How To Use Talk as an Entry Point for Literacy

by Lauren Nizol Notes from the Classroom


Many students need a temporary on-ramp to accelerate them through a literacy task.

For teachers of resistant readers and writers, creating this on-ramp can be a daunting task. Yet, I have discovered how talk is an effective entry point for students who are easily overwhelmed by a challenging reading or a complex writing composition, because it leads teachers and students to co-construct meaning.

Talk also reveals to students what they already know.

Over the holiday break, I worked with my son, a third grader, on paragraph writing. Though his composition was definitely different than my high school students’ writing, the process was familiar to me.

When I asked him to write a paragraph, I got one of those “I dunno” shoulder shrugs I often get from my students. When I asked him to tell me about something interesting he learned over break, I got one of those “I kinda know” pauses. Then when I asked him to tell me about seeing his uncle’s fencing equipment, I knew I had him.

Dylan started to rattle off a series of details about fencing–both European and Japanese. As he rattled, I wrote. And by the end of our conversation, what I had recorded became a piece of evidence for him that he did indeed have ideas that he could develop.

Yet I cannot be Dylan’s or my students’ Johnny-on-the-Spot stenographer every time they write.

And that’s why framing this exercise as an entry point works best. It should be used as a way to show students what they have rattling around in their minds. Talk should be used to help students to get comfortable with using their voices, and to see that they really do have something to say. Sometimes providing a space and a simple affirmation can encourage even the most resistant student.

Talk can also help students puzzle through an idea.

Recently I’ve been working with freshmen on writing a research essay that explains how an element of our world today is dystopian. One student I worked with had a hard time understanding a part of an article about China’s protectionist censoring of sites like Facebook and Google. I knew that in her U.S. History class, she had just studied isolationism and the U.S.’s closed-door policy, and as I brought up these terms, she was easily able to make meaning, and to interpret the significance of the evidence to her argument.

This is another area in which talk is important. A lot of students want to jump right into the writing before carefully thinking about the research. And that leads to a lot of out-of-context quotes and disjointed analysis!

But talk can create a space to puzzle through ideas first. This was true of my student who wrote about China–and it shows again why conversation is a necessary part of any writer’s process.


Another benefit of talk is this: it can offer students a path toward revision.

When recently conferencing with a student about a research paper, she remarked, “I have this paragraph, but I dunno–it just seems like a bunch of facts.” Something wasn’t sitting right with her, but she didn’t know how to process it.

This is the messiest stage of writing, and some of our students don’t know how to work through it without intentional conferencing during workshop time. So how did conversation help my student here?

We talked through her sources–articles about gun violence in school–and she pointed out an intriguing line from one of the articles. The line noted that violence seemed to be a familiar story. My student didn’t know what to do with the line, but when we looked closer together at the article, we noticed that it was written in 1999–after the Columbine Massacre.

Our reaction was the same–shivers. It made both of us jump because the story around school shootings has gotten worse, not better, even though it was “familiar” almost twenty years ago. Our astonishment led her to make a careful revision. She looked back at her paragraph that was just a “bunch of facts,” and decided to put it aside while she wrote a paragraph on violence in schools, because she could see how the impact was stronger on her audience.

I praised her for doing the hardest thing a writer can do–letting go of her writing when it just doesn’t fit. Because we had talked through her new ideas, it was easy to let go of what wasn’t working. And by talking, she was able to make a purposeful revision that considered her audience and purpose.

Lauren Nizol (@CoachNizol) is an MTSS Student Support Coach and Interventionist at Novi High School. She has eleven years of classroom experience, teaching English, IB Theory of Knowledge and English Lab. Lauren completed her undergraduate degree in History, English and Secondary Education at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and her Masters in English Education from Eastern Michigan University. She is a National Writing Project Teacher Consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project and an advocate for underperforming students and literacy interventions.  When she’s not teaching, Lauren often runs for the woods with her husband and their three sons/Jedi in training and posts many stylized pictures of trees on Instagram.

The Grid and The Great Gatsby

by Mike Ziegler Notes from the Classroom

toplogo2xMy last post was about the new app Flipgrid and my plan to use it to get my students talking about revision. My goal was pretty simple: Get students to make meaningful revisions that they could explain and support as good writing.

