Writing from Within

This course empowers teachers to help students tap into their personal stories. Giving students the skills and opportunities to write from a personal place enables them to build their writing skills across all academic areas. Structured to provide participants with the resources, support and applications of technology that facilitate and inspire student writing, course participants engage in thoughtful uses of technology that reflect the interactive world that students experience. Online collaborative writing and publishing sites, as well as tools for curating and saving resources are explored.

Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically and Writing Meaningfully to get to the Core by Lesley Roessing serves as the primary text. Participants also read The Gold Mailbox by Beth Schulman, a heartfelt memoir of struggle and resilience as the "mentor" text to Roessing’s book. The PLN frameworks provide the theoretical foundation for this course: The Four Lenses of Learning and The Five Reading, Writing and Talking Processes. These evidence-based frameworks shape how participants examine texts as they reflect on classroom memoir writing lessons.