Grant Wiggins made a lot of waves yesterday with a post the ASCD blog The Edge in which he calls for banning the reading of fiction in schools in order to encourage boys to read and help students improve nonfiction reading skills. He says he wrote meaning to provoke, and he certainly did. The blog … Continue reading Why Fiction Matters
I am presenting at NCTE tomorrow morning at 9:30 at the Yacht and Beach Club in Grand Harbour Ballroom South. You can download and/or view all my session materials here. “To End Where I Begun”: Backward Design and ShakespeareView more presentations from Dana Huff. Note: I think if you visit the presentation on SlideShare and … Continue reading “To End Where I Begun”: Backward Design and Shakespeare
I am really jealous of Jim Burke’s new organization scheme. I think he has come up with a system that is easy to use and will enable him to find and retain (and reuse) lesson and unit plans. I keep most of my documents on my computer and several of my unit plans at the … Continue reading Organization
One thing I share with my department chair is a geeky love of planning assignments. I should probably have been grading papers today, but instead I finished my Frankenstein unit and created a performance task based on an out-of-date (and apparently no longer used/updated) WebQuest. I did think the ideas were sound, but I also … Continue reading Frankenstein
I have not been happy with my Macbeth unit for some time. I sat down with my department chair today and brainstormed, and I have come up with a new plan that includes some serious tweaking and a performance task that I’m in love with (I only hope the students will be, too). I have … Continue reading Macbeth Unit Plan
I have been doing some tweaking with my Beowulf unit. In the past, my performance task has been to compile an annotated résumé for Beowulf. It’s good practice for their own résumés; my students have to compile résumés for college applications toward the end of their junior year, the year in which they study Beowulf … Continue reading Grendel’s Ima
When you update as seldom as I have lately, it seems posts are destined to become a mishmash of assorted thoughts as I catch everyone up. First, as you can see from the sidebar, I am supporting NCTE’s National Day on Writing. I am not sure exactly what I and my students will do, but … Continue reading A Mishmash of Assorted Thoughts
The fourth chapter in Traci Gardner’s Designing Writing Assignments focuses on “unusual or new alternatives to the standard kinds of writing that students are asked to complete” (48). Some of my best writing assignments have sprung from planning UbD performance tasks with an authentic audience. For example, two grammar UbD units I wrote concern the … Continue reading Designing Writing Assignments: Defining New Tasks for Standard Writing Activities
The title of this post is not a typo or hiccup. The third chapter of Traci Garder’s book Designing Writing Assignments is titled “Designing Writing Assignments,” too. In this chapter, Garder addresses the reason why students might fail to meet our expectations: we didn’t communicate what we thought we did. I am guilty, as Gardner … Continue reading Designing Writing Assignments: Designing Writing Assignments
Today is the fourth anniversary of my blog. In light of that fact, here are a few facts and statistics: The first post on this blog was a review of Constance Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context. Since that post, I’ve made 564 posts (including this one). The first commenter was Ms. Ris, who commented on … Continue reading Happy Birthday, Blog