In a recent article published by the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, a poll revealed that 91% of secondary teachers were never taught how to teach writing in their teaching practicums. In effect, therefore, we have not been provided with the necessary toolkit to perform half of what we do – teach writing.

I know from my experience that I did not have a paradigm or even a workable plan to offer writing instruction early in my career. I more or less flew by the seat of my pants and built the airplane in mid-flight. But over the course of those early years, I really studied what good writing looked like and what my better writers intuitively and instinctually did to write so eloquently and cogently. And from those studies, I developed the framework for my heuristics that work for every expository mode: the syllogistic method and the declarative/inverted thesis.

These heuristics truly work in transforming our students to become fantastic writers! True learning can only happen when we provide scaffolds and a framework to help our students think on paper. And that’s just what this course does!

Oh My Goodness … Writing Instructors Have an Uphill Battle!

Here’s what the research is telling us:

I. 91% of secondary teachers state that they were not taught how to teach writing in their practicums.

II. 88% of colleges and universities report that first year entrants are unprepared for the rigors of college writing.

III. 89% of college freshman students state that their high school writing programs did not adequately prepare them for their transition into college level composition.

Quite clearly, we need to do more at the secondary level if we are to better serve our students. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a shift in our pedagogical approaches in that we are becoming less “literature-centric” and more in balance with the literacies that our students need to transition into the workforce and college. As such, we are being asked to place greater focus on the writing process. But here’s the thing – within this shift, how much professional development is occurring to teach us how to teach writing? And therein lies the problem.

The course I created provides a concrete means to close that pedagogical gap. I feel confident in asserting that if you learn these heuristics and offer them to your students, you are going to witness tremendous growth in your student’s writing ability as well as your ability to be an effective classroom practitioner. It’s really as easy as learning three fundamental heuristics that can be used for every expository mode; and therefore, every single essay your students ever write.

How the Course Works

It is not a traditional course in that there are no quizzes or tests. There is a textbook, but that’s just to help you become a better writing instructor and to provide points of reference.

What the course does is offer you an opportunity to enter an expert writing instructor’s classroom to learn what our practicums never fully offered – an exhaustive toolkit to equip you to become a complete teacher that can nurture students to become adept and skillful writers.

Let’s say, for example, that you are preparing a unit for Hamlet or The Crucible. What the course allows you to do is enter my classroom to participate in a writing workshop whereby you’ll see just how exactly I instruct the writing process using my three heuristics. No matter what the text or expository mode, my heuristics work every time.

Whenever I assign writing, I write with my students so you will see my models and exemplars as well as my student’s work in the instructional video. You will see plenty of examples as to how to write a declarative and inverted thesis, as well as the syllogistic method for the body paragraphs.

You will also see how I critique writing and offer meaningful feedback that yields growth in student’s ability to write. By the time you finish the instructional video, you will have a concrete plan to teach your students how to write their essay for that particular text – prompts, exemplars and models, graphic organizers – even a framework for offering teacher feedback.

Currently, the course has 75 writing workshops, each is about 30 minutes long. Forty of the writing workshop videos feature the most commonly taught plays and novels in the American curriculum. But here’s the thing – the library of videos is growing all the time. As you place requests for content, I will add more to the toolkit. All expository modes are present – literary analysis, rhetorical analysis, persuasion, argument, synthesis, as well as research.

What You Get After You Purchase the Course

Let’s say that you are preparing a unit and you want a little bit of help or are just feeling overwhelmed by the demands of lesson planning. You scroll through the library of writing workshops and say to yourself, “Dang … I wish there was a writing workshop for “Such and Such” a text. Well, you can contact me and we can build a workshop together.

As an example, a group of AP Literature & Composition teachers reached out to me recently and asked if I could help them with “The Things They Carried”. The four of us put our heads together and wrote a few prompts and we each wrote some exemplars and models for the students to learn from and reference.

So here’s the gist of it – if your request is within my abilities and wheelhouse, I will do it. I want our library of workshops to grow exponentially over time so that we have hundreds of videos and a vast reservoir of content. So keep the suggestions coming – I’ll add as best I can.