Spent the last few weeks working closely with our writing mentors at Chico State thinking about their role in the success of first-year writers. Grateful in particular to Geoff Bogan and Brittany DeLacy for their participation in our Educator Innovator conversation (with Tom Fox), and Keaton Kirkpatrick for his DMLCentral blog–“Building Community With Peer Mentors”–this week.…
Summary: We discuss teaching writing, teaching science, and how to create classrooms in which students use writing to learn and think scientifically with Kim Jaxon and Leslie Atkins Elliott, authors of the new book Composing Science. Kim and Leslie talk about concrete approaches for engaging students in practices that mirror the work that writing plays…
The spring semester in academia is notoriously brutal: conference presentations, thesis and dissertation projects, graduations looming, and many classes to teach. Years ago, well into a PhD program, my friends and I started to notice a pattern: around April, one of us would lose it. Our panic rotated through the group, but on any given…
Excited to be back in the full swing of the spring semester. I spent the first day of classes completely full of jitters the whole day; funny how that doesn’t go away after 15 years of teaching. I have an amazing group of students in my jumbo first-year writing course: 88 freshmen who are a…
I spent the past few weeks working with my colleague, Dr. Tracy Butts, 19 cool writing mentors from our English Department, and 191 incoming freshmen at Chico State. The students are part of the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) on our campus. Students spend two weeks living in the dorms– and as first generation college students–they are…
Recently, I was fortunate enough to be asked to host the September 2015 Connected Learning.tv series: “Back to School: Creating the School Year We Want to Live In.” Below are the webinar archives, which bring together educators from 1st grade to college who discuss how they design classrooms that nurture kindness, support inquiry, develop student…