 

In order for students to perform well on this revision assignment, they needed to succeed in two separate phases. First, they had to make revisions–based on very directed feedback from me–that improved a section of their paper. Then, they had to fill 90 seconds of video with their explanation of why their revisions constituted effective writing.

Here’s what my rubric looked like for the video itself. In order to receive full credit:

The video

  • clearly explains specific and meaningful changes to the text
  • outlines why the changes were made, using the language of the rubric strand
  • includes visible and thorough annotation of the revised section to help guide viewers
  • Clearly demonstrates that the author understands how to improve writing for future pieces
  • feels polished and uses the full 90 seconds available

When I finalized that rubric, I had to tell myself that if worse came to worst, I could always toss the scores and tell the kids it was a learning experience. I had faith in them, but this assignment basically demanded that each of my writers speak for a minute and a half…like a professional writer.

Which is why I’m pretty comfortable saying that Flipgrid is a game changer. I’m going to let the students’ efforts speak for themselves, but first some context: they revised a narrative that reimagined a scene from The Great Gatsby from a different character’s perspective. My feedback on it narrowed them in on certain areas of their writing that they might choose to improve on (narrator’s voice, organization, etc.), and then they chose one of those for the video. (If you’d like to skip ahead and watch the videos, scroll down to the bottom of this post.)

Flippin’ Fantastic

Turns out my concerns about their meeting the rubric demands were misguided. Most of them killed it with this assignment.

Take note of a few heartening examples:

  • A student who exited ESL about a year ago added sensory detail describing a character praying on the “cold, painful floor.” His explanation of the revision: “This emphasized that he was really sad and was begging for God’s help.”
  • One of my more talented writers, whose original narrative was imbalanced with long flashbacks, color coded her revision to emphasize how her new organizational structure improved things: “There’s an obvious balance [now] between what’s going on in the scene and what Daisy is thinking about,” she explained while pointing to the modified paragraph order.
    A frame from a student video: note the color coding and annotation of how she developed narrative voice.

    A frame from a student video: note the color coding and annotation of how she developed narrative voice.

  • A writer who had struggled to establish the voice of her narrator added several lines of narrative reflection to establish her main character’s selfish motivations in the scene, and explained how this transformed the narrative perspective.
  • A writer who enjoys playing with diction added the phrase “riled me up” to her narrator’s reflections and explained, simply, “I thought that was cool.”

It was cool. All of it was cool. Even the kids whose revisions themselves weren’t quite masterful were able to articulate not only what they had improved in their writing but also why it was better.

Re-vid-sion Is Key

If you like what you’re seeing but you’re also wondering whether the video element really matters to its success, think about this: Talking about writing is a stressful endeavor for most young writers–even the good ones. Using Flipgrid to turn that process into a student-driven, premeditated, predictable, finite process alleviates all sorts of stresses that otherwise tend to silence less experienced writers.

Video is a familiar medium that allows them to combine a visual outline of their efforts with a verbal elaboration of their reasoning. As a result, many of my students suddenly loosened up a bit and actually had some fun talking about their writing (seriously–one student even took a picture of himself with a wad of dollar bills in his mouth as the opening to his video, which I’m going to just presume is a reference to all the wealth in The Great Gatsby and try not to think about ever again).

There’s one more treasure buried in this sea of video footage. My students’ grid of videos are my new models for future writing. Don’t know how to structure dialogue? Go watch Ken’s video. Did I knock your organization last time around? Check out what Lauren did with her opening paragraphs on that last assignment.

It’s the most productive 90 seconds my kids have ever spent on their phones.

The Videos

Here’s a small selection of student videos:

 

 

 

Michael Ziegler

Michael Ziegler (@ZigThinks) is a Content Area Leader and teacher at Novi High School.  This is his 15th year in the classroom. He teaches 11th Grade English and IB Theory of Knowledge. He also coaches JV Girls Soccer and has spent time as a Creative Writing Club sponsor, Poetry Slam team coach, AdvancEd Chair, and Boys JV Soccer Coach. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, majoring in English, and earned his Masters in Administration from Michigan State University.  

Garage Band Writing Instruction

by Hattie Maguire Notes from the Classroom Professional Learning

shutterstock_109511876Sometimes, the teaching pieces all come together beautifully, like different musicians in a carefully rehearsed symphony. You plan something that dovetails perfectly with something else, which builds to something better, and on and on, to the amazing crescendo of learning.

