This
book is about teaching writing and the gritty particulars of teaching
adolescents. But it is also the planning, the thinking, the writing, the
journey: all I’ve been putting into my teaching for the last two
decades. This is the book I wanted when I was first given ninth graders
and a list of novels to teach. This is a book of vision and hope and
joy, but it is also a book of genre units and minilessons and actual
conferences with students.-Penny Kittle
What makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When
the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to
them. Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It’s the
comprehensive book and DVD that English/language arts teachers need to
ensure that teens improve their writing.
Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for
instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed
teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section
of Write Beside Them describes a specific element of Kittle’s workshop:
- Daily writing practice: writer’s notebooks and quick writes
- Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts
- Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres
- Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style
- Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading.
All along the way, Kittle demonstrates minilessons that respond to
students’ immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and
spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her
workshop. In addition, Write Beside Them provides a study guide,
reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions
for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all,
the accompanying DVD takes you right inside Penny’s classroom. Its video
clips explicitly model how to make the process of writing accessible to
all kids.
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Penny Kittle’s active coaching and can-do attitude alone will
energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But
her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage
will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher.
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Write Beside Them debuts as the field’s most comprehensive,
contemporary, and practical book on high school writing. Kittle not only
tells how a skillful writing teacher operates, she shows you on the
accompanying DVD, with clips of kids at work in every stage of a writing
workshop. And all this glorious teaching happens with real, sometimes
struggling kids who remind us of our own classrooms and students. Write Beside Them is the whole package.
-Harvey Daniels
Author of Content-Area Writing and Subjects Matter
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