over time and space with multiple individuals (explaining, recounting & opinion). It can also be used as a permanent record or as a statement e.g. in history, geography  & science genres. The third cultural aspect for writing is artistry (narrative and poetry). Finally, there is also the personal aspect to writing. Writing allows us all to reflect, express our perceptions of self, to socially dream or to be critical (memoir). By writing, we find out what we know; what we think. Ultimately though, writing is a means for us to express ourselves in the world, make sense of the world or impose ourselves upon it. The question now is why do children write at school? For these purposes? - Not often. There is a massive discrepancy between the writing done in the real-world and that of the classroom. Donald Graves says 'all children want to write'. It is just a case of allowing them to write about the things they are interested in. As Frank Smith says, 'all children can write if they can speak it.' If they can talk about it, they can write it down. The transmission of narrow decontextualized writing skills; that English is just a formal system to be learnt. The insistence on task-orientated writing. The insistence on teacher-chosen writing tasks. The insistence on the use of external stimulus (literature units, film-clips, topic-writing) at the expense of children's knowledge, interests, loves, talents and idiosyncrasies. The formal rather than functional teaching of grammar. These examples embody the 'commonsense' assumptions which claim an authority which is supposedly natural and unshakable. Writing in classrooms at present isn't seen by children as important

"Through hashtags, test takers have categorized tweets about different AP exams. #APLit for the AP Literature and Composition exam. #APBio for the AP Biology exam, and so on. While these tweets are in jest - and many in the format of popular memes -there is something peculiar about them: they are oddly specific. For example, in reference to the AP Literature and Composition exam, many users tweeted about Mr. Pickle and Godfrey. These tweets about the exam even inspired a Twitter moment that highlighted the best memes about the AP exam. A Twitter search of #APLit will yield similar results. All of these memes reference a specific short story published in 1751, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett. While the tweets express the sentiment of the students taking the exam, they do another thing: reference the questions asked of them on the AP Literature exam."

"Serial senior producer Julie Snyder described the project as an "arty" and "novelistic" seven-part series about a man who despises the Alabama town he's lived in his whole life and decides to do something about it. The press release circulated this morning offered further narrative clues: Production of S-Town began when a man reached out to This American Life bitterly complaining about his small Alabama town. He wanted a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who had allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. Brian agreed to look into it. But then someone else ended up dead, and another story began to unfold - about a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure and the mysteries of one man's life."

"1. Survey students about our school's writing atmosphere What role do you expect writing to play in your life during the next 5-10 years? What do you think colleges/universities expect in terms of student writing? What writing do you think is valued at your high school? What does your teacher value in terms of writing? How do you know what writing is valued at your school and in this class? In the last 2-3 years, what has positively influenced your writing? What feedback is most helpful to you as a writer? How does grading influence your writing? My colleague and I turned these questions into a Google form survey, and the results will give us lots to think about in the months ahead. This is a great opportunity to talk with students about what they value about writing and help them find ways to make their writing reflect what they value and what readers might need.  2. Separate my reading roles At the symposium, participants discussed how rarely we simply read student work as readers. 3. Create opportunities to switch "modes""

"McPhee has now published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He's written about Alaska (Coming into the Country), the Swiss Army (La Place de la Concorde Suisse), and an island in Scotland's Inner Hebrides (The Crofter and the Laird). His subjects have included the atomic bomb, the environmental movement, the U.S. Merchant Marine, Russian art, and fishing. Four books on geology. Three on transport. Two on sports. One book entirely about oranges. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism." This is an interview with him about writing and teaching.

"English teachers, I ask that you incorporate more sci-fi into your curriculum. Librarians, bring books into your libraries that include protagonists of all shapes, shades, and perspectives. Other educators, think about the following: how other books beyond 1984 can help us examine polities; how books set in the distant future can help us teach evolutionary biology; what dystopian novels about despotic regimes can teach children about a school's zero-tolerance policies. We shouldn't be in the business of fostering mindless containers of knowledge, and science fiction can be an invaluable tool for examining and improving the learning environments we create for our students."

"Students still use computers for writing outside of class, especially essays, but all writing in class happens by hand: notes from the whiteboard, notes from somebody's discussion comment, notes about which shoes to wear to Jim and Julia's party…. I tell them about the research, and, yes, they're skeptical-of course they are. It's like taking all their cuddly toys from the crib and convincing them it's still a place called home. But at least I know they're all present, if only functionally. I don't need to constantly worry about what might be going on in screenland. The classroom feels more like a classroom than an office, the conversations stronger precisely because more students usually otherwise engaged get involved. It comes down to a sense of kids being present together in a unified space, a space that allows for communities and communication to develop. Romantic, yes, as students are rarely present in the ways we aspire for them to be, but at least without technology, they space-out within the confines of their own imaginations. For instance, doodling when distracted instead of resorting to a virtual rabbit warren of visual excitement. As doodlers they are makers."

"I had tried everything from the traditional book report style assessment to more creative movie trailers, but I didn't feel like they accomplished what I wanted from a silent sustained reading assessment. It wasn't until I went to a book club meeting with some friends that inspiration struck. At our book club meetings we ate food, drank wine, and talked about literature for hours. Why couldn't our SSR assessment be more like that? (Sans the wine, of course.) I thought about what inspired me to read my book club books and the answer was that I really enjoyed that evening of food, conversation, and friends. So, I decided to design a book club style chat assessment for our silent sustained reading. The goal was to get my students having conversations about their various books. Ultimately, I hoped they would turn each other on to titles they had read and enjoyed. Below is a brief overview of the assignment. I've also included a link to a Google document with a detailed explanation of the assignment for any teacher interested in using it!"