At least that’s what happens in my dreams.

Instead of a symphony, I have more of a garage-band vibe going in my room this year. We try something that isn’t quite right, which leads to something a little bit better, and on and on, to a quirky song that’s kinda cool but also not radio-ready.

These days, my quirky song is the work I’ve been doing with explicit grammar instruction and cross-curricular writing, and this past week I finally felt like we were getting somewhere.

The Looming Exam

Going into the week, I had two competing goals. First, I wanted students to hone their revision skills and provide some good feedback for our partner Physics class, which I wrote about last month. Second, I needed to get them moving on their review for the AP Language exam, which is about two and a half weeks away (insert emojis of horror here).

Like it or not–sorry, Physics kids–my students are most concerned with their AP exam. As I was planning this week, I was regretting telling Brian, the Physics teacher, we’d still bring our classes together. I was starting to worry that, though this exercise was really interesting to me and helpful for Brian and his kids, the joint work was not incredibly relevant for my kids at this critical point in their AP Language course.

Then I attended the Oakland Schools webinar with Connie Weaver, which focused on her book Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing. 

All the pieces fell together.

Learning with Revision

Dr. Weaver helped me see how easily my two competing goals for the week weren’t competing at all. 

GrammartoEnrichandEnhanceWritingIn her webinar, Dr. Weaver focused on revision with argumentative writing, and she used a sample essay from the new SAT as her model. She walked us through adding things–participial phrases, appositives, absolutes–or reworking existing sentences to include more complex structures. I had been asking my students to mimic the writing they were seeing in mentor texts, to write with those things in mind, but I hadn’t asked them to explicitly go back and revise or add to their writing using those tools.  

The next week, I shamelessly stole Dr. Weaver’s activity from the webinar and adapted it to work with my students. We did a quick refresh of grammatical structures, and then practiced revising small chunks of a sample student essay. I discovered quickly that our work with mentor texts had been successful; my students can identify good writing.

The second part of the activity, though, was much more telling. I had my students revise text on a shared Google Doc, which allowed us to all see the different options. This led to some great discussions about active vs. passive voice, the use of participial phrases to add detail, and the use of appositives to surprise readers.

Suddenly, these grammatical terms were starting to mean something to my students and their writing. Asking students to identify grammatical structures is one thing; forcing them to take an existing sentence and apply said structure is totally different.  

They weren’t always successful–some were wildly unsuccessful–but now they were applying these grammatical terms to real student writing. Before, by only identifying techniques and asking students to mimic them, I think I was inadvertently implying that good writing happens naturally the first time. Sometimes it does, but this gave students some specific tools to use when it doesn’t.

Applying the Lessons

Wednesday and Thursday, we unleashed our newly honed revision skills on the Physics essays. I modeled giving feedback on one essay: general comments regarding organization and evidence, and three specific suggestions for making the writing more sophisticated. I asked students to find sentences they could revise, and to then give advice about how to replicate those revisions later in the essay. Instead of just seeing all the things that were “wrong” with the essays, they started seeing the possibilities.

On Friday we will take the final step: their own essays. On Tuesday night after school, they all sat for a full-length practice AP exam–three essays in two hours. Timed writing doesn’t allow for careful, thoughtful revision, but on Friday we will look for the possibilities in those essays and practice careful revision.  

At the end of this week, we’re definitely still going to be a quirky garage band. But we’re going to be a few steps closer to our big break, I think.

Hattie profileHattie Maguire is an English teacher and Content Area Leader at Novi High School. She is spending her fifteenth year in the classroom teaching AP English Language and Composition and English 10. She is a National Board Certified Teacher who earned her BS in English and MA in Curriculum and Teaching from Michigan State University.

Write. Revise. Read. Repeat.

by Caroline Thompson Common Core Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project

 

shutterstock_283334561When I think back about why I wanted to become a teacher, I remember an ambition I had to make a difference in the lives of others. A want to share my passion for the books that I loved. A desire to help people express themselves in new and powerful ways. These are ideals that I still hold after twelve years of teaching, amid different political landscapes and ever-changing initiatives.

