With so much content to teach, we often focus on getting students to remember, understand, and apply information. That's no small feat! But Bloom's Revised Taxonomy suggests that we help students go deeper—analyzing and evaluating and eventually creating. Sure . . . but how? Why not visually? For most of us, seeing is believing. When we can visualize abstract concepts and relationships, we gain a greater grasp of them.

Mindset plays a pivotal role in learning. Students who approach writing with confidence and enthusiasm are much more likely to persist through challenges than students who feel fearful and discouraged by it. Unfortunately, the latter category includes many students in our classrooms. This year, let's nurture a positive mindset toward writing.

While most people spend August sipping sun tea and binge-watching Stranger Things, teachers spend it kicking off the new school year. So. Much. To. Do. We have to set up our classrooms on newly shined floors, decorate our boards, deploy our reading materials, get the printer and laminator dancing like a pair of tango champions. . . .

Cats dropped upside down land on their feet. How? It’s not magic. They go through a process. The cat first realizes it is falling upside down. It then spins its tail to turn its head and front legs toward the ground. It continues to spin its tail to counteract the spin of its back legs. Its feet extend, and its back arches to serve as shock absorbers. Its legs and back absorb the impact. Image from Agence Nature/Science Source Don’t try this at home.

“So, you’re a teacher. What do you teach?” “I teach children.” In an environment of standards and assessments, we sometimes struggle to focus on the kids, who are, after all, the reason we teach. Yes, they can be infuriating, but they can also be amazing and inspiring. The greatest moment for us is when that light comes on in a student’s eyes, when the child “gets it” for the first time. It’s like a sunrise that only we get to witness. So education is about reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, but before all of those, it’s about kids—minds, bodies, and souls. The whole child.

You routinely connect writing with reading, but how often do you connect writing with media literacy? It's a symbiotic relationship. You teach students to write about different topics for different audiences and purposes. They can use the same skills to engage media about different topics for different audiences and purposes. Most writing teachers, though, wouldn’t consider themselves media-literacy coaches.

Good writing comes to life through a series of steps: prewriting, writing, revising, editing, and publishing.

Author Shannon Hale describes her writing process as “shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” Hale's metaphor speaks to the power of revising. How to revise, though, remains a mystery to many student writers. They tend to write one draft, correct a few surface errors, and submit their work without contemplating deeper improvements.

Sometimes writers must cut their favorite sentences because they don’t support the focus. Stephen King calls this process, “Killing your darlings.” It is one of the most effective revising strategies—and one of the most painful. Asking students to cut their writing can lead to quizzical stares. They often believe more writing is better writing. And for students who put a great deal of effort into expressing an idea, having to delete or reimagine that idea can feel demoralizing. Students need to know that cutting is a normal part of the writing process.

Fake news. Biased information. Divisive commentary. Today’s media landscape blurs the line between fact and fiction. Our students are left to sort out the truth.  Passive reading and viewing won't do.