All Posts

In education, we often talk about giving students choices, and those choices certainly matter. Students may choose a topic, select a text, decide how to demonstrate their learning, or choose among several possible assignments. All of these decisions can give students greater ownership of their work, but student voice asks us to go a little further. Voice means that students are not simply choosing from options adults have already created for them. It means that their own know

There is a meaningful difference between asking a student to complete a writing assignment and asking that student to become an author. An assignment is usually written for the teacher and often ends when it is submitted, graded, and returned. Authorship introduces another question into the process: Who will read this? When students know their words will travel beyond the classroom to families, classmates, teachers, community members, or the pages of a published anthology, th

One of the most important shifts we can make in literacy instruction is also one of the simplest: we can begin with students’ lives. Too often, students experience reading and writing as something that belongs somewhere else, perhaps to authors in books, to assignments created by adults, or to experiences that seem far removed from their own communities. When we invite students to write about their names, families, neighborhoods, friendships, heroes, and dreams, however, lite