So, when I asked our blog editor for some topics to write about, I was taken aback by one of his suggestions: Can beautiful (or good) writing be taught?

Of course! I immediately thought. What kind of a reading and writing workshop teacher would I be if I didn’t believe this, deep in my heart?

Practice and Feedback

“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”
– Vince Lombardi

I believe that the first thing you need to carve out and protect in your classroom is deliberate writing practice, coupled with feedback from an expert. An expert, as Penny Kittle reminds us, need only be a teacher who is a little bit better at writing than a student.

Logging practice time in writing is important and necessary for getting all of the ideas out, but it is only the first step; teachers are only as good as the feedback they give to student writers, and feedback in the moment of writing is always the gold standard.

Revision

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
– Raymond Chandler

Teaching and encouraging revision are also necessary components to the writing classroom. Modeling revision in your own writing shows students how to mine their writing for rocks, and how to polish these rocks into gems.

Penny Kittle talks about taking photos of your writing work, which shows students the revision process in action. This also helps students to recognize that it is in small changes to our writing that we learn to get better.

Learning through Mimicry

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
– Charles Caleb Colton

shutterstock_284746478Recognizing, naming, and even copying good writing are all important pieces in the quest to shape good writers.

Using mentor texts is one way to help students read like writers. Another way is to look at student writing samples, select the best as models, and then go through a process of naming what is good in that writing, as Ron Berger from Expeditionary Learning suggests.

A paramount exercise for any student is to notice an author’s craft and imitate good writers. This can mean inviting students to “copy change,” compose sentences, or keep a notebook of favorite lines from books they’ve read.

Practice, Practice, Practice

“The writer’s secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience.”
– Orhan Pamuk

Student writers need to realize that good writing comes less from talent and more from repeated practice. And teachers of writing need to remember that good writers can be guided with deliberate practice and teacher modeling.

 

IMG_3075Caroline Thompson (@TeacherThompson) taught middle school ELA for twelve years in Lake Orion before becoming a stay-at-home mom. She supports AARI teachers for Oakland Schools as an independent literacy consultant in the areas of digital media, professional development, and non-fiction resources. Caroline is a Reading and Writing Workshop advocate, a 2008 Oakland Writing Project Teacher Consultant, and a 2009 Oakland County Outstanding Teacher of the Year Nominee. She has a BA in English from Michigan State University and a Masters in the Art of Teaching Reading from Oakland University.  She lives in Berkley with her husband and their two year old daughter.

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What's the Word

 

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#nozeros and the Growth Mindset

by Amy Gurney Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project

shutterstock_125746187Research reveals that a score of zero, in a 100-point grading scale, is pretty difficult for a student to overcome. For example, if a student gained a zero for not having turned in work, he or she would have to turn in nine assignments, earning 100 points each, to overcome the impact of that zero score.

Many teachers just excuse the task, rather than assigning a zero for no work done. But this suggests that the tasks themselves are not valuable, and that the student should not have a grade that represents their learning.

To avoid the zero mark, teachers should take another approach: providing an additional opportunity for students to show their work.

#nozeros

To act on these ideas, I started a lunch routine called #nozeros. (The name came from a kid’s suggestion for a classroom assignment, and it helped to entice the kids to the event.)

Here’s how it works. When students don’t turn in an assignment in class like a monthly reading log, I give them a lunch pass with #nozeros written on it. This requires them to spend a lunch in my classroom.

At first, students came reluctantly when they were given these passes. They expected a punishment-type lunch with the teacher.

Instead, they came and realized that I just wanted to give them a score on their work, and that I would help them if they liked. They could also work alone if they prefered.

If, for example, the missed assignment is a reading log, students write a claim about something that happened in their book. This task shows me that students have read the book, and it takes about a minute to complete. Students can leave when they finish, though some choose to stay and hang out.

These lunches have become something fun, and as my husband, a self-described average student, observes, “It’s not that they don’t want to do the assignment or can’t do the assignment. It’s that they forgot at night or don’t want to do it at home. They love this option because it gets their work in.” For me, the lunches make sense because I get work and students get a viable alternative to show that work.

Now, I have no zeros in my grade book and a lunch routine of openness and growth with my students.

