HC English Department

If you're a regular Times reader, you've no doubt enjoyed, and maybe even taught with, some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine's Lives column, which has run weekly for decades. But did you know that NYTimes.com also regularly features personal writing on everything from love and family to life on campus, how we relate to animals, living with disabilities and navigating anxiety? In this post we suggest several ways to inspire your students' own personal writing, using Times models as "mentor texts," and advice from our writers on everything from avoiding "zombie nouns" to writing "dangerous" college essays."

"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."

"The key to getting kids to read deeply in any format is to have them engage with the text in meaningful ways. In the digital space, that means disrupting a pattern of skipping around, writing short chats and getting lost down the rabbit hole of the internet. It means teaching kids ways to break down a complex text, find key ideas, organize them and defend them. Practicing those skills in class can be time-consuming, but it also builds good digital reading habits that hopefully become second nature. "The goal in almost all the strategies is to slow the kids down so they are focusing on this text," Hess said. "Number two is to engage them in an active way with the text, and number three you want to encourage oral discourse. And number four you want them to do some reflection." Those steps should sound familiar to teachers because they are important for any kind of reading for comprehension and analysis. The trick for teachers is to learn how to transfer these processes into the digital space and push them even further."

"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."

"How you close a lesson is just as important as how you open it. Yet all too often, we run out of time. Or, we look at the clock, see our students are still working hard, and think to ourselves, why interrupt their flow? But there are proven benefits to taking even just one minute to wrap up a lesson. In those last moments, you and your students have a chance to check for understanding, reflect on what you've learned, tie up loose ends, or make sure everyone is ready for the next part of the day. You could even just take a moment to breathe! If you're looking for new ideas on how to wrap up your next lesson, here are five things you can try."

"These publications are the real deal - online and print periodicals that showcase work by student artists and writers, some as young as age five. Many are run by a staff that is partly or completely made up of students. Each one is beautifully designed and features high-quality work. Some even pay. If you know a student who aspires to become a serious writer or artist, encourage them to take the next step and start working toward publication."

"Below is a list of the VALUE Rubrics, organized by learning outcome. Click on an outcome to preview, download, and learn more about a particular rubric."

"Whatever you're consuming-even a movie that seems to require no thought-pay attention, and take notes. For Scott, there's no real difference between reading or watching for work and for pleasure. "I can't read without a pencil or pen in hand, whatever I'm reading," he says. "I have to have something to make notes in the margin or underline or scribble with. … I can't just like what I like, or not like what I don't like, without thinking, 'Why?' -Which is kind of where criticism starts.""

"Inspired by the success of our popular syndicated series Poem-a-Day, we're pleased to present Teach This Poem.  Produced for K-12 educators, Teach This Poem features one poem a week from our online poetry collection, accompanied by interdisciplinary resources and activities designed to help teachers quickly and easily bring poetry into the classroom. "

"Two years ago, at the suggestion of a fellow actor, Kelly decided to take a different tack: Incorporate music, specifically hip-hop, into a typical workshop. He pulled apart one of his traditional presentations featuring Shakespearean speeches from different plays, and revamped it with hip-hop beats and music. They focused on the rhythm and poetry of both art forms, and even designed a rap version of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, comparing it with the themes of some present-day hip-hop songs. "We will say [to the students], 'Oh, isn't that interesting? 400 years ago this guy was talking about this [suicide, indecision], so really, nothing has changed, has it?" When they brought it to high schools, "Shakespeare Meets Hip-Hop" was an instant success. "The presentation itself, they loved," Kelly said. "They'd go bananas when we would do it, and they loved all the musical stuff we put in there.""

"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."

"The Common Core State Standards--has, in some places, contributed to narrowing students' experience of writing inside school. In that contradictory and shifting environment, the NCTE Executive Committee charged a committee to update the Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, attempting to reflect some of the historically significant changes of recent years. What follow are some of the professional principles that guide effective teaching."

"The upshot for schools is clear: honor codes work, Ariely said, provided that students write them out and talk about them. Codes signed at the start of the year and tucked away in an administrator's office will flop, however; the same holds true for one-off lectures on moral behavior. To reduce cheating, the honor codes need to be woven into the school's culture, a recurrent nudge that honesty matters. Now closing in on the end of the school year, Tammi is hopeful that students at Fieldston will grow to see the new academic integrity board as educational rather than disciplinary, and will come to welcome the restorative justice philosophy that serves as its foundation. "Being academically honest helps them," Tammi said. To say nothing of the rest of us. "Every time we cheat, we break a little bit of trust in society," Ariely said."

"The authors all told NPR Ed that their studies are not perfect, with a lot of gaps in the data. But here are some observations we can make."

"Sometimes when we are frustrated with students' behavior, it can be easy to blame a student's home life, be exasperated that family expectations are different than those in school, or feel that parents "just don't care." It's a fact that challenges at home often translate into challenges at school, but that fact sets our work in motion rather than halting it. To make change, we must partner with families and caregivers. With the parents of the students who challenge us the most, we must in turn challenge ourselves to reach for empathy and curiosity instead of blame. Here are a few ways to spark connection and empathy with the parents of your most challenging student."

"At the beginning of the writing process, I have had students write silently. For it to be successful, in my experience, students need plenty of topics handy (self-generated, or a list of topics, questions, and prompts provided). Silent writing is a wonderful, focused activity for the brainstorming and drafting stage of the writing process. I also think it's important that the teacher write during this time, as well (model, model, model). However, when it comes to revising, and later, editing, I think peer interaction is necessary. Students need to, for example, "rehearse" words, phrases, introductions, and thesis statements with each other during the revision stage."

"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."

"Poetry 180 is designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. Michael Collins selected these poems with high school students in mind. They are intended to be listened to, and he suggests that all members of the school community be included as readers. A great time for the readings would be following the end of daily announcements over the public address system.

"If you haven't heard of Genius Hour or 20% time in the classroom, the premise is simple: Give your students 20% of their class time (or an hour each week) to learn what they want. These projects allow students to choose the content and still acquire/master skills and hit academic standards. I've written extensively about Genius Hour and 20% Time, but wanted to share a list of the 10 reasons you should consider Genius Hour in your classroom (for those of you on the fence) and why you will not regret making that choice!"

Projects created by the Student Councils for the New York Times' Learning Blog. These are groups of high school students who work with content from the newspaper to create learning experiences for students.