"Should students about to read "The Great Gatsby" be forewarned about "a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence," as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism - like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or "Things Fall Apart" - have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label? Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as "trigger warnings," explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans."

" I'd been teaching writing all wrong! I'd dangled the carrots of prizes and threatened with the sticks of docked points for misplaced modifiers. But sometimes, I also got it right. Before, I'd let students choose prompts and readings as much as possible, providing autonomy. After reading Pink, I learned to unbend myself, make deadlines more flexible, and shape the writing process more to fit the student. Now, my students feel more control over their process. Before, I'd encouraged my students to write for real audiences as summative assessments. Now, I encourage students to write to real people for real purposes throughout the school year -- their own blogs, each other, me, their principal, their Congressional representatives, and the world. Before, I'd embedded grammar instruction in writing process and had students keep their work to casually notice their progress once a year. Now, I conference four times a year with students about portfolios of their work -- an ongoing conversation about writing goals of their choosing. I explicitly teach metacognition, or how to talk and write about their writing."

"Low-stakes writing is a tool to help students build comfort with sharing and developing their thoughts through writing. A defining element of low-stakes writing is how it's graded -- the grade doesn't carry a lot of weight. This removes much of the pressure from having to do the assignment a certain way, putting value instead on student thought, expression, and learning, rather than punctuation, grammar, or getting a correct answer the first time. "The most important thing about it for me is that it's not censored, and it's not too highly structured," explains James Kobialka, a UPCS seventh-grade science teacher. "Students aren't being told exactly what to do. They're allowed to have freedom, and they're not so worried about it that they try to write what they think they want me to see, or that they're tempted to plagiarize. It's about them getting their own ideas down, and then being able to interact with those ideas, change them, and revise them if they're not correct." Low-stakes writing: Increases students' comfort with expressing their ideas and empowers student voice Creates more investment and ownership in student learning Prepares students for high-stakes writing and testing Is adaptable for any subject Allows for differentiation"

In a connected world, information comes at us constantly, whether we choose it or not, and we must each figure out a way to navigate it. Not for a school assignment, but for our real lives. So we've proposed an experiment. We're running a challenge that invites students to think deeply about their own relationships with news, and devise personal "news diets" that work for them. It runs from Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 2017, and any teenager anywhere in the world can participate. The challenge has three steps: 1. Do a personal "news audit" to observe the role of news in their lives right now. 2. Experiment with their "news diets" in some way to find new sources that address any lacks they found. 3. Write a short essay or produce a short video that reflects on the process and what they learned. What did they discover about their news habits before and after they did the challenge - and what can they say about the role of news in their lives in general?

"Over the past year, we witnessed police violence, increasingly partisan politics and the continued American legacy of racism during a generation-defining pandemic. And for many, this was observed, at times, in isolation at home. I have worried about how we can heal from our collective trauma. As a teacher of Greek literature, I am inclined to turn to the past to understand the present. I found solace in the Homeric epic "The Iliad" and its complex views about violence after the 9/11 attacks. And I found comfort in the Odyssey after my father's unexpected death at 61, in 2011. Similarly, Homer can help guide us as we return back to our normal worlds after a year of minimizing social contact. He can also, I believe, offer guidance on how people can heal."

"Like so many of the people he writes about, McPhee is a consummate craftsman. There are many aspects of his craft that a fellow writer can envy, from his keen, loving ear for the quirks and rhythms of American speech, to his arsenal of tools - including shifts of tense you only notice on the second reading - for nimbly hopping about in time."

"Consider this a public-service announcement in the wake of Monday's National Grammar Day. Here are seven rules you really (really!) don't have to worry about following."

"Back in January, when I asked high school seniors to send in college application essays about money, class, working and the economy, I wasn't sure what, if anything, would come in over the transom. But 66 students submitted essays, and with the help of Harry Bauld, the author of "On Writing the College Application Essay," we've selected four to publish in full online and in part in this column. That allowed us to be slightly more selective than Princeton itself was last year. What these four writers have in common is an appetite for risk. Not only did they talk openly about issues that are emotionally complex and often outright taboo, but they took brave and counterintuitive positions on class, national identity and the application process itself. For anyone looking to inspire their own children or grandchildren who are seeking to go to college in the fall of 2014, these four essays would be a good place to start."

"At the American Press Institute (API), we put energy into helping news readers of any age understand and evaluate the news they encounter. In our work with youth and media, we generally recommend six basic questions that can be asked about the news you encounter: 1. Type: What kind of content is this - news, opinion, advertising or something else? 2. Source: Who and what are the sources cited, and why should I believe them? 3. Evidence: What's the evidence and how was it vetted? 4. Interpretation: Is the main point of the piece backed up by the evidence? 5. Completeness: What's missing? 6. Knowledge: Is there an issue here that I want to learn more about, and where can I do that? We are excited to partner with Newsela to offer a way for teachers to begin some of these thoughtful media literacy discussions with their students. Newsela has created an election Text Set that focuses squarely on media literacy. Every article in the set uses some of API's six questions as Annotations to encourage critical thinking - and teachers can use some, or all, of the six questions to guide classroom discussion."

"Think of a topic from your own teaching that you wish your students cared more about. It could be social justice, evolution, literature, or anything that you really care about but some students do not. Now, how can you use these 5 pedagogical moves to make your topic relevant for students? To help you think through, I have 5 tips and questions-based in literacies research-that you can ask yourself to keep your teaching relevant to your students."

We grown-ups often assume that children are oblivious to our money talk, ignorant of our budget woes and uninterested in how adults make financial decisions. Better to protect them from all that for as long as possible, right? But the best entries of this year's crop of college application essays about money prove that they are watching and listening - always - and picking up every little thing by osmosis."