The Growth Mindset

This kind of routine is part of my conscious effort at establishing a growth mindset in my classroom. I want students to realize that they can do their best work—and that sometimes this takes multiple attempts.

amy 2

Exemplars of achievement levels

To help establish the growth mindset in my classroom this year, I also started modeling the work for my current students, and modeling work at all levels of achievement. All of my students’ work can be revised and resubmitted for feedback.

In addition to the #nozeros meetings, I opened my classroom at lunch time to offer kids one-on-one help if they desired.

One student, Matt, became a weekly participant, with a goal to increase his level of achievement on our weekly narrative writing piece. At these lunch sessions, we worked to increase the elaboration in his weekly story, and to grow his craft in areas like character creation, dialogue, passive voice, and modified structure. My descriptive feedback, which connected directly to his writing, allowed Matt to be successful.

As we continued to work on the assignment in class, I would gently encourage him to name the skills we worked on at lunch, and remind him to make use of them.

After several weeks, Matt, smiling, announced that he got a 4 (a mark of excellent achievement)—because he worked to get it. He wasn’t bragging, though, when he said this to our class. He was encouraging others to put in some work to grow their achievement. I smiled.

From these experiences, I’ve learned a few things as a teacher:

  1. Students are honest evaluators of their own work.
  2. Students will strive to meet expectations you set when they trust that you care about them and their work.
  3. Student can gain confidence through achievement on meaningful tasks.

It’s important to allow kids to do their best, even when the methods to achieve this may look different.

pic 2Amy Gurney is an 8th grade Language Arts teacher for Bloomfield Hills School District. She was a facilitator for the release of the MAISA units of study. She has studied, researched, and practiced reading and writing workshop through Oakland Schools, The Teacher’s College, and action research projects. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Education at Central Michigan University and a Master’s in Educational Administration at Michigan State University.

Dr. Constance Weaver – Literacy Webinar

by Delia DeCourcy
Revising Sentences by Adding “Juicy Details”

Thursday, April 14, 2016   7-9pm EST (optional discussion 8-9pm)
Google Drive folder with resources & activities

GrammartoEnrichandEnhanceWritingDo your students’ sentences drip with juicy details, engaging and enticing the reader? Or do they plod along, a repository for just the most basic information? When you ask students to add details, do they pile up adjectives before nouns? Or add sentences, each sentence basic in structure, adding just one detail per sentence, creating paragraphs that lumber along–thump, thump, thump–instead of demonstrating variety and flowing gracefully? Then this workshop if for you! Decades ago, I learned from the writings of Francis Christensen how to write sentences that subordinate details to a main statement, using grammatical options that most students seldom employ unless they are avid readers, in love with richly written texts.  Paradoxically, perhaps, playing with form can help writers generate content—those “juicy” details that we find call to us as readers.

In this webinar, I’ll use examples from Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing (2008), my most recent book on the subject; share some student examples; work with you to expand some sentences with these grammatical options; and finally turn to student paragraphs to see where we might guide writers to discover more within themselves, encouraging and scaffolding them to expand upon their meaning by adding details in grammatical options. Am I always able to do this? No! But we can discuss other alternatives to try.

Digital handouts will be available through Google docs a week in advance of the webinar.

Recommended Reading: Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing

Connie Weaver 2014[1] copyConstance (Connie) Weaver is happily retired from many years teaching English Education courses in the Department of English at Western Michigan University, and from Miami University in Ohio, where she held an endowed chair in reading and language arts (Teacher Education) for the last five years of her educational career.  Her best-known publication in the field of reading was Reading Process (1988), now in a third edition as Reading Process and Practice.  She developed a unique stance on the teaching of grammar, beginning with Grammar for Teachers (1979), her “classic” Grammar in Context (1996) plus an edited book, finally culminating in The Grammar Plan Book (2007) and Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing (with Jon Bush, 2008).  Through all these books on grammar and writing, it has been her passion to help teachers learn to teach a minimum of grammar in conjunction with writing; that is, to maximize the effects of grammar instruction on writing while minimizing the instructional time required. About ten years ago,  Connie played a significant role in revising, for the MDE, a scope and sequence for teaching grammar, but she advocates teaching grammatical elements as the need arises.  She lives in Portage, MI with her cat Sweetie.

