The Stenhouse Blog

When students make progress as writers, that progress is likely to spill over into other parts of their lives—both academic and personal. In order to be successful writers, however, students need to be connected to their writing, which might not be so easy to teach. Here are some resources from Stenhouse to give your writing instruction a boost and help your students find their voice and learn to love writing.

Below is excerpted from the Introduction in Patterns of Power: Inviting Young Writers into the Conventions of Language (2017) by Jeff Anderson and Whitney La Rocca. It’s a wonderful description—in the authors’ words—of what makes this authentic grammar and conventions instruction through the process of invitation so successful and how it’s used to bridge the gap left by current reading and writing curriculums.

By now, your reading and writing workshops are up and running. But are you noticing  there's something missing in your instruction that would bridge the two together? Jeff Anderson and Whitney La Rocca noticed that in their own instruction and they figured out a way to close the gap!  

In this video, hear from Jeff and Whitney about how taking just 5 minutes from reading workshop and 5 minutes from writing workshop each day, you can use their process known as the Invitational Process, or Patterns of Power Process, to strengthen your students’ comprehension and composition skills. Find out why this process works and how you can use it to create a space where students notice the beauty and meaning of writer’s craft in the texts they read and in the world around them.

The following is the foreword written by Barry Lane for the new book Writing, Redefined by Shawna Coppola.

Below is an excerpt written by Caroline Sweet from the Introduction of Patterns of Power, en español. Caroline joined forces with Jeff Anderson and Whitney La Rocca to create this Spanish adaptation of their popular resource book, Patterns of Power: Inviting Young Writers into the Conventions of Language. In this excerpt, Caroline writes about the importance of teaching in both Spanish and English in bilingual classrooms.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has designated October 20 as the National Day on Writing, so we thought we’d give you some ideas from a few of our Stenhouse writing resources to take back to your classroom.

By Trevor A. Bryan

Here is a wonderful and creative explanation from talented author, Shawna Coppola, of what you can find in her new book, Writing, Redefined, in comic strip format!  

I believe what happens in the first weeks of the school year determines how well one’s entire school year will go. Planning classroom routines in advance of the first day of school allows all members of the classroom community to have their social and/or emotional needs met so you can meet students’ academic needs all year long.

Below is a guest blog post from Ruth Culham, author of Teach Writing Well.

I’ve found that one of the things teachers like least about teaching writing is the paper load. It’s true—when you teach writing well, students write often. When students write often, as they should, they produce many papers to read and respond to. When they produce many papers, sometimes teachers reduce the amount of time they give students to write to save paper. It’s a Catch-22. Students can’t get better without practice, yet the practice swamps even the most dedicated writing teacher.