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"Jessica Contrera's "The End of the Waffle House" begins on the morning when a big change comes to a small square of Bloomington, Ind. "Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell's aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington's Waffle House. His Waffle House. That Wednesday in September, the owner didn't know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted into his nose as he wandered past the vinyl booths. He sat down, then stood up again." Contrera had never been to the old restaurant surrounded by new student apartments before, but when the senior from Akron, Ohio, started her semester at Indiana University, she saw the sign reading "We will close Sept. 4." And she wanted to tell the story. Contrera visited the Waffle House a week before it closed, when she met her three major characters, as well as the day it closed and the day it was torn down. She also spoke with about a dozen other customers and staff who didn't make it into the story, but did help her understand what the business meant to the community. In her reporting, Contrera's professor of practice, Pulitzer-prize winner and Poynter writing fellow Tom French, pushed her to find details. Fifteen drafts later, those details include many small things that help readers feel what the closing of the old restaurant meant to its regulars, the owner and the community."

"The goal of any close reading is the following: an ability to understand the general content of a text even when you don't understand every word or concept in it. an ability to spot techniques that writers use to get their ideas and feelings across and to explain how they work. an ability to judge whether techniques the writer has used succeed or fail and an ability to compare and contrast the successes and failures of different writers' techniques. Remember-when doing a close reading, the goal is to closely analyze the material and explain why details are significant. Therefore, close reading does not try to summarize the author's main points, rather, it focuses on "picking apart" and closely looking at the what the author makes his/her argument, why is it interesting, etc. Here are a few of the helpful questions to consider in close reading, from the handout by  Kip Wheeler, a college English professor:"

"Two years ago, Griffith was one of 10 students at the Lawton C. Johnson Summit Middle School, in New Jersey, to be selected for the school's first TEDx program. Modelled on the popular TED talks, TEDx allows community organizations, towns and schools to put on their own version of a TED talk, featuring local experts, authorities or even teenagers, rather than nationally recognized figures. More than 10,000 TEDx events have been held around the world since the program was launched in 2009, including those put on by schools like the one in Summit. To be recognized as an official TEDx event, organizers need to apply online for licensing and agree to TED's detailed set of by-laws. What's critical to the success of a youth-run TEDx program is the active participation of a teacher, says Salome Heusel, Deputy Director of TEDx."

"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!"

Sandra Stotsky just released a report on the state of literature instruction (amount, difficulty, titles, etc.) in grades 9-11. Click here to read the report; click here to read a summary and others' responses on the Core Knowledge site. The report was written for the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. Here are her key findings and details from the report's Executive Summary:

I'VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter. I don't expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students' daily chatter, as well as the world's conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital. So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers

"Remember-when doing a close reading, the goal is to closely analyze the material and explain why details are significant. Therefore, close reading does not try to summarize the author's main points, rather, it focuses on "picking apart" and closely looking at the what the author makes his/her argument, why is it interesting, etc. Here are a few of the helpful questions to consider in close reading, from the handout by  Kip Wheeler, a college English professor:"

"Closely reading any text, whether written or visual, requires that students proceed more slowly and methodically, noticing details, making connections and asking questions. This takes practice. But it certainly helps when students want to read the text. We've selected 10 photos from The Times that we've used previously in our weekly "What's Going On in This Picture?" and that have already successfully caught students' and teachers' attention. These are some of our most popular images - ones that may make viewers say "huh?" on first glance, but that spark enough curiosity to make them want to dig deeper. Below, we offer ideas from students and teachers who have engaged with these images for ways to use them, or images like them, to teach close reading and visual thinking skills."

"The Gallup Student Poll is an online poll made up of 20 well-researched questions designed to assess the hope, engagement, and wellbeing of students in the U.S. The poll takes eight to ten minutes to complete, and is entirely free to any public or private school in the United States. After your students complete the poll, you will receive a detailed report on the engagement level at your school. This report can be monumental in discovering elements of your school community that can be improved upon to increase student engagement. The act of administering the Gallup Student Poll, or any poll designed to research student engagement, is also an excellent opportunity to connect with your students. Explain to them why you're asking them to complete the poll and let them know that their school cares about their wellbeing. Reassure your students that you are listening to their feedback and that the results will be studied carefully and acted upon. Once you have a good idea of how engaged your students are, you can start to create activities and programs to increase their engagement."

An interview of Stephen King in which he shares some of his teaching experiences. Jessica Lahey "asked King to expound on the parts of On Writing [she loves] most: the nuts and bolts of teaching, the geekiest details of grammar, and his ideas about how to encourage a love of language in all of our students."

"Voice is perhaps one of writer's most important traits and also one of the hardest to discover. Because you already have a unique voice, you just have to nail it down on the page. Record yourself telling a story. There are details you use, the way you move your body (or don't), your facial expressions, the way you move your hands (or don't), all of that is specific to you. It's part of your voice and getting that down on the page is so very important to you as a writer. The only way to uncover your voice is to write and read a lot, then write and read some more. Record yourself telling your stories and transcribe them. Consider the stories that matter to you and why and how that shapes how you tell them. Consider what's more powerful, the way you tell a story to your friends or when you write it down? Why? Who told you that there was only one way to write and real writers, established writers, writers who mean anything, write this way?"

"I've used the story of Rudolph as a "mentor text" ever since. At 88 words, Rudolph is shorter than the Jesus parables and the Lincoln speeches, works often praised for their brevity and high purpose. In the digital age, writers need reminders that memorable stories can be told in short forms. I now believe that there may be no more efficient example for teaching the elements of story than Rudolph. I use it to discuss the naming of characters, the telling detail, the inciting incident, the narrative arc, the story engine, the mythic archetype and the big payoff."

"Over the next several weeks, we're going to do a series of posts that looks at the 7 Types of Stories and breaks down each one in great detail. Up first-The Origin Story. The origin story-the story of how a business, idea, product, or service came to be-is one of the most common, and most powerful, types of stories we can tell."

"The writing curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, we've pulled together the many writing-related features we already offer, added new ones, and organized them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online. But our main goal is to offer young people a global audience - to, in effect, invite them to add their voices to the larger conversation at The Times about issues facing our world today. Through the opportunities for publication woven throughout each unit, we hope to encourage students to go beyond simply being media consumers to become media creators themselves. "