Penny Kittle – Literacy Webinar

by Delia DeCourcy
Revision: the Heart of Writing

Thursday, March 3, 2016    7-9pm EST (optional discussion 8-9pm)
Google Doc with all links

WriteBesideThemIt’s a no-fail zone: the writing notebook. Notebooks anchor the daily work in my classroom and lead students to improve voice and clarity in their writing. Renowned author and literacy advocate Penny Kittle will lead us in exploring how to use quick writes, re-reading, and revision to motivate students to invest more in their writing. Breathe life into your writing workshop with notebooks for gathering, thinking, and finding important things to write about.

Follow up this webinar by attending Penny’s face to face workshop at Wayne RESA on April 8. 


Recommended Reading: Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing

kittle copyAs a professional development coordinator for the Conway, New Hampshire, School District, Penny Kittle acts as a K-12 literacy coach and directs new teacher mentoring. In addition, she teaches writing at Conway’s Kennett High School and in the summer Literacy Institutes at the University of New Hampshire. Penny is the author of five books with Heinemann—Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers (2013), Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing (2008) which won the 2009 James N. Britton Award from NCTE, Inside Writing (2005), coauthor (with Thomas Newkirk) of Children Want to Write (2013) and coauthor (with Donald H. Graves) of The Greatest Catch (2005) and Public Teaching(2003)—and she is a Heinemann Professional Development Provider.

Dr. Nell Duke – Literacy Webinar

by Delia DeCourcy
Not Like Pulling Teeth: Revision in a Project-Based Context

Thursday, February 11, 2016   7-9pm EST (optional discussion 8-9pm)

insideinformationResearch suggests that students write better when they have an audience beyond the teacher and revise more when they have a specified purpose for writing. Project-based approaches provide a framework for engaging students in writing for authentic purposes and audiences, thus more deeply motivating their revision. In this webinar, Duke will describe how to situate revision in a project-based context and share techniques for structuring students’ revision and editing processes within that context.

Recommended Reading: Inside Information: Developing Powerful Readers and Writers of Informational Text Through Project-Based Instruction

 

NellKDukePhoto copy

Nell K. Duke is a professor of literacy, language, and culture and a faculty affiliate in the combined program in education and psychology at the University of Michigan and a member of the International Literacy Association Literacy Research Panel. Duke’s work focuses on early literacy development, particularly among children living in poverty. She has received a number of awards for her research including, most recently, the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award from the Literacy Research Association. She serves as editor of The Research-Informed Classroom book series and co-editor of the Not This, But That book series. She is also author and co-author of numerous journal articles and book chapters. Her most recent book is Inside Information: Developing Powerful Readers and Writers of Informational Text through Project-based Instruction.

 

Dr. Troy Hicks – Literacy Webinar

by Delia DeCourcy
Revising Digital Writing

Thursday, January 14, 2016  7-9pm EST (optional discussion 8-9pm)
slides    hyperlink paragraph example     web text paragraph

craftingdigitalwritingAs the inputs continue to multiply, how can we help students find, evaluate, and synthesize information from a variety of sources? More importantly, how can we help them craft — and revise — digital writing in effective ways? When revision happens with multimedia, we must think broadly about how text, images, audio, and video can be used to best reach an audience. Based on Hicks’ book Crafting Digital Writing, we will explore a variety of web-based tools and mobile applications to help students combine amplify their voices when revising digital texts.


Recommended Reading: Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres

Hicks_PortraitDr. Troy Hicks (@hickstro) is an associate professor of English at Central Michigan University and focuses his work on the teaching of writing, literacy and technology, and teacher education and professional development. A former middle school teacher, he collaborates with K–12 colleagues and explores how they implement newer literacies in their classrooms. Hicks directs CMU’s Chippewa River Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, and he frequently conducts professional development workshops related to writing and technology. Hicks is author of the Heinemann titles Crafting Digital Writing (2013) and The Digital Writing Workshop(2009), as well as a co-author of Because Digital Writing Matters (Jossey-Bass, 2010) and Create, Compose, Connect! (Routledge/Eye on Education, 2014). He blogs at Digital Writing, Digital Teaching. In March 2011, Hicks was honored with CMU’s Provost’s Award for junior faculty who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in research and creative activity. Most importantly, he is the father of six digital natives and is always learning something new about writing and technology from them.