1. Mentor Texts Mentor Texts Goal today: Model write from a mentor text

2. Presentation at NCTE  Kelly Gallagher (The Writing Coach series), Penny Kittle (Write Beside Them), and Jeff Anderson (Mechanically Inclined)  Have students “encounter brilliant text. What we read shapes us, our world, and our writing.”

3. Let’s Practice!  Read the article, noting good writing strategies.  We’ll discuss briefly.  I’ll show you what I modeled.  We can write very briefly together, or you can write individually very briefly.

4. My Conference Writing – I do. Sometimes school is cruel. That is the fundamental lesson children learn as bullies taunt, adults discriminate, and learning seems irrelevant to their lives. Sometimes just getting through the hallway is an insult to integrity. Sometimes eating alone is an insult to self-esteem. Sometimes learning in the form of regurgitation is an insult to intelligence. But, what do students do? They get up. They drag themselves to the bus. They walk, heads down, through the gauntlet to class. This is the price of their